Stop developing this technology • Hacker News Board

Re: Stop developing this technology

#371

Post by EamonnMR » Fri, Feb 03, 2023, 12:03 AM UTC

lucumo wrote: post #92

There's a book in Dutch literature, The Assault by Harry Mulisch. It's a great read if you're interested in multi-faceted morality. It deals with guilt and responsibility when there's a chain of things that need to happen for a bad outcome. During WWII the protagonist's parents are shot by Germans after a body of a collaborator was found in front of their house. The parents were arguing with the soldiers about someth…

I don't think this is a good way to characterize this situation. In this situation someone is saying, look, these are the consequences of your actions, and they are washing their hands of the consequences in advance, knowing full well what they are. This isn't a series of disconnected accidents leading to an outcome.

A better analogy might be a guy who likes to hand out free bolt cutters on the street.

Re: Stop developing this technology

#372

Post by xg15 » Fri, Feb 03, 2023, 12:07 AM UTC

lucumo wrote: post #92

There's a book in Dutch literature, The Assault by Harry Mulisch. It's a great read if you're interested in multi-faceted morality. It deals with guilt and responsibility when there's a chain of things that need to happen for a bad outcome. During WWII the protagonist's parents are shot by Germans after a body of a collaborator was found in front of their house. The parents were arguing with the soldiers about someth…

That's a very convenient kind of morals for the people who invested billions of dollars into developing this tech, fully aware what it could be used for. (And OpenAI was aware, it's their entire justification why they don't publish the models)

Re: Stop developing this technology

#373

Post by mihaic » Fri, Feb 03, 2023, 12:57 AM UTC

tomjen3 wrote: post #348

mihaic wrote: post #272

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agree, I've come to believe that social ethics is something that needs to be indoctrinated from an early age, otherwise it can't naturally be developed in many people.

If you need to indoctrinate somebody with a certain belief from an early age, then your belief must be so poor that it cannot be used to convince adults, so how can such an action be justified?

Do you assume most adults are rational in their decision-making process and are convinced by arguments? I'm mostly seeing the opposite in practice, and that indoctrination seems merely necessary to balance things out.

Re: Stop developing this technology

#374

Post by netsharc » Fri, Feb 03, 2023, 1:07 AM UTC

cwillu wrote: post #18

jakelazaroff wrote: post #3

Regardless of what I think about this technology in particular, I want to respond to this line from the second comment: [1] > on the contrary, it must be developed. No, it mustn’t. There’s not a gun to your head, forcing you to do this. You want to develop this technology. That’s why it’s happening. Technology isn’t inevitable. It’s a choice we make. And we can go in circles about whether it’s good or bad, but at lea…

From the main page: “Communication groups [...] • mrdeepfakes - the biggest NSFW English deepfake community”, which strains my assumption of good faith debate regarding their ethics.

TBH I got curious. Clicked on one celeb, oh man, I've seen 90's Photoshop cut and paste the face onto a different body better than those "deepfakes"...

Re: Stop developing this technology

#375

Post by qwerty456127 » Fri, Feb 03, 2023, 1:23 AM UTC

trashtester wrote: post #258

qwerty456127 wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Why should people believe anything you say on this topic? They shouldn't. I would just be glad if they would analyse my oppinion and try to understand what do I mean. Whenever I mention a fact they should check it if they consider it important. > How can they know you're not a bot or a psy-ops troll working for Xi or Putin with the mission to undermine the very fabric of Democratic societies? I am a psy-ops troll w…

> I am a psy-ops troll working for myself, So you say. How can I know you're not lying even there? > Only 5 different regular polyhedra forms can exist in euclidean 3D space - this is another fact. Most people are no more able to verify this statement than statements about 11-dimensional string theory. If you have their trust, they will belive you, otherwise, not. Regardless of whether it's true. This goes all the wa…

> How can I know you're not lying even there?

You never know. People mostly just believe what and whom they feel like believing. People having an idea of reasonable credibility are extremely rare. Simply adjusting your voice is enough to make a non-expert to believe or disbelieve you and more.

Re: Stop developing this technology

#376

Post by qwerty456127 » Fri, Feb 03, 2023, 2:15 AM UTC

trashtester wrote: post #252

duckmysick wrote: post #213

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> We may need to find a way back to a world where there is one main shared narrative that we can all more or less trust. Where the custodians of the institutions that provide the narrative understand the need to maintain the trust and the risks involved in undermining the trust for personal gain, and where there are checks and balances that removes bad actors from such positions. When was such time in history? I'm tr…

> Misinformation has spread in the past too, albeit slowly. I would argue that almost all information is "wrong" in the strict sense. Everyone has a ceiling for how detailed a model of reality they need (including moral and ethical reality). And even those weith the highest ceiling (most exact model) are simplifying in ways that others can see as "wrong". "The earth is flat", "Earth is spherical" and "Earth is an ell…

> Now, if people are making up stories already. How will that when anyone can create a video that appears to show that the opponent's champion is doing exactly what the worst conspiracy theories claim

I see. Some people can't help but believe what their eyes see and what their minds think. Instead of considering that just a candidate for a working hypothesis. We must pity them.

Re: Stop developing this technology

#377

Post by [deleted] » Fri, Feb 03, 2023, 2:25 AM UTC

kefka_p wrote: post #25

Can anybody demonstrate a legitimate use of deepfake software? Has it ever been used to facilitate a socially positive or desirable outcome? While I recognize my experiences are far from definitive, I hazard most would be hard pressed to name anything positive that came out of deepfake technology. edit: I’ll take your knee-jerk DV, and any others, as an admission of an inability to speak to positive utility of this t…

[deleted]

Re: Stop developing this technology

#378

Post by kazinator » Fri, Feb 03, 2023, 2:34 AM UTC

kefka_p wrote: post #25

Can anybody demonstrate a legitimate use of deepfake software? Has it ever been used to facilitate a socially positive or desirable outcome? While I recognize my experiences are far from definitive, I hazard most would be hard pressed to name anything positive that came out of deepfake technology. edit: I’ll take your knee-jerk DV, and any others, as an admission of an inability to speak to positive utility of this t…

The social good of deepfake technology will be the destruction of the unwarranted power which has been given to image, and which the Internet has amplified.

Think about it: people choose to trust or not trust based on a face. When deepfaking becomes a tool easily available to every average joe, appearance will lose some of its power. People will learn to lose their irrational trust in face.

Re: Stop developing this technology

#379

Post by davidivadavid » Fri, Feb 03, 2023, 4:20 AM UTC

epistemer wrote: post #277

yipbub wrote: post #11

I'm convinced that this idea that technology is completely neutral is wrong. It is not neutral in the face of human psychology. The human species is a different animal that the human individual, and it is powerful, but does not make truly conscious decisions. Once you let the genie out of the bottle, a wish will be made. A technology might not be inherently bad, but neither are knives, and we don't leave those lying…

The idea technology is completely neutral is obviously stupid and obviously wrong. Neil Postman has two amazing books on this subject. It is not even that technology is good or bad, any technology will have good and bad aspects but the main issue is that we have surrendered culture and agency to technology as a society. There is no going back or fix now. The fix for all was a culture that devalues bad uses of technol…

The purported neutrality of technology is an old saw that people who are practitioners of technology ought to discard. The fact they haven't shows how terrible a job we're doing educating them.

Technology is not neutral and never will be because the nature of technology is to be a means to an end, and as such, to be inseparable from its end.

Technologies enable certain future outcomes.

That some of those outcomes are deemed "good" or "bad" just depends on whether they're compatible with the ends that were pursued initially and the worldview that supports them.

Some technologies have unexpected outcomes, but that doesn't make those outcomes independent of those technologies, either.

Re: Stop developing this technology

#380

Post by davidivadavid » Fri, Feb 03, 2023, 4:27 AM UTC

college_physics wrote: post #95

Its hard to take seriously the argument that "tech is neutral" when it concerns software. One could maybe make this argument for the hardware underneath (the chips and the cables). They are called after all "general purpose computing" devices and the packets moving around are general purpose streams of bits as well [0]. But software is not "tech". It is the explicit expression and projection of cultural objectives an…

> But software is not "tech". It is the explicit expression and projection of cultural objectives and values onto a particular type of tech. You can take the exact precise hardware we have today and reprogram a million different worlds on it, some better, some worse.

But all of them with computing as a cultural artifact of some kind — and certainly not a "neutral" one. I've basically come to think of the idea of "general purpose computing" as basically a trojan horse for the naive "tech is neutral" POV. "Making things computable faster" is not a "neutral" change of the universe, it's a step in a specific direction, it defines the boundaries of a particular future cone at the exception of many others.