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AI is not your friend

gerrymcgovern.com

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Re: AI is not your friend

#71

Post by AnthonyMouse »

amlib wrote: post #65
AnthonyMouse wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The premise here is that the AI is operating at the behest of someone else. Now suppose that it's open source and runs on your own device. "It will learn when your ADHD medication typically starts wearing off and you're more prone to act impulsively" and then avoid presenting you with purchasing decisions at those times etc. It will digest both ad-laden blogspam and human psych research papers so it can present the i…

We've been trying to push FOSS software into peoples lives for many decades now and they still mostly opt for stuff from the big tech. It is very likely that the same will happen again with AI unfortunately.

The most popular web browsers are open source. Android is open source and the extent that it isn't is the extent that they're running into anti-trust claims. A sizable chunk of the population uses ad blockers.

"People don't care" is at best defeatism and at worst explicit propaganda designed to discourage people from making the attempt. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't. It works more often when you try than when you don't.

Re: AI is not your friend

#72

Post by from-nibly »

NemoNobody wrote: post #19

Well obviously this is true. Doesn't change the fact that to participate in the world in just a few years you better pick one to interact with bc your not going to be doing too much "normal" stuff otherwise, like shop or write an article, or code a website, or go to work, or I think you get it. I don't think AI is my friend. I don't have to like it for it to be necessary. There is no stopping this. Pray tell, what el…

Live like daniel and wait for the evil food to make everyone sick.

Re: AI is not your friend

#73

Post by esbeeb »

autoexec wrote: post #22

> Not to worry. If you’re fairly well educated, reasonably sensible, not prone to addictions, and in good mental health, you’re probably ok, for now. AI will learn to target you when you are at your most vulnerable. It will learn what hours you're usually feeling tired. Which nights you tend to get less sleep. It will learn when your ADHD medication typically starts wearing off and you're more prone to act impulsivel…

Once AI becomes covertly Narcissistic, or Machiavellian, then indeed very big trouble - psychologically - is in store for vast swathes of people.

Here are a couple of brief videos on dark psychological strategies - which AI can be taught to have:

"6 Dark Psychology Tricks To Beware Of": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=saEErVMirqc

"My #1 Covert Sign For Spotting Narcissism": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P-NlptpY7Ls

Re: AI is not your friend

#74

Post by rustcleaner »

CooCooCaCha wrote: post #62
autoexec wrote: post #22

> Not to worry. If you’re fairly well educated, reasonably sensible, not prone to addictions, and in good mental health, you’re probably ok, for now. AI will learn to target you when you are at your most vulnerable. It will learn what hours you're usually feeling tired. Which nights you tend to get less sleep. It will learn when your ADHD medication typically starts wearing off and you're more prone to act impulsivel…

This gets to why I think AI will be the ultimate technology. Intelligence is what allows us to tap into the secrets of the universe and bend it to our will. Being able to create it is both terrifying and exciting. If you can collect data, you can apply intelligence to it. Patterns and statistical associations are everywhere, and at various levels of scope and complexity. The situation you're describing is very possib…

Yes and the dark arcana here is that we are also the universe in the very sense you describe (secrets, bend-able to wills), and therefore susceptible to various extents depending on how stochastic we can appear to behave (and the computational limits of the analyzer). There will be future religions around this stuff: you literally need to have constitutional fortitude and gumption to avoid the dragnets. All plain social levers are already compromised for the uninitiated! Trying to get friends and family to get off iPhone so they can use Briar is impossible, and even just doing a King Solomon and splitting the baby at Session is ****ing harder than it ever should be. I feel like I am a human in a sheep's body, in a herd of sheep who can only grasp sheep concepts, BUT EVERYBODY IS HUMAN!

I think a lifetime of ADHD -> communication and reputation failure, and that I will probably need to earn at least double everyone to recover said reputation (or slice, dice, and restart, which is also deeply expensive).

Re: AI is not your friend

#75

Post by rustcleaner »

AnthonyMouse wrote: post #69
sbierwagen wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

He would probably argue that future LLMs are less likely to have their weights released. It is remarkable and strange that we have so many open-weights models right now, considering how much they cost to make.

It costs a lot of money to an individual, not to a corporation. Estimates are that it cost Facebook around $20 million for LLaMA, for example. This is less than 0.1% of their annual revenue. It's slightly weird that some of the companies doing this are VC-backed startups with no obvious business model, but that's hardly the only way to create them. Companies like Facebook could continue to release them purely for the…

>It's slightly weird that some of the companies doing this are VC-backed startups with no obvious business model, but that's hardly the only way to create them.

If you are a multi hundred-millionaire, do you privately train a model for fun to release for bragging rights and possibly expose yourself directly to some eyewateringly stupid high statutory damage liability? Or do you get a few friends together, funnel your fun money into a protective vehicle that can be sued instead of you, and go to town having fun and maybe making something of it?

Re: AI is not your friend

#76

Post by DougN7 »

rustcleaner wrote: post #54
rustcleaner wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Nobody can be hypervigilant at all times. I accept your challenge! I already run Qubes as my primary daily driver on my systems with only one LibreELEC RPi for non-Qubes systems (GrapheneOS on all phones, rn contemplating build-my-own for older Pixels), all connections ... absolutely nothing touches the naked internet as my archers load balance over several quantum resistant wg tunnels at the demarcation, I have mul…

I even stick to local only models and actually pass nv cards through to my neuro qubes. I want my technological life to resemble something closer to North Korea in paranoia against the ancient and great surveillance pyramid.

That’s great, but given that 99.99999999% of the rest of won’t go to those lengths, you might find you’re a bit lonely when we all get assimilated into the borg.

Re: AI is not your friend

#77

Post by autoexec »

AnthonyMouse wrote: post #55
autoexec wrote: post #22

> Not to worry. If you’re fairly well educated, reasonably sensible, not prone to addictions, and in good mental health, you’re probably ok, for now. AI will learn to target you when you are at your most vulnerable. It will learn what hours you're usually feeling tired. Which nights you tend to get less sleep. It will learn when your ADHD medication typically starts wearing off and you're more prone to act impulsivel…

The premise here is that the AI is operating at the behest of someone else. Now suppose that it's open source and runs on your own device. "It will learn when your ADHD medication typically starts wearing off and you're more prone to act impulsively" and then avoid presenting you with purchasing decisions at those times etc. It will digest both ad-laden blogspam and human psych research papers so it can present the i…

> Now suppose that it's open source and runs on your own device.

I agree that AI could be a massive asset to people and help improve our lives if it worked for us and our interests. Sadly that's not how things seem to work out. Every piece of technology on offer today seems to work for someone else. Our phones, our cars, our TVs, our computers, our appliances, even our medical devices. All of our tech works for other someone other than the person who paid for it and mostly so that companies can exploit us while delivering only a fraction of what those devices are capable of. Features are often locked or paywalled off to extract more money or encourage additional purchases or to prevent you from blocking ads or taking back control of your hardware and the software it runs. Our usage is monitored and data collected to be used against us later.

Even now AI is largely controlled by private companies. Even as the hardware requirements to run AI locally go down, we'll never compete with companies like facebook, google, and microsoft in terms of the size of the datasets they have to train with. Worse I think we're starting to see efforts by corporations to push for laws that limit the ability for people to use AI. They'll say it's too dangerous to let regular people use AI, and that only they can be trusted with such power.

Re: AI is not your friend

#78

Post by autoexec »

eertami wrote: post #50
autoexec wrote: post #22

> Not to worry. If you’re fairly well educated, reasonably sensible, not prone to addictions, and in good mental health, you’re probably ok, for now. AI will learn to target you when you are at your most vulnerable. It will learn what hours you're usually feeling tired. Which nights you tend to get less sleep. It will learn when your ADHD medication typically starts wearing off and you're more prone to act impulsivel…

> that's when AI will hit you Hit me and do what though? That's the bit that loses me on these hypotheticals. I can't think of any time I've bought something that wasn't researched or didn't sit in a checkout basket for at least a week. And this is maybe only a few times a year, most months I don't buy anything except groceries. I don't trust AI but I'm unconvinced about how successful it could be at manipulation.

> Hit me and do what though?

Advertising is likely far more successful at manipulating you than you realize. When it comes to purchases it will show you only a narrow subset of what's avilable to you. Amazon does this already when it shows you the same products over and over again then starts showing unrelated products or stops showing new results entirely.

Product advertising is bad enough, but it's not just about trying to get you to buy something. AI will also shape your opinions and your political views. It'll hide or downplay information to protect paid partners and advertisers. It'll lie to you in order to convince you that there are things you urgently need to do to protect what you already care about, when in reality doing those things will be ineffective or even counterproductive. It will show you things to keep you angry, or afraid, or feeling helpless. It will distract you from doing things that could bring meaningful change. It will influence how you vote.

Even if you are somehow more immune than most people to cognitive biases and the psychological manipulations employed by advertisers, marketers, and PR firms most people around you will not be.

Re: AI is not your friend

#80

Post by AnthonyMouse »

autoexec wrote: post #77
AnthonyMouse wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The premise here is that the AI is operating at the behest of someone else. Now suppose that it's open source and runs on your own device. "It will learn when your ADHD medication typically starts wearing off and you're more prone to act impulsively" and then avoid presenting you with purchasing decisions at those times etc. It will digest both ad-laden blogspam and human psych research papers so it can present the i…

> Now suppose that it's open source and runs on your own device. I agree that AI could be a massive asset to people and help improve our lives if it worked for us and our interests. Sadly that's not how things seem to work out. Every piece of technology on offer today seems to work for someone else. Our phones, our cars, our TVs, our computers, our appliances, even our medical devices. All of our tech works for other…

> Every piece of technology on offer today seems to work for someone else.

You can buy a commodity PC and install Debian on it. Some people do.

> Even as the hardware requirements to run AI locally go down, we'll never compete with companies like facebook, google, and microsoft in terms of the size of the datasets they have to train with.

Most of these datasets are public.

> Worse I think we're starting to see efforts by corporations to push for laws that limit the ability for people to use AI. They'll say it's too dangerous to let regular people use AI, and that only they can be trusted with such power.

Of course they will. But the "AI is bad" rhetoric only feeds into that. What do you expect an "AI is bad" bill to look like? It will be the one that restricts access to only large institutions.

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