AI and Mass Spying • Hacker News Board

Re: AI and Mass Spying

#271

Post by from-nibly » Tue, Dec 05, 2023, 9:02 PM UTC

dfxm12 wrote: post #245

petsfed wrote: post #222

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You and I are in agreement that the surveillance needs to stop, but I think we differ on how to explain the problem. My explanation follows, but note that its not directed at you. At its peak, the KGB employed ~500,000 people directly, with untold more employed as informants. The FBI currently employs ~35,000 people. What if I told you that the FBI could reach the KGB's peak level of reach, without meaningfully incre…

I think if you bring up a dystopian nightmare, it assumes someone in power acting in bad faith. If their power is great enough, like maybe a government intelligence agency, it doesn't need things like due process, etc., to do what it wants to do. For example, Joe McCarthy & J. Edgar Hoover didn't need the evidence that could have been produced by AI-aided mass surveillance to justify getting people people who opposed…

That's what this article argues though. Even with good faith acting this would be a disaster. Imagine any time you did something against the law you got fined. The second you drive your unregistered car off your driveway (presumably to re register) you are immediately fined. There may be "due process" cause you DID break the law, but there is no contextual thought behind the massive ticket machine.

Our laws are not built to have the level of enforcement that AI could achieve.

Re: AI and Mass Spying

#272

Post by salawat » Tue, Dec 05, 2023, 9:11 PM UTC

w-m wrote: post #119

somenameforme wrote: post #58

This is a political problem, not a technological one. The USSR (alongside Germany and others) managed effective at scale spying with primitive technology: paperwork for everything and every movement, informants, audio surveillance, and so on. The reason such things did not come to places like the US in the same way is not because we were incapable of such, but because there was no political interest in it. And when o…

Sure, everything is ultimately a political problem, but this one is completely driven by technological change. In the USSR (and GDR), it took them a staff of hundreds of thousands of people to write up their reports. Now it would take a single skilled person the better part of an afternoon to, for example, download a HN dump, and have an LLM create reports on the users. You could put in things like political affiliat…

Stop posting things like this, you're just giving them ideas, and you can't take it back once it's out there.

I assure you, you may find the prodpect abhorrent, but there are people around who'd consider it a perfectly cromulent Tuesday.

Re: AI and Mass Spying

#273

Post by TheLoafOfBread » Tue, Dec 05, 2023, 9:14 PM UTC

forward1 wrote: post #258

TheLoafOfBread wrote: post #212

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That actually works. Sure one click is not enough, but purposefully browsing women's products on Amazon for few hours confused something and since then I am getting ads for women's products only.

What problem have you actually solved by doing that, because you're still receiving ads and being manipulated through your continued use of those platforms.

None. I was drunk and this is the result. Now I am a woman for advertisers.

Re: AI and Mass Spying

#274

Post by trinsic2 » Tue, Dec 05, 2023, 9:18 PM UTC

nox100 wrote: post #114

bonyt wrote: post #42

I think another aspect of this is mass criminal law enforcement enabled by AI. Many of our criminal laws are written with the implicit assumption that it takes resources to investigate and prosecute a crime, and that this will limit the effective scope of the law. Prosecutorial discretion. Putting aside for the moment the (very serious) injustice that comes with the inequitable use of prosecutorial discretion, let's…

[flagged]

Yea that stuff is happening here where I live (1hr away) more often as well, it seemed like it started happening more often during COVID. People are running red lights more often and going way over the speed limit.

Re: AI and Mass Spying

#275

Post by salawat » Tue, Dec 05, 2023, 9:19 PM UTC

forward1 wrote: post #256

somenameforme wrote: post #58

This is a political problem, not a technological one. The USSR (alongside Germany and others) managed effective at scale spying with primitive technology: paperwork for everything and every movement, informants, audio surveillance, and so on. The reason such things did not come to places like the US in the same way is not because we were incapable of such, but because there was no political interest in it. And when o…

Laws limiting collection of data to solve privacy is akin to halting the production of fossil fuels to solve climate change: naive and ignorant of basic economic forces.

Economic forces serve those that make the Market possible.

People > Markets.

Or to put it explicitly, people have primacy over Markets.

I.e. two people does not a Market make, and a Market with no people is not thing.

Re: AI and Mass Spying

#276

Post by trinsic2 » Tue, Dec 05, 2023, 9:20 PM UTC

mikepurvis wrote: post #166

nox100 wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

Honestly, when it comes to road-related violations (speeding, yield issues, fulling stopping at stop signs or RTOR, etc), I feel similarly. The current state of affairs where it's a $300 ticket that you're probably never going to see because 99% of the time you get away with it is dumb— it makes people contemptuous of the law and also feel super resentful and hard-done-by if they do finally get caught. And it's a pos…

I wonder whats going on at the enforcement level. It seems like there is a dumbing down of that system. It would be interesting to see some research on this.

Re: AI and Mass Spying

#277

Post by uticus » Tue, Dec 05, 2023, 9:22 PM UTC

This sums up so many things well and clearly. It's so quotable.

- The money trail: "Their true customers—their advertisers—will demand it."

- The current state of affairs: "Surveillance has become the business model of the internet..."

- The fact that not participating, or opting-out, still yields informational value, if not even more so: "Find me all the pairs of phones that were moving toward each other, turned themselves off..."

This isn't a technological problem. Technology always precedes the morals and piggybacks on the fuzzy ideas that haven't yet developed into concrete, well-taught axioms. It is a problem about how our society approaches ideals. Ideals, not ideas. What do we value? What do we love?

If we love perceived security more than responsibility, we will give up freedoms. And gladly. If we love ourselves more than future generations, we will make short-sighted decisions and pat ourselves on the back for our efficiency in rewarding ourselves. If we love ourselves more than others, we won't even care much about social concerns. We'll fail to notice anything that doesn't move the needle against my comfort much.

It's more understandable to me than ever how recent human horrors - genocides, repressive regimes, all of it - came about to be. It's because I'm a very selfish person and I am surrounded by selfish people. Mass spying is a symptom - not much of a cause - of the human condition.

Re: AI and Mass Spying

#278

Post by floxy » Tue, Dec 05, 2023, 9:25 PM UTC

127361 wrote: post #41

_Nat_ wrote: post #37

Seems inevitable enough that we may have to accept it and try to work within the context of (what we'd tend to think of today as) mass-spying. I mean, even if we pass laws to offer more protections, as computation gets cheaper, it ought to become easier-and-easier for anyone to start a mass-spying operation -- even by just buying a bunch of cheap sensors and doing all of the work on their personal-computer. A decent…

Living off-grid is how I'm dealing with the whole situation nowadays.

Except for the posting on HN?

Re: AI and Mass Spying

#279

Post by asdff » Tue, Dec 05, 2023, 9:28 PM UTC

chagen wrote: post #243

asdff wrote: post #227

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thats the exact issue with gpt. You don't know how its making the summary. It could very well be wrong in parts. It could be oversummarized to a bla bla state like you say. There's no telling whether you have outputted garbage or not, at least not without secondary forms of evidence that you might as well use anyway and drop the unreliable language model. You can summarize everything with traditional statistical meth…

What LLMs can do efficiently is crawl through and identify the secondary forms of evidence you mentioned. The real power behind retrieval architectures with LLMs is not the summarization part- the power comes from automating the retrieval of relevant documents from arbitrarily large corpuses which weren't included in the training set.

What makes a document relevant or not? Provenance? Certain keywords? A lot of this retrieval people cite that llms are good at can be done with existing search algorithms too. These are imo nicer because they will at least provide a score for the fit of the given document to the term.

Re: AI and Mass Spying

#280

Post by thesuperbigfrog » Tue, Dec 05, 2023, 9:34 PM UTC

tech_ken wrote: post #239

thesuperbigfrog wrote: post #232

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's starting to happen now. Here is one example: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-copilot "AI for everything you do" "Work smarter, be more productive, boost creativity, and stay connected to the people and things in your life with Copilot—an AI companion that works everywhere you do and intelligently adapts to your needs." If Microsoft builds them, then Google, Apple, and Samsung will too. How else will th…

I mean by this definition I’d say it happened when they introduced Siri or Hey Google. The creation of these tools and their massive/universal adoption a la web-crawlers is still a large gap though. Getting to point where you consider them as a dark “guardian angel” or “ancestral spirit” goes even a step farther I think

>> The creation of these tools and their massive/universal adoption a la web-crawlers is still a large gap though.

It only takes a decade or so.

Consider people who are young children now in "first world nations". They will have always had LLM-based tools available and voice assistants you can ask natural language questions.

It will likely follow the same adoption curves as smartphones, only faster because of existing network effects.

If you have smartphone with a reasonably fast connection, you have access to LLM tools. The next generations of smartphones, tablets, laptops, and desktops will all have LLM tools built-in.