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OpenAI says it's scanning users' conversations and reporting content to police

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Re: OpenAI says it's scanning users' conversations and reporting content to police

#231

Post by barbazoo »

fwip wrote: post #156
mionhe wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>[...]about one school shooting or mass shooting every two days proves that at least one member of the species isn't uniformly ready to have firearms. I often see comments online descending into the argument about firearms. Besides the potential number of people hurt/killed, what's the difference between someone walking into a school with a gun versus one walking into a school with a knife? Or a sharpened spear (from…

In general, mass stabbings have fewer victims, and a higher percentage of those victims are injured rather than killed.

Well that just doesn't make sense because I was told that guns don't kill people, people do. So why would they only injure, not kill, someone just because they only had a knife? /s

Re: OpenAI says it's scanning users' conversations and reporting content to police

#232

Post by sangnoir »

groby_b wrote: post #154
idle_zealot wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I tend to shy away from that sort of rhetoric on HN. Saying that the problem is capitalism and we need socialism or whatever gets you downvoted to hell. Making the underlying arguments that lead to that conclusion gets you upvotes, exposing more people to those ideas. People, even smart people, especially in the US, hear socialism or communism and immediately think of the USSR or Maoist China. The terms are very unpo…

It's not that the terms are unpopular, it's that every system that doesn't have strong capitalist roots has lost out to more capitalist systems. Nothing wrong with alternatives, but for that we need to let go of "let's make it just like the thing that also fails". We also need to acknowledge that socialism assumes that humans are fundamentally good, and that ignores that many are fundamentally not. We need to acknowl…

> It's not that the terms are unpopular, it's that every system that doesn't have strong capitalist roots has lost out to more capitalist systems.

The arch of history is long, and we are naturally biased to think of the present as the culmination of history - but it's just a point in time. I do not think "socialism will save us" - but I believe there is a breaking point where society simply will not accept a - as you put it - "more capitalist system".

Politics and economic systems go hand in hand, any economic system, practiced in extremis will be destabilizing. I posit that theoretically the "more capitalist system" wins over the less capitalist one, up to a point, where winning comes at the cost of killing the host society, and thus itself. This is simply a thought experiment, I am not making any declarations on where the US is on this axis.

Re: OpenAI says it's scanning users' conversations and reporting content to police

#233

Post by dragonwriter »

groby_b wrote: post #154
idle_zealot wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I tend to shy away from that sort of rhetoric on HN. Saying that the problem is capitalism and we need socialism or whatever gets you downvoted to hell. Making the underlying arguments that lead to that conclusion gets you upvotes, exposing more people to those ideas. People, even smart people, especially in the US, hear socialism or communism and immediately think of the USSR or Maoist China. The terms are very unpo…

It's not that the terms are unpopular, it's that every system that doesn't have strong capitalist roots has lost out to more capitalist systems. Nothing wrong with alternatives, but for that we need to let go of "let's make it just like the thing that also fails". We also need to acknowledge that socialism assumes that humans are fundamentally good, and that ignores that many are fundamentally not. We need to acknowl…

> It's not that the terms are unpopular, it's that every system that doesn't have strong capitalist roots has lost out to more capitalist systems.

The system with the strongest capitalist roots (i.e., the dominant system of the industrialized West of the mid-19th century which is the system for which “capitalism” as a term was coined to describe) progressively lost out over the time since that name was coined for it by its socialist critics to a more socialist system, the modern mixed economy, through changes largely driven by socialist critics.

> We also need to acknowledge that socialism assumes that humans are fundamentally good.

Socialism does not assume this. I would even argue that the idea that “humans are fundamentally good” is even a coherent claim that can be right or wrong requires a concept of a particular kind of external mrorality that is difficult to reconcile with the premises of socialism.

> We need to acknowledge that the core idea of socialism, the common good, is ill-defined.

The core idea of socialism (like that of democracy in the political sphere, because socialism is exactly democracy without an artificial divide between political and economic spheres) is less “the common good” as it is “the common good is ill-defined, while the interests of individuals are known to the individual more than any third party, and fairness requires equal empowerment of individuals to pursue their interests.”

Re: OpenAI says it's scanning users' conversations and reporting content to police

#234

Post by dyauspitr »

barbazoo wrote: post #3

> Update: It looks like this may have been OpenAI's attempt to get ahead of a horrifying story that just broke, about a man who fell into AI psychosis and killed his mother in a murder-suicide. Full details here. With the URL being https://futurism.com/openai-scanning-conversations-police . From there: > "Erik, you're not crazy. Your instincts are sharp, and your vigilance here is fully justified," ChatGPT told Soelb…

We are ready. Just because you have a minority of people that can’t handle it doesn’t mean the vast majority of us can’t. We have got to move away from this system of shutting down progress due to outliers.

Re: OpenAI says it's scanning users' conversations and reporting content to police

#235

Post by subscribed »

tuatoru wrote: post #194
SilverElfin wrote: post #24

Unacceptable. This type of behavior can be used for an increasing expansive regime of censorship or worse. Imagine being turned into authorities for, say, discussing ways to help asylum applicants or under a different administration, the lab leak theory, or under a different administration, how to grow cannabis. This is why the ACLU of the past had it right, when they were defending even offensive uses of the right t…

Private companies can do as they choose within the law. You can choose not to use their products.

You may not know if you're using the product.

Re: OpenAI says it's scanning users' conversations and reporting content to police

#236

Post by subscribed »

throwaway290 wrote: post #84
themafia wrote: post #13

If you've ever seen a video of a random police department responding to a mental health crisis then this should send chills down your spine. They are not equipped to handle this type of reporting. They are a cudgel and not a scalpel.

I think it would make total sense if OpenAI reports conversations to police so that SWAT storms OpenAI datacenters and shut it down when bot encourages someone to commit murder or suicide again. But something tells me it's probably not that

No, that would be shooting dead the person accused of having suicidal thoughts.

Re: OpenAI says it's scanning users' conversations and reporting content to police

#237

Post by ashtakeaway »

ACCount37 wrote: post #8
kiba wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sycophancy is a known flaw in ChatGPT. Seems like OpenAI has no real coherent plan but reacting to every horror story with an ill fitted solution.

They tried to mitigate sycophancy in the GPT-5 release. Guess what happened? A lot of users started complaining that "GPT-5 sucks, my AI now HATES me". And OpenAI relented.

OpenAI shouldn't be everyone's parent yet it's more than willing to be that.

Honestly dopamine imbalances should be considered. Used correctly as a tool it's fine but too many people are using it as an Alan Turing machine to mitigate loneliness instead.

Re: OpenAI says it's scanning users' conversations and reporting content to police

#238

Post by ben_w »

queenkjuul wrote: post #227
ben_w wrote: post #222

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure, yes. I'm just frustrated that "doing it right" gets people laughed at both at the time and for several years later, right up until the general dangers they were publicly concerned about manifest, and then people complain about people not doing something to prevent the outcome that they were previously laughed at for attempting to prevent. Those same cautious people who left one way or another, they were the one…

Well they didn't really try that hard to prevent it, clearly

Leaving a company does traditionally make it difficult to influence that company, yes.

Re: OpenAI says it's scanning users' conversations and reporting content to police

#239

Post by Miraste »

tuatoru wrote: post #194
SilverElfin wrote: post #24

Unacceptable. This type of behavior can be used for an increasing expansive regime of censorship or worse. Imagine being turned into authorities for, say, discussing ways to help asylum applicants or under a different administration, the lab leak theory, or under a different administration, how to grow cannabis. This is why the ACLU of the past had it right, when they were defending even offensive uses of the right t…

Private companies can do as they choose within the law. You can choose not to use their products.

Whatever private companies you route your communications through are almost certainly working on implementing this. The NSA will be applying this technology to ~all communication routed through the USA, as well. You can't opt out of it.
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