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Bad Actors Are Grooming LLMs to Produce Falsehoods

americansunlight.substack.com

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Re: Bad Actors Are Grooming LLMs to Produce Falsehoods

#211

Post by yurish »

mjburgess wrote: post #132
sofixa wrote: post #122

Earlier 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…

Ii is rare to encounter such an opinion on HN. Thanks.

Re: Bad Actors Are Grooming LLMs to Produce Falsehoods

#212

Post by charcircuit »

numpad0 wrote: post #115
charcircuit wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are personalized social media feeds, so why not have personalized LLMs that align with how people want their LLM to act.

Cost. It takes a lot of computational cost to train or retrain LLM, currently.

You would still have a single model, but like internet search, it would take in both a user vector and a query (prompt).

Re: Bad Actors Are Grooming LLMs to Produce Falsehoods

#213

Post by amalcon »

glotzerhotze wrote: post #193
tokioyoyo wrote: post #185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Counter data point — my surroundings use ChatGPT basically for anything and say it’s good enough.

Same here, people use it like google for searching answers. It‘s a shortcut for them to not have to screen results and reason about them.

This is precisely the problem: users still need to screen and reason about results of LLMs. I am not sure what is generating this implied permission structure, but it does seem to exist.

(I don't mean to imply that parent doesn't know this, it just seems worth saying explicitly)

Re: Bad Actors Are Grooming LLMs to Produce Falsehoods

#214

Post by grishka »

suspended_state wrote: post #105
grishka wrote: post #86

Earlier 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.

In the early web, there already were forums. There were chats. There were news websites. There were online stores. There were company websites with useful information. Many of these were there pretty much from the beginning. In the 90s, no one questioned the utility of the internet. Some people were just too lazy to learn how to use a computer or couldn't afford one.

LLMs in their current form have existed since what, 2021? That's 4 years already. They have hundreds of millions of active users. The only improvements we've seen so far were very much iterative ones — more of the same. Larger contexts, thinking tokens, multimodality, all that stuff. But the core concept is still the same, a very computationally expensive, very large neural network that predicts the next token of a text given a sequence of tokens. How much more time do we have to give this technology before we could judge it?

Re: Bad Actors Are Grooming LLMs to Produce Falsehoods

#215

Post by filoeleven »

_Algernon_ wrote: post #136
imiric wrote: post #62

Earlier 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…

We got the boring version of the cyberpunk future. No cool body mods, neon city scapes and space travel. Just megacorps manipulating the masses to their benefit.

The cool body mods are coming!

The work at the Levin Lab ( https://drmichaellevin.org/ ) is making great progress in the basic science that supports this. They can make two-headed planaria, regenerate frog limbs, cure cancer in tadpoles; all via bioelectric communication with cellular networks. No gene editing.

Levin believes this stuff will be very available to humans within the next 10 years, and has talked about how widespread body-modding is something we're going to have to wrestle with societally. He is of course very close to the work, but his cautious nature and the lab's astounding results give that 10-year prediction some weight. From his blog:

> We were all born into physical and mental limitations that were set at arbitrary levels by chance and genetics. Even those who have “perfect” standard human health and capabilities are limited by anatomical decisions that were not made with anyone’s well-being or fulfillment in mind. I consider it to be a core right of sentient beings to (if they wish) move beyond the involuntary vagaries of their birth and alter their form and function in whatever way suits their personal goals and potential.- Copied from https://thoughtforms.life/faqs-from-my-academic-work/

Re: Bad Actors Are Grooming LLMs to Produce Falsehoods

#216

Post by Lu2025 »

gdbsjjdn wrote: post #191
autoexec wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

I work in Customer Success so I have to screenshare with a decent number of engineers working for customers - startups and BigCos. The number of them who just blindly put shit into an AI prompt is incredible. I don't know if they were better engineers before LLMs? But I just watch them blindly pass flags that don't exist to CLIs and then throw their hands up. I can't imagine it's faster than a (non-LLM) Google search…

> An underrated concern (IMO) is the impact of COVID on cognition

Car accidents came down from the Covid uptick but only slightly. Aviation... ugh. And there is some evidence it accelerates Altzheimer's and other dementias. We are so screwed.

Re: Bad Actors Are Grooming LLMs to Produce Falsehoods

#217

Post by Lu2025 »

tokioyoyo wrote: post #185
autoexec wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

Counter data point — my surroundings use ChatGPT basically for anything and say it’s good enough.

> say it’s good enough

How do they know?

Re: Bad Actors Are Grooming LLMs to Produce Falsehoods

#218

Post by Lu2025 »

_Algernon_ wrote: post #136
imiric wrote: post #62

Earlier 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…

We got the boring version of the cyberpunk future. No cool body mods, neon city scapes and space travel. Just megacorps manipulating the masses to their benefit.

Oh well, at least the futuristic sunglasses are back in fashion.

Re: Bad Actors Are Grooming LLMs to Produce Falsehoods

#219

Post by Lu2025 »

anal_reactor wrote: post #77
dns_snek wrote: post #9

If 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.

Nah. It's just they are upselling us AI so aggressively it doesn't pass the sniff test anymore.

Re: Bad Actors Are Grooming LLMs to Produce Falsehoods

#220

Post by cyanydeez »

dns_snek wrote: post #9

If 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 you use the USA Republicans as a benchmark and fox news as the bad actors, there's perpetual faith that facts wont matter. Just keep confirming biases and foreshadow upcoming pivots to choose your own delusions.
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