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

GPT-2: Too Dangerous To Release (2019)

naokishibuya.github.io

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

61–70 of 139 posts

Re: GPT-2: Too Dangerous To Release (2019)

#61

Post by boelboel »

smith7018 wrote: post #47
boelboel wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A lot of low cost content generation would've come regardless with something like 50% of the developing world getting access to mobile internet between 2018-2026 and social media incentivizing certain types of content (monetizing). But AI certainly didn't help.

Cheap labor has always been a thing; a random country getting more access to the internet doesn't change that. What's truly changed is velocity, quality, and quantity. Framing the pure firehose of slop targeting scientific research, used for nefarious political purposes, flooding social media, scamming people, and much more as something that "would've come regardless" without LLMs is disingenuous imo

You're right, I should've been more accurate and said a significant portion of the enshitification of the internet would've happened regardless. The effects on education is probably a lot worse.

I shouldn't have targeted the developing world as much as the incentives made by social media platforms needing to get growth in other ways than usercount.

Re: GPT-2: Too Dangerous To Release (2019)

#62

Post by ffsm8 »

jrflo wrote: post #40

It's really interesting how back then no one was considering these tools for coding at all. Today, the hype around Mythos is mostly around security vulnerabilities, while in the original GPT 2 post they don't mention coding once. The "danger" was probably spam content and mis-information.

The agentic loop wasn't really established back then either, as tool calling came much much later... So yeah, not just probably - rather most definitely.

Re: GPT-2: Too Dangerous To Release (2019)

#63

Post by legitster »

stanmancan wrote: post #48
nonethewiser wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What is the astronomical social damage that this has caused? I am having so much trouble relating to and even understanding what the anti-AI crowd's position is. It looks like a caricature to me.

A large portion of the content on the internet is now generated by AI. You can and do have full conversations with bots and not know. I want to interact with humans not LLMs. There’s no way to combat it. An army of bots can post a specific rhetoric and it can and does sway people’s opinions. The new version of Digg was shut down because they couldn’t find a way to combat AI. They were at least trying to, other platfo…

The sloppification of the internet began before AI. Google was SEOing the open internet to death, Reddit had fully baked in a hivemind, and social media became dominated by professional influencers.

AI is accelerating but also perhaps backfilling in what was already being lost.

Re: GPT-2: Too Dangerous To Release (2019)

#64

Post by Qhemlomo »

stanmancan wrote: post #50
Qhemlomo wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My partner wrote an android app which was doing what she wanted to do. She did this experiment 5 month ago and she did this in one day. My wife has 0 knowledge how any of this works. That was shocking to see. Progress is not stoping and Fable proves that.

You can scaffold out a simple app pretty easily. Anything large or complex things break down. If you don’t know what you’re doing you end up leaking secrets like the dozens of examples we’ve seen so far.

You know what the problem is in software engineering? A LOT of people have no clue what good software engineering is.

I was working in a company before which used md5 in 2015! Databases on the internet with a 5 character password. No tests.

A person i know would have broken the whole production DB if i wouldn't have stoped the PR.

Another ex-collegue thought its okay to 'encrypt' with a basic shift cyper creditcard data.

I don't think any of these companies care that much

Re: GPT-2: Too Dangerous To Release (2019)

#65

Post by _aavaa_ »

PhunkyPhil wrote: post #55
nonethewiser wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What is the astronomical social damage that this has caused? I am having so much trouble relating to and even understanding what the anti-AI crowd's position is. It looks like a caricature to me.

School is almost a joke now. The fraction of students who have a propensity to cheat now has increased, and the accuracy of the cheated material is so good teachers/professors can't or don't have the resources to properly address it.

This is not a great example depending on how you frame this.

The solution to the cheating is, as has always been, to have tests conducted in person, on paper without digital technology, under strict supervision.

Re: GPT-2: Too Dangerous To Release (2019)

#67

Post by juleiie »

Qhemlomo wrote: post #21
minimaxir wrote: post #8

Back in 2019, it was more fair to have caution around the larger GPT-2 models since robust text generation (by 2019 standards) was a complete unknown. For something like Mythos in 2026, where now the social implications of better LLMs are more understood, it's more fair to call it (EDIT: specifically, the declaration of its danger) a marketing gimmick.

How is this a gimmick? It changes my whole profession on a level i couldn't even imagine how we would 'solve' software engineering.

For starters it makes you able to bypass having to go on Reddit to find incomplete trace of solution to some niche problem and acts as a sophisticated (but sometimes wrong) search engine. This already is worth every penny and improved my mental health immensely.

Re: GPT-2: Too Dangerous To Release (2019)

#68

Post by whstl »

boelboel wrote: post #28
cjjfjjfjf wrote: post #6

In hindsight, they were entirely correct. The social damage caused by low cost content generation that’s hard to distinguish from human authorship is astronomical. You don’t need to entertain the more ridiculous doomsday scenarios to wish that this technology had never been created.

A lot of low cost content generation would've come regardless with something like 50% of the developing world getting access to mobile internet between 2018-2026 and social media incentivizing certain types of content (monetizing). But AI certainly didn't help.

Yep. And there were previews of that 10+ years ago already with content farms and SEO-spam.

Re: GPT-2: Too Dangerous To Release (2019)

#69

Post by nonethewiser »

FabCH wrote: post #46
nonethewiser wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What is the astronomical social damage that this has caused? I am having so much trouble relating to and even understanding what the anti-AI crowd's position is. It looks like a caricature to me.

The president of the United States tweeted an AI generated image of himself as Jesus Christ descending from the sky and saving a sick person. I feel like that is a good example. Now multiply that by hundreds of millions of AI generated propaganda images across the world. And that’s even without touching the effect of fake videos on democracy or Elons pedo-bot that generates CSAM on demand of specific people…

> The president of the United States tweeted an AI generated image of himself as Jesus Christ descending from the sky and saving a sick person.

Does that say anything about AI or everything about Donald Trump?

Re: GPT-2: Too Dangerous To Release (2019)

#70

Post by nonethewiser »

stanmancan wrote: post #48
nonethewiser wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What is the astronomical social damage that this has caused? I am having so much trouble relating to and even understanding what the anti-AI crowd's position is. It looks like a caricature to me.

A large portion of the content on the internet is now generated by AI. You can and do have full conversations with bots and not know. I want to interact with humans not LLMs. There’s no way to combat it. An army of bots can post a specific rhetoric and it can and does sway people’s opinions. The new version of Digg was shut down because they couldn’t find a way to combat AI. They were at least trying to, other platfo…

But what is the social damage? Can you quantify the damage, even roughly?
Post reply on HN