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Google Duplex: An AI System for Accomplishing Real World Tasks Over the Phone

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Re: Google Duplex: An AI System for Accomplishing Real World Tasks Over the Phone

#61

Post by jbob2000 »

apendleton wrote: post #28
542458 wrote: post #13

This is going to be awesome/terrible for social engineering attacks. We'll be training millions of people to to trust phone calls from "Google". But are you talking to Google-calling-on-behalf-of-your-boss, or Google-calling-on-behalf-of-some-phisher? Or better yet, some custom system that pretends to be Google over the phone? Who knows!

At least in the demo, the system didn't identify itself as a bot. It pretended (fairly convincingly) to just be a person, and seemed focused on interactions (making a restaurant reservation, etc.) that don't involve someone recognizing your voice. In other words, I don't think the attack surface is any different than situations where you could just place the call yourself, save perhaps for the possibility of scaling…

So now I can script a bot to book restaurant reservations all over the city at busy times. Then nobody shows up for the reservations, the busy time has passed, and customers have moved on or gone home.

Restaurants make or break on one or two nights in a month. A calculated social engineering attack like this could bring down hundreds of restaurants in a city, which would cause millions of dollars in lost taxes, and you see where this is going.

Re: Google Duplex: An AI System for Accomplishing Real World Tasks Over the Phone

#62

Post by madeofpalk »

ocdtrekkie wrote: post #35
arikr wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm concerned that a lack of understanding and fear will limit the benefits we get from technology. I don't think that calling for regulation and making this illegal is the appropriate next step. They explicitly say: > We want to be clear about the intent of the call so businesses understand the context. You note: > laws against what they're doing needs to be passed. What makes you say that robots making phone calls…

I am far more afraid of technology we can't control that works for an ad company, not for us, than moving technology forward a little bit slower. We need to be able to trust our communication, and we're moving away from that at light speed. Where a company whose entire business model is to subtly influence you in the directions profitable to them is the middleman in all of our communications. I am terrified of this.…

It's tough here because Google is both an ad company and a product company (funded through ads).

Would you have the same fears if Apple were able to (through some ridiculous miracle) achieve the same thing?

Re: Google Duplex: An AI System for Accomplishing Real World Tasks Over the Phone

#63

Post by sp527 »

ansible wrote: post #38
sp527 wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The technology promises "wealth and leisure for all". The capital owners promise "it'll trickle down". Technical utopianists need to start tempering their optimism with the realities of human nature and design systems accordingly.

I think our only realistic hope is actually various non-profit foundations and such. When you think about it, I can download (for zero cost), a high-quality operating system and attendant applications which would have cost hundreds of dollars 20 years ago, and would have cost a fortune 40 years ago. Ditto for educational materials, entertainment, etc. In that sense, we are quite wealthy in comparison to previous gene…

Interesting perspective. I share your pessimism about corporations and governments.

But sadly I think government is the only institution with the necessary leverage (tax base, mandate, etc) to accomplish this. Non-profits are also fairly dubious in their motives, subject to corruption, and generally highly inefficient. I'm not sure they're going to be our saviors either.

Re: Google Duplex: An AI System for Accomplishing Real World Tasks Over the Phone

#65

Post by brownbat »

542458 wrote: post #13

This is going to be awesome/terrible for social engineering attacks. We'll be training millions of people to to trust phone calls from "Google". But are you talking to Google-calling-on-behalf-of-your-boss, or Google-calling-on-behalf-of-some-phisher? Or better yet, some custom system that pretends to be Google over the phone? Who knows!

Clever social engineering is really customized, but social engineering that works "often enough" is mostly reducible to a flow chart.

If you can automate it, your response rate only needs to be, what, like people clicking on spam? Tiny.

The days of trusting meat sacks with important information might be numbered.

Someone should make the dystopia where Skynet doesn't build terminators, but call centers.

Re: Google Duplex: An AI System for Accomplishing Real World Tasks Over the Phone

#66

Post by cryptoz »

gowld wrote: post #37
saulrh wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know if I'd call it a "deficiency" - if we interpret "disfluency" in a literal sense as "not flowing" without negative connotation, then the interruptions (hmm, uh, okay) are actually communicating useful information to the other party. I might even say that omitting those interruptions (and replacing them with, say, dead silence) might be poor communication.

The "um" isn't a deficiency, but the slow response is. If the response is artificially delayed to give the appearance of slow thinking, and an "um" added to fill the artificially long silence, that's an artificial deficiency.

It's not a deficiency if understanding is increased. If that fake pause increases the listener's understanding of the sentence (it might), then the 'slow response' is not a deficiency but an improvement.

Edit: should the robot talk at 2x normal speaking speed in order to more quickly convey the necessary information? Slowing the speech down artificially so a human could easily understand it sounds like a deficiency to me. (By your definition).

Re: Google Duplex: An AI System for Accomplishing Real World Tasks Over the Phone

#67

Post by tanilama »

This is awesome, But

The algorithm of cause doesn't understand all contexts. What troubles me is that, in the first example, should we really give algorithm the freedom to propose a new date for an appointment? It reminds me one thing that particular bothers me with the Gmail's smart reply feature, where when given Monday or Wednesday as options, the suggested reply is, 'How about Tuesday', which does make the conversation flows, but doesn't really make any logical sense.

It makes a good demo, I am very much impressed, however, I feel it will run into a LOT of issues, even only in those provided scenarios, should those scenarios become more sophisticated.

Re: Google Duplex: An AI System for Accomplishing Real World Tasks Over the Phone

#68

Post by madeofpalk »

jld wrote: post #3

In the case where the person on the other end isn't a native english speaker, (the calling a restaurant clip) why doesn't Google figure out what language they speak and speak it to them?

I would imagine that a lot of the work that goes into making the speaking so natural would be very specific to English. As in, they would need to repeat 50% of the work for each language.

Re: Google Duplex: An AI System for Accomplishing Real World Tasks Over the Phone

#69

Post by madeofpalk »

have_faith wrote: post #27

One positive thing about our dystopian future is that it will force us to meet up more in person, if only to confirm our friends are real.

But then you would need to shoot them to see if they bleed or not.

Re: Google Duplex: An AI System for Accomplishing Real World Tasks Over the Phone

#70

Post by freehunter »

jbob2000 wrote: post #61
apendleton wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At least in the demo, the system didn't identify itself as a bot. It pretended (fairly convincingly) to just be a person, and seemed focused on interactions (making a restaurant reservation, etc.) that don't involve someone recognizing your voice. In other words, I don't think the attack surface is any different than situations where you could just place the call yourself, save perhaps for the possibility of scaling…

So now I can script a bot to book restaurant reservations all over the city at busy times. Then nobody shows up for the reservations, the busy time has passed, and customers have moved on or gone home. Restaurants make or break on one or two nights in a month. A calculated social engineering attack like this could bring down hundreds of restaurants in a city, which would cause millions of dollars in lost taxes, and y…

Was there something stopping you from doing that before? A lot of places you can even do it online.
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