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AI is fundamentally ‘a surveillance technology’

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Re: AI is fundamentally ‘a surveillance technology’

#121

Post by api »

nologic01 wrote: post #88
api wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> lets us not concede that surveillance capitalism owns every possible future of tech. It does as long as it's the only way to finance tech, which seems to be the case.

why is that such a popular opinion. Tech has been financed for decades by individuals, corporates and public sector actors. Even today a large fraction is financed by "healthy" tech services demand. One of the many dramatic flaws of surveillance capitalism is that it cannot really provide the entire tech stack society needs. It thrives as a parasitic model, predicated on political dysfunction and public ignorance. So…

People have been conditioned to see software and even online services as something that should be "free." That's what I'm referring to.

It's obviously a bigger issue for B2C than B2B.

If everything has to be "free" then it becomes impossible to create sophisticated software or run any kind of service without finding some scuzzy way to double-dip and sell out your users. There is no viable business model that aligns the producer with the customer.

Re: AI is fundamentally ‘a surveillance technology’

#123

Post by insanitybit »

I can run models locally on my laptop, so no, it isn't. I can even train it locally on my own data if I want to.

Hyperbole really serves no purpose when it's so extreme. Instead of talking about the merits of "how can this technology be abused?" you're putting everyone else on the defensive, having to say "I'm not abusing it".

Like,

> AI is a way, I think, to entrench and expand the surveillance business model,” she said. “The Venn diagram is a circle.”

No it isn't.

If you want to say "facial recognition is a surveillance technology" OK. I find it deeply ironic that you then point out a use case where facial recognition is not used for surveillance and is actually protecting people (by blurring out faces) when you've just said that "The Venn diagram is a circle" but ok, at least the hyperbole is not so absurd if we limit it there. But then you just look like you're saying "AI" for headlines because yeah, we've been talking about facial recognition being surveillance technology for like 30 years or more...

This article should have been reframed as something more like "The surveillance impacts of advanced AI techniques on Facial Recognition", to throw out a half assed attempt at a title/ rephrasing. The hyperbole should have been applied exclusively to surveillance applications, which is hardly polarizing by contrast, and the interesting bit would have been to hear about how AI factors in. Instead this was a puff piece with no real technical content, nothing interesting, and is practically a time piece from the early 2000s surveillance discussion with "AI" slapped onto the headline for clicks.

Re: AI is fundamentally ‘a surveillance technology’

#124

Post by flagrant_taco »

happytiger wrote: post #8

This isn’t novel. So is the Internet itself. How do we protect against the downsides? Do we need a privacy bill of rights? I say yes.

The modern internet is easily used for surveillance, the early versions wouldn't have been very useful for surveillance though.

We could pretty easily strip most of the risks out if we cared to, though we'd lose functionality along with it and more importantly it wouldn't be the massive revenue driver it is today.

Re: AI is fundamentally ‘a surveillance technology’

#125

Post by insanitybit »

beepbooptheory wrote: post #119

What is it, in general, that makes people feel so motivated to defend AI? Every commenter can't be the CEO of some AI adjacent company.. Beyond that, why care so much? You can still use it even if its imperfect, you can even still use it while recognizing the fraught society it is being introduced into and the consequences of that introduction. And even in that recognition, we can be excited for what this stuff might…

> Isn't the "hacker" spirit one which itches to utilize and exploit? To be empowered and to be quick to kill your darlings?

Isn't that the answer? Someone is saying "entire technology, broadly, is bad" and a bunch of people who love technologies, who want to use this for all sorts of things, are going "what? no".

Who's subordinating? If I were to agree with the article would I be subordinate to techcrunch? No one is "fanboying" we're on a highly technical website with practitioners who, more or less, have a better understanding of the technology than virtually everyone involved in writing this article.

No one is even talking about BigCompany Product. A quick scan of the comments shows no mentions of meta or openai or chatgpt.

Re: AI is fundamentally ‘a surveillance technology’

#126

Post by flagrant_taco »

nuc1e0n wrote: post #28

The current wave of AI seems more like an investment scam to me. Like crypto currencies and NFTs were.

I'd compare it more to VR than NFTs.

VR was a technology step that could have had interesting uses for a new experience, pumped up like crazy by VCs that just wanted a new hype train to fill with cheap money.

NFTs, at least most of them, were complete frauds from the beginning and only existed to scam users in what was basically a ponzi scheme.

Re: AI is fundamentally ‘a surveillance technology’

#127

Post by sealeck »

insanitybit wrote: post #123

I can run models locally on my laptop, so no, it isn't. I can even train it locally on my own data if I want to. Hyperbole really serves no purpose when it's so extreme. Instead of talking about the merits of "how can this technology be abused?" you're putting everyone else on the defensive, having to say "I'm not abusing it". Like, > AI is a way, I think, to entrench and expand the surveillance business model,” she…

You can also turn your phone into a CCTV camera and yet a city where the state has 1 million surveillance cameras is qualitatively different to your homegrown back garden solution.

Re: AI is fundamentally ‘a surveillance technology’

#128

Post by janAkali »

fhd2 wrote: post #75
janAkali wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Is any of this currently being done, however? Companies aren't obligated to disclose the training process. So, we can't tell. Until, in the matter of months, it is available, accessible and almost impossible to regulate. And every company will start using it to not fall behind.

Why do you think it's impossible to regulate? There's a _long_ list of unlawful things that are technically possible, sometimes trivial even. Only _because_ they are possible in the first place, are there laws against them. This process seems slow compared to a human lifespan, but lots of terrible things people used to do got outlawed eventually.

> Why do you think it's impossible to regulate?

There are three reasons:

- once it's widespread - it's a standard (targeted ads, cookie tracking, SEO)

- we'd need a lot of infrastructure to track all the data recorded, where it goes, how it is processed, etc. etc.. And if a big company is caught.. they'll pay fines for being caught and let away to continue the same shady practices, as we have seen with privacy scandals at Facebook.

> ...but lots of terrible things people used to do got outlawed eventually.

That's the third reason - surveillance is evil and bad, but it will never be advertised as that. It will be something good and convenient with a surveillance as a side effect, similar to social media and smart appliances.

Maybe, I am just too pessimistic and you're right with: 'This process seems slow compared to a human lifespan'.

Re: AI is fundamentally ‘a surveillance technology’

#129

Post by flagrant_taco »

nathias wrote: post #55
krapp wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Definitions don't matter. The device I carry in my pocket is "defined" as a "smartphone" despite being a computer that just happens to have an app that simulates an archaic device called a "telephone" installed on it. It also provides convenient access for law enforcement to monitor all of my social media accounts and communications and metadata and scan my storage for contraband. Preferably with a warrant but of cou…

Your computer can spy on you. The web can spy on you. Your appliances can spy on you. Your car can spy on you. Your lightbulbs can spy on you. but you don't need tech for that, a spy can spy on you

These technologies all commodities spying, making it viable when you couldn't send a person to do the spying.

I live in a rural area. The government would never bother to send someone to spy on me here, I can't imagine they suspect me of anything important enough to spend resources on me. But they can spy on me digitally for a very low cost and with little or no humna resources. Even better for them, they can spy on me digitally without cause and dump the data in storage in case they ever want to pull it up later.

Re: AI is fundamentally ‘a surveillance technology’

#130

Post by starburst »

AndrewThrowaway wrote: post #110

Out of topic question. Would it be possible to combine machine learning with something like 23andMe and match 100 000 person photos with their DNA. Would we have an AI model which basically can tell how the persons looks like from a strand of hair? Imagine finding some DNA on a crime scene. Witnesses can say that this person was a bit overweight so you slide some slider to the right a bit and get a pretty good AI gen…

When playing with a custom LoRA (dreambooth / SDXL) trained on my brother’s photos of himself something interesting happened, when we used the prompt “as a women” instead of “a man”, the result looked incredibly similar to one of our cousin, so much that my parents asked how come she was now in the pictures generated.
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