Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Stop developing this technology

github.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

61–70 of 410 posts

Re: Stop developing this technology

#61

Post by jolmg »

prox wrote: post #20
jakelazaroff wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can we agree that “someone would have done this anyway” is a poor justification for one’s actions? That’s what you say when you 1) recognize that you did a bad thing, but 2) don’t want to be blamed for it.

It’s simply that it’s a kids/teen level argument. “But they did it too!” Not a lot of thought went into it, is what it usually tells me.

The argument wasn't "Doing something bad is fine because others are", it's "You're trying to stop a bad thing happening by stopping some people upstream from doing something that's perfectly fine. That's going to be ineffective."

But you're right about me not putting a lot of thought. I didn't think this would need more arguing than that.

I still believe that tech is fundamentally neutral, and as such so is its development. Even if a developer intends to give it bad use, the use and development are separate questions.

Re: Stop developing this technology

#62

Post by candiodari »

pfortuny wrote: post #14
jolmg wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"must" is probably the wrong word, but if they don't develop it, someone else will. At most, it would be delayed, and I'm not sure there's much difference in that.

Right. Tell that to Einstein, who just before Hiroshima realized it was not such a good argument. That is a nice piece of history. Ethics is important. And one consequence is: I may die but at least it was not because I made it possible.

While Einstein regretted working on nuclear weapons, the work they did there is equally responsible for the many lives saved by nuclear power, which he also appreciated. Also, it was the first 20% of the work towards nuclear fusion.

Technology is not evil or good.

Even this technology could be great. Jacky Chan, for example, is not going to make any more movies. But I want more of those movies. This very technology would allow that.

Re: Stop developing this technology

#63

Post by YurgenJurgensen »

caporaltito wrote: post #51

This reminds of the whole crowd of artists calling for a ban of AI generated art because "it's stealing". The change will happen, whether you want it or not. So those guys'd better raise the prices for their unique, by-hand manufactured, hard worked pieces of work and leave the low-quality, generic and industrially generated ones to AI. Embrace the change, as they say.

Do you carry a gas mask with you wherever you go? Mustard gas is over a hundred years old, and change will happen, whether you want it or not, so you should be able to just go down to the supermarket and buy it. I'm personally very annoyed by random mustard gas attacks, but there's just no mechanism in society for preventing them.

Re: Stop developing this technology

#64

Post by qthrowayq0909 »

atemerev wrote: post #38
qthrowayq0909 wrote: post #13

Tangent, but I think things like that will spell the end of remote working and remote interviewing.

Why do you even need to look at someone's face for remote working? Most of communications are text-based and asynchronous.

because HR-wise a company needs to be sure it is working with whom it thinks it is working.

See that under the prism of rising interview scams.

Re: Stop developing this technology

#65

Post by yipbub »

bigDinosaur wrote: post #39
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…

'Technology is neutral' is simply a banal observation that technology is only ever used by humans who can decide what to do with it. It's not saying that a new technology doesn't enable new and terrible human choices, simply that those choices rest with the people, not the technology itself. Knives seem like the perfect example, really. We do leave them lying around in our drawers, usually under zero real security ag…

Yeah, my argument with the knives was pretty weak and I was trying to make the point you make in your last paragraph. I think I meant to type "lying around children". I should've said bombs.

Re: Stop developing this technology

#66

Post by kefka_p »

praash wrote: post #59
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…

I think some socially positive use cases could be: - Representing assistive robots/software with friendly human faces - Reconstructing the likeness of people with permanent facial injuries when connecting with family Other, questionably "legitimate", commercial uses are already in production: - auto-generated corporate training videos - "Personalized" advertising I'm hating it already.

#2 sounds really interesting! I’m not sure of the psychological ramifications, but I can’t imagine they’d be different than any other sort of prosthesis save for an inability to actually touch it.

I could see it being used in AR to conceal identity to facilitate more equitable medical outcomes, I suppose.

Thank you again for the input! I was honestly at a loss for positive applications outside of financial gain.

I haven’t seen any ads driven by deepfake, or at least I don’t think I have. That advertising bit does sound rather obnoxious though!

Re: Stop developing this technology

#67

Post by sneak »

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.

Nothing about producing or consuming deepfakes suggests bad faith.

You might not like the art, but deepfakes are not harmful.

Re: Stop developing this technology

#68

Post by sneak »

MattRix wrote: post #16
jolmg wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can we agree that it's fundamentally not a bad thing to develop a technology? If you were a legislator, how would you like to criminalize the development of technology? You know, the most difficult part of this tech is probably the facial tracking, which is probably also used for the animation of 3d avatars. The jump is probably not huge.

Many things can be unethical/immoral without being illegal, and of course there are some technologies that are fundamentally bad.

What technologies are fundamentally bad? I don't know of any outside of perhaps torture devices.

Re: Stop developing this technology

#69

Post by sneak »

mihaic wrote: post #34

HN seems to actively work on a cognitive dissonance: on the one hand producing inspirational stories of entrepreneurs changing the world and on the other abandoning all hope that technology/market forces can be controlled in any way. I'm thinking now this is to justify away the collective guilt of bringing into the mainstream harmful products. It seems to come from the same origins as "crypto can't be regulated", "go…

"crypto can't be [effectively] regulated" is more observable fact than ideology.

Re: Stop developing this technology

#70

Post by sneak »

ano88888 wrote: post #7
dusted wrote: post #6

I think it's a good thing. Not that it's being used for evil things, but because it should help make it obvious that you can't trust anything you see on a screen. Using fake media to trick people into believing anything used to be a privileged reserved for nation states and the ultra rich. Now that _ANYONE_ and their cat can do it, it should follow that nobody can believe anything that's on a screen anymore (this com…

Right. When that chaos happen, just remember that you will not be safe from it

Fake information being promoted does not inherently spread chaos.

The church has been around for years and despite the millennia of lies we are all still here and thriving and improving.

Bullshit spreads faster, but truth wins out over centuries because it doesn't go away when you stop looking at it.

Post reply on HN