Earlier quoted context omitted.
Really? I thought it was obvious and that people were just being reactive to the topics discussed by the OP. Do you think that the commonly accepted truth on these matters did not change?
You're projecting your views on the comment. You may even be correct, but it's still a projection: that view is not explicit in the text; combined with the specific wording, I feel down-voting rather than engaging was precisely the correct response. This whole interaction is a classic motte-and-bailey: someone says something vague that can be interpreted several ways (and reading their comment history makes it clear…
Bad Actors Are Grooming LLMs to Produce Falsehoods
131–140 of 302 posts
Re: Bad Actors Are Grooming LLMs to Produce Falsehoods
#132Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 thre…
You continue with the false equivalences trying to smudge reality. And assuming that if I recognise facts, it's because I belong to the tribe that currently recognises those facts too. > The reason you're emotionally disregulated by russian propaganda is because it threatens your identity-based committment to one group. No, it's because it lies to advance the imperialist ambitions of a dictator committing war crimes.…
I invite you to reflect that this sensation your feeling is not about the status of facts in the world, its about "morality" as you say -- you have connected, in your mind, a sensation which accompanies justice to the need to believe certain claims. This is just the emotions of tribal affliliation and identity -- and it shows that our psychologies are not of a suitable makeup for this kind of adjudication of "what is true" --- this is why in liberal democracies, we have tried very hard to deprive the state from control over the press. But in matters of foreign policy, the media is entirely controlled by the state.
Nothing I believe about russia/ukraine comes from russia: it's by having listened to american senators on cspan as they were disposing the ukrainian government in 2013 -- its having listened to the tapes of us state department officials discussing who they will replace the leader with at the time. I mean, you can go and find interviews with Kissinger discussing in the 90s what would happen if the US tried to intervene in ukraine.
If you want to know what actually happened: the US has been using bribes and threats across eastern europe to turn those states into allies, placing armies and missles in them, for decades. Russia has been protesting this for decades too, and was too weak to do anything about it in the 2000s. They were very afraid they would lose their naval base in crimea (which was always, officially, their land) when the US participated in the overthrow of the elected government in 2013, by siding with one half of a civil conflict. When that happened they took crimea to ensure the US wouldnt gain control of that base -- subsequently, the ukrainian goverment became extemely hostile to russian populations in ukraine, and engaged in lots of destabilising actions against crimea (shutting off water, etc.) --- all the while arms, soliders etc. were flowing in from western states into the country (against agreements france/germany made, which they violated to do this). In the backgrond the entire time, the far-east of ukraine has not been controlled by kiev. After 2014, the ukrianian arming by the west, their increased hostility to internal russian populations, and the on-going civil war in the east reached a critical point where russia decided the detabalisation on its border was a greater threat than a show of force. The original russian plans were just to quickly surround kiev and effect a reigeme change quickly, not to enter a war -- the war was escalated to its current scale in large part by US/UK pressuring ukraine not to regotiate and promising massive arms/aid backing. About two years ago UA fell into a stalemate/loss posisition, and now it may be to late to negotiate terms with putin not to take a much larger area. In part, putin is interested in taking an area of land that puts moscow outside of missle range from ukraine, which is up to about half-way.
Re: Bad Actors Are Grooming LLMs to Produce Falsehoods
#133Earlier quoted context omitted.
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Now, why are you spending misinformation? The russian military doctrine of spreading a "firehouse of falsehood" is well documented. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_disinformation And yet, you switch it around and blame the west - exactly as per russian misinformation doctrine. Odd, eh?
An earlier comment mentioned how hard it is to get down to objective truth. Sometimes there are cases, like 'accelerate climate change in the belief that it'll help Siberia and hurt the West and Europe and open up the Arctic for shipping' where it's not at all hard to get down to objective truth: objective truth comes for ya like a tiger and will not be avoided.
Re: Bad Actors Are Grooming LLMs to Produce Falsehoods
#134Earlier 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…
Re: Bad Actors Are Grooming LLMs to Produce Falsehoods
#135Earlier quoted context omitted.
AIs can be trained to rely more on critical thinking rather than just regurgitating what it reads. The problem is just like with people, critical thinking takes more power and time. So we avoid it as much as possible. In fact, optimizing for the wrong things like that, is basically the entire world's problem right now.
Regurgitating its input is the only thing it does. It does not do any thinking, let alone critical thinking. It may give the illusion of thinking because it's been trained on thoughts. That's it.
Re: Bad Actors Are Grooming LLMs to Produce Falsehoods
#136If 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.
Before the bubble does pop, which I think is inevitable, there will be many stories like this one, and a lot of people will be scammed, manipulated, and harmed. It might take years until the general consensus is negative about the effects of these tools. All while the wealthy and powerful continue to reap the benefits, while those on slightly lower rungs fight to take their place. And even if the public perception sh…
Re: Bad Actors Are Grooming LLMs to Produce Falsehoods
#137Whatever capabilities Russia has to groom LLMs and and spread disinformation is completely dwarfed by the capabilities of Israel/America. Meaning, yes, you probably do hear Kremlin propaganda, but you have been awash with Israeli/American propaganda since you were born - so much so you probably can't even see it and have internalised much of it.
A liberal multicultural postmodern democracy continually acting as if immigration (both legal and illegal) and diversity are its strengths, particularly when that turns out to be factual (see: large American cities becoming influential cultural exporters and hotbeds of innovation, like New York and Silicon Valley etc) means American propaganda is only more effective when it's backed by economic might.
It also means the American propaganda is WILDLY contradictory. There's a million sources and it's a noisy burst of neon glamour. It is simply not as controlled by authority, however they may try.
You cannot liken authoritarian propaganda to postmodern multicultural propaganda. The whole reason it's postmodern is that it eschews direct control of the message, and it's a giant scrum of information. Turns out this is fertile ground, and this is also why attacks by alien propaganda have been so effective. If you can grab big chunks of the American propaganda and turn it to your enemy weapon of war and destruction of America quite directly, well then the American propaganda is not on the same destructive level as your rigidly state-controlled propaganda.
Re: Bad Actors Are Grooming LLMs to Produce Falsehoods
#138Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
It was a whole new world that may have changed my life forever. ChatGPT is a shitty Google replacement in comparison, and it's a bad alternative due to being censored in its main instructions.
Re: Bad Actors Are Grooming LLMs to Produce Falsehoods
#139Earlier quoted context omitted.
Personally, I have three use cases for AI: 1. Image upscaling. I am decorating my house and AI allowed me to get huge prints from tiny shitty pictures. It's not perfect, but it works. 2. Conversational partner. It's a different question whether it's a good or a bad thing, but I can spend hours talking to Claude about things in general. He's expensive though. 3. Learning basics of something. I'm trying to install LED…
> Conversational partner This is the ai holy grail. When tech companies can get users to think of the ai as a friend ( -> best friend -> only friend -> lover ) and be loyal to it it will make the monetisation possibilities of the ad fuelled outrage engagement of the past 10 years look silly. Scary that that is the endgame for “social” media.
Gaslight reality, coming right up, at scale. Only costs like ten degrees of global warming and the death of the world as we know it. But WOW, the opportunities for massed social control!
Re: Bad Actors Are Grooming LLMs to Produce Falsehoods
#140"Ultimately, the only way forward is better cognition, including systems that can evaluate news sources, understand satire, and so forth. But that will require deeper forms of reasoning, better integrated into the process, and systems sharp enough to fact check to their own outputs. All of which may require a fundamental rethink. In the meantime, systems of naive mimicry and regurgitation, such as the AIs we have now…