I figured this would become an issue from the first story about some websites not allowing LLM access popped up. It's a simple leap to find that the narratives which will become widely known and accepted over time are those which are made widely available, and so IMO those who seek to push their narrative will just optimize for AI to train on or otherwise utilize their content. Those who seek to lock their content away will become less and less heard/relevant. And if/when at some point we start handing far greater control of life aspects to AI, we'll find it skewing in favor of the former, and wonder why.
Bad Actors Are Grooming LLMs to Produce Falsehoods
201–210 of 302 posts
Re: Bad Actors Are Grooming LLMs to Produce Falsehoods
#202Earlier quoted context omitted.
If there's one underlying axiom of western thought it is "question everything." So no, not really.
> If there's one underlying axiom of western thought it is "question everything." I don't believe this, even for a second. How are those that truly do question everything treated? Well, as either looney conspiracy theorists, or vindicated activists, depending on when the official State narrative (or classification status) changes. Not always, or even often unjustified, but I hardly think you can call it an "underlyin…
Gasp! Are you referring to a lively marketplace of ideas and the intrinsic dynamics of competition within that marketplace?
Nobody said it's without cost to hold non-consensus views. The point is that those costs are incurred by the marketplace of ideas itself (people being "mean" to you, not the state beheading you) and that, in the long run, correct views become the consensus through winning such competitions over and over again.
There are alternative regimes where incorrect views can reign indefinitely because they choose to prevent people from criticizing each others' views.
Re: Bad Actors Are Grooming LLMs to Produce Falsehoods
#203Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
> It might take years until the general consensus is negative about the effects of these tools. The only thing I'm seeing offline are people who already think AI is trash, untrustworthy, and harmful, while also occasionally being convenient when the stakes are extremely low (random search results mostly) or as a fun toy ("Look I'm a ghibli character!") I don't think it'll take long for the masses to sour to AI and th…
The things I have noted offline included a HK case where someone got a link to a zoom call with what seemed to be his team mates and CFO, and then transferring money as per the CFOs instructions.
The error here was to click on a phishing email.
But something I have seen myself is Tim Cook talking about a crypto coin right after the 2024 Apple keynote, on a YT channel that showed the Apple logo. It took me a bit to realize and reassure myself that it was a scam. Even though it was a video of the shoulders up.
The bigger issue we face isn’t the outright fraud and scamming, it’s that our ability to make out fakes easily is weakened - the Liar’s dividend.
It’s by default a shot in the arm for bullshit and lies.
On some days I wonder if the inability to sort between lies, misinformation, initial ideas, fair debate, argument, theory and fact at scale - is the great filter.
Re: Bad Actors Are Grooming LLMs to Produce Falsehoods
#204It 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.
> we cannot really agree what the desired behavior should be
How many of "us" believe that the desired behavior is lies??
Re: Bad Actors Are Grooming LLMs to Produce Falsehoods
#205Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yes. As humans are inherently ideological and subjective beings, that is all we will ever have.
So killing you is not an inherently immoral act and should be justified under someone's ideological standpoint?
The morality of killing, as everything else, is a question of ideology.
See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soldiers_are_murderers for a famous debate on this subject.
Re: Bad Actors Are Grooming LLMs to Produce Falsehoods
#206Earlier quoted context omitted.
The internet predates the Web; people were playing Muds and chatting on message boards before the first browser was made at CERN.
Of course, but does it mean that my argument is flawed? You're just shifting the discourse, without disproving anything. Do you claim that the web was useful for everyone on day one, or as useful as it is today for everyone? I could just do the same as GP, and qualify MUDs and BBS as poor proxies for social interactions that are much more elaborate and vibrant in person.
As I pointed out in a different comment, the Internet at least was (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.
But LLMs are from the get-go a bad idea, a bullshit generating machine.
Re: Bad Actors Are Grooming LLMs to Produce Falsehoods
#207Earlier quoted context omitted.
IMO the split is between people understanding the heuristic nature of AI and people who dont and thus think of it as an all-knowing, all-solving oracle. Your elder parents having nice conversations with chatgpt is nice aslong it doesnt make big life changing decisions for them, which happens already today. You have to know the tools limits and usecases.
Yup. Exactly this. As soon as enough people get screwed by the ~80% accuracy rate, the whole facade will crumble. Unless AI companies manage to bring the accuracy up 20% in the next year, by either limiting scope or finding new methods, it will crumble. That kind of accuracy gain isn't happening with LLMs alone (ie foundational models).
Charitably, I don’t understand what those like you mean by the “whole facade” and why you use these old machine learning metrics like “accuracy rate” to assess what’s going on. Facade implies that the unprecedented and still exponential organic uptake of GPT (again see the actual data I linked earlier from Mary Meeker) is just a hype-generated fad, rather than people finding it actually useful to whatever end. Indeed, the main issue with the “facade” argument is that it’s actually what dominates the media (Marcus et al) much more than any hyperbolic pro-AI “hype.”
This “80-20” framing, moreover, implies we’re just trying to asymptotically optimize a classification model or some information retrieval system… If you’ve worked with LLMs daily on hard problems (non-trivial programming and scholarly research, for example), the progress over even just the last year is phenomenal — and even with the presently existing models I find most problems arise from failures of context management and the integration of LLMs with IR systems.
Re: Bad Actors Are Grooming LLMs to Produce Falsehoods
#208I 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…
> I am questioning, how is this news?
You couldn't have lies targeting LLMs before LLMs, so this is new.
> What about the other terabyte of text influenced by bias and opinion
That's a different group of issues that doesn't prevent focusing of something else
Re: Bad Actors Are Grooming LLMs to Produce Falsehoods
#209Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's wild -- I've never seen such a persistent split in the Hacker News audience like this one. The skeptics read one set of AI articles, everyone else the others; a similar comment will be praised in one thread and down-voted to oblivion in another.
I think there are two problems: 1. AI is a genuine threat to lots of white-collar jobs, and people instinctively deny this reality. See that very few articles here are "I found a nice use case for AI", most of them are "I found a use case where AI doesn't work (yet)". Does it sound like tech enthusiasts? Or rather people terrified of tech? 2. Current AI is advanced enough to have us ask deeper questions about conscio…
On the second point, it’s worth noting how many of the most vocal and well-positioned critics of LLMs (Marcus/Pinker in particular) represent the still academically dominant but now known to be losing side of the debate over connectionism. The anthology from the 90s Talking Nets is phenomenal to see how institutionally marginalized figures like Hinton were until very recently.
Off-topic, but I couldn’t find your contact info and just saw your now closed polyglot submission from last year. Look into technical sales/solution architecture roles at high growth US startups expanding into the EU. Often these companies hire one or two non-technical native speakers per EU country/region, but only have a handful of SAs from a hub office so language skills are of much more use. Given your interest in the topic, check out OpenAI and Anthropic in particular.
Re: Bad Actors Are Grooming LLMs to Produce Falsehoods
#210Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 can give you the relevant facts here that will undermine your confidence in this position, but I'm not talking about ukraine -- i'm talking about LLMs and the base of facts they use; and how people feel about sets of alleged claims. 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…
> 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.
That's an incredible flood of lies. Starting from the top: name one such missile site. You can't, because there never were any foreign "armies and missiles" in Eastern Europe. This narrative is pure fiction. You've picked it up from some Russian propaganda piece, never bothered to check the facts, and are now preaching it as truth, while carrying an inflated ego as if you had above-average knowledge of the subject, which only reinforces the tendency to cling to these false beliefs when challenged. Propaganda 101.