Similar but different... identity based political disinformation is getting so much harder to spot.
Bad Actors Are Grooming LLMs to Produce Falsehoods
101–110 of 302 posts
Re: Bad Actors Are Grooming LLMs to Produce Falsehoods
#102I am questioning, how is this news? What about the other terabyte of text influenced by bias and opinion and human nature and clearly wrong, contradicts itself or in some other way very arguable. Framing publishing falsehoods on internet as attempts to influence LLMs is true in same sense that inserts in a database attempts influence files on disk. The real question is who authorized database access and how we believ…
The example in this article is particularly funny. Pravda was founded in 1912, predating the internet, and had been Soviet's propaganda machine for its whole existence.
One needs a PhD in mental gymnastics to frame Pravda spreading misinformation as an attempt to specifically groom LLMs.
Re: Bad Actors Are Grooming LLMs to Produce Falsehoods
#103It is impossible to solve this problem because we cannot really agree what the desired behavior should be. People live in different and dynamic truths. What we consider enemy propaganda today might be an official statement tomorrow. The only way to win here is to not play the game.
I would actually be very interested in a system where there's nothing stored just as a "fact", but rather every piece of information is connected to its sources and the evidence provided.
Re: Bad Actors Are Grooming LLMs to Produce Falsehoods
#104Earlier quoted context omitted.
> There are plenty of cases (like in Ukraine, or vaccines, or climate change) where there is unquestionable truth on one side The problem is that most people are like you, and live in psycho-informational ecosystems in which there are "unquestionable truths" -- it is in these very states of comfortable-certainty that we are often most subject to propaganda. All of the issues you mention are identity markers for being…
Thank you for proving my point. On one hand, we have the unquestionable and undeniable facts that Russia invaded Ukraine and is committing atrocities against its civilian population, up to and including literal genocide (kidnapping children). On the other, we have: > Scientists who are aware of the full history of ukraine, western interventionism, russian geostrategic concerns, the full details of the 2013 collapse o…
So, just to be clear, you believe that comments like yours are the kinds of things LLMs should be trained on?
The sensation you call "muddying the waters" is the feeling that your tribal loyalties are being questioned with identity-challenging facts that complicate your ability to live in a simple good-vs-evil us-vs-them tribal setup. The reason you're emotionally disregulated by russian propaganda is because it threatens your identity-based committment to one group.
This has nothing to do with the "unquestionable facts" you suppose exists.
If you had no loyalties to any tribe, and were in every respect a dispassionate scientist as an LLM should be -- then this would not be an emotional issue for you.
No one is claiming that russians do not commit war crimes, or release propaganda -- that happens on both sides. The issue is your psychological sensation of "unquestionables" that isnt occuring in a discussion of atomic theory, but instead about claims of adveraries in the middle of a war.
Do you think your feelings here are an accurate track of whether there are unquestionable truths only on "one side"? Isnt that you think there are "sides" alarming?
Re: Bad Actors Are Grooming LLMs to Produce Falsehoods
#105Earlier quoted context omitted.
This whole attitude against AI reminds me of my parents being upset that the internet changed the way they live. They refused to take part in the internet revolution, and now they're surprised that they don't know how to navigate the web. I think that a part of them is still waiting for computers in general to magically disappear, and everything return to the times of their youth.
The internet actually enabled us to do new things. AI is nothing of that sort. It just generates mediocre statistically-plausible text.
In the early days of the web, there wasn't much we could do with it other than making silly pages with blinking texts or under construction animated GIFs. You need to give it some time before judging a new technology.
Re: Bad Actors Are Grooming LLMs to Produce Falsehoods
#106If actions by these bad actors accelerate the rate at which people lose trust in these systems and lead to the AI bubble popping faster then they have my full support. The entire space is just bad actors complaining about other bad actors while they're collectively ruining the web for everyone, each in their own way.
This whole attitude against AI reminds me of my parents being upset that the internet changed the way they live. They refused to take part in the internet revolution, and now they're surprised that they don't know how to navigate the web. I think that a part of them is still waiting for computers in general to magically disappear, and everything return to the times of their youth.
No, your parents spoke out of ignorance and resistance towards any sort of change, I'm speaking from years of experience of both trying to use the technology productively, as well as spending a significant portion of my life in the digital world that has been impacted by it. I remember being mesmerized by GPT-3 before ChatGPT was even a thing.
The only thing that has been revolutionized over the past few years is the amount of time I now waste looking at Cloudflare turnstile and dredging through the ocean of shit that has flooded the open web to find information that is actually reliable.
2 years ago I could still search for information (let's say plumbing-related), but we're now at a point where I'll end up on a bunch of professional and traditionally trustworthy sources, but after a few seconds I realize it's just LLM-generated slop that's regurgitating the same incorrect information that was already provided to me by an LLM a few minutes prior. It sounds reasonable, it sounds authoritative, most people would accept it but I know that it's wrong. Where do I go? Soon the answer is probably going to have to be "the library" again.
All the while less perceptive people like yourself apparently don't even seem to realize just how bad the quality of information you're consuming has become, so you cheer it on while labeling us stubborn, resistant to change, or even luddites.
Re: Bad Actors Are Grooming LLMs to Produce Falsehoods
#107Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is in fact the goal of Russian style propaganda. You have successfully been targeted. The idea is to spread so much confusion that you just throw up your hands and say, I'm not going to try and figure out what's going on any more. That saps your will to be political, to morally judge actions and support efforts to punish wrongdoers. https://www.rand.org/pubs/perspectives/PE198.html https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/…
What you're saying is certainly an established propaganda strategy of Russia (and others), but what parent is saying is also true, "truth" isn't always black and white, and what is the desired behavior in one country can be the opposite in another. For example, it is the truth that the Golf of Mexico is called the Gulf of America in the US, but Golf of Mexico everywhere else. What is the "correct" truth? Well, there…
> For example, it is the truth that the Golf of Mexico is called the Gulf of America in the US
We're pretty much okay with different countries and languages having different names for the same thing. None of that really reflects "truth" though. For what it's worth, I'd guess that "the Gulf of America" is and will be about as successful as "Freedom fries" was.
Re: Bad Actors Are Grooming LLMs to Produce Falsehoods
#108If actions by these bad actors accelerate the rate at which people lose trust in these systems and lead to the AI bubble popping faster then they have my full support. The entire space is just bad actors complaining about other bad actors while they're collectively ruining the web for everyone, each in their own way.
If that outcome were likely, then Fox News and The Daily Mail would have died a death a decade ago and Trump wouldn’t be serving a 2nd term. Yet here we are, in a world where it doesn’t matter if “facts” are truth or lies, just as long as your target audience agrees with the sentiment.
Tobacco, alcohol, and drugs too!
Re: Bad Actors Are Grooming LLMs to Produce Falsehoods
#109If actions by these bad actors accelerate the rate at which people lose trust in these systems and lead to the AI bubble popping faster then they have my full support. The entire space is just bad actors complaining about other bad actors while they're collectively ruining the web for everyone, each in their own way.
This whole attitude against AI reminds me of my parents being upset that the internet changed the way they live. They refused to take part in the internet revolution, and now they're surprised that they don't know how to navigate the web. I think that a part of them is still waiting for computers in general to magically disappear, and everything return to the times of their youth.
The internet was at least (and is) a promise of many wondrous things: video call your loved ones, talk in message boards, read an encyclopedia, download any book, watch any concert, find any scientific paper, etc etc; even though it has been for the last 15 years cannibalised by the cancerous mix of surveillance capitalism and algorithmic social media.
LLMs are from the get-go a bad idea, a bullshit generating machine.
Re: Bad Actors Are Grooming LLMs to Produce Falsehoods
#110It is impossible to solve this problem because we cannot really agree what the desired behavior should be. People live in different and dynamic truths. What we consider enemy propaganda today might be an official statement tomorrow. The only way to win here is to not play the game.
"different and dynamic truths" = fictions We can not play the game.
But the social sphere is made of fictions, the most influential of which probably been the value of different currencies and commodities. I don't think there's any way for an individual to live in the modern world without such fictions.