Today, I posted the following on Mastodon:
Back in 2022/23, as people were realizing that the Butlerian Jihad had already started without them knowing about it, they started looking back and wondered: When did we start “engaging” with bots? Was it guestbooks on the Old Web? Spammers on Wiki? Was it fake accounts on OK Cupid? Was it fake likes or fake haters on Twitter? Everybody had their own doubts. Some had flirted with bots without knowing. Some had argued with bots without knowing. As their bot defence picked up, they started realizing how hard it had become to pass the Turing test: they wrote emails that got junked, the art they tried to sell got classified as AI generated, they got insulted as bots at their customer service jobs. I think that must have been the point when we realised that it was hard to be people and that we might have to start teaching the kids what it meant to be human.
I had recently wondered aloud whether the artists using the hashtag #AYearForArt were in fact mostly non-human actors:
To me, it looks like a bot network spamming the world. A paragraph of stuff that could be AI generated, links to sites where you can buy prints, a selection of hashtags, a picture. Always the same mesmerizing pattern. Am I AI paranoid or is this spam?
I got back a handful or replies:
I feel weird. I’m no longer concerned about the art being generated by artificial intelligence, I’m concerned that the accounts selling the art might be artificial intelligence, too.
The use of capitalisation, the invitations to join, a bit of that customer service language (”Thank for sharing your concerns.”), posting their art every 1–3 days, boosting each other… It really does get harder day by day to pass as a human.
Day by day, however, the machines are gaining ground upon us; day by day we are becoming more subservient to them; more men are daily bound down as slaves to tend them, more men are daily devoting the energies of their whole lives to the development of mechanical life. The upshot is simply a question of time, but that the time will come when the machines will hold the real supremacy over the world and its inhabitants is what no person of a truly philosophic mind can for a moment question. – Darwin among the Machines, by Samuel Butler, 1863-06-13, as cited in Wikipedia
Darwin among the Machines, by Samuel Butler, 1863-06-13, as cited in Wikipedia
#AI #Butlerian Jihad #Philosophy
(Please contact me if you want to remove your comment.)
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There’s a post by Rob Horning from december that has stayed with me a lot:
The obvious answer — one that ChatGPT might even offer — is that feeds have always already been filled with algorithmically produced content, and generative models’ content just reflects a slightly different hybrid of human and machine than the one made up of humans and recommendation algorithms. The feed has always been a kind of chatbot responding to the prompts of our past interaction data. That is to say, feeds can be understood as AI-generated works, and vice versa: The output of models is always implicitly a kind of endless feed.
https://robhorning.substack.com/p/conversation-fear
The ppl who are most threatened by the generative models are so because they themselves have built themselves into doing the thing that the models do; their whole conception of “art” revolves around producing material to exist in social media feeds and monetizing it.
– adamwb 2023-02-10 20:15 UTC
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If the AI is used to sort a feed that we are unable to sort, then the argument is an interesting one.
I think the main counter to that would be that feeds have some parameters that are under our control, at least if you are talking about RSS or the fediverse.
More generally speaking, though, the point made doesn’t address the fundamental power imbalance. When I’m black and the software doesn’t handle my skin colour well, I can’t fix it because the resources needed to train it are horrendous. Monopolies are baked in.
Furthermore, I am lamenting the fact that we have poor interpersonal relationships and can’t tell bots from people and that we sometimes feel betrayed by having interactions with bots when we thought they are people. This is not addressed either.
And finally, the idea that I have to increasingly spend energy on trying to differentiate spam and other malicious text and pictures and videos from human made media is also not addressed.
– Alex 2023-02-10 23:13 UTC
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The despair that Generative AI projects produce in nearly all people involved in creative work is the point. It’s the same despair Weizenbaum felt. It’s the same despair that nihilists feel and want to impose on the rest of us. That despair is, to many of the thinkers who examined the rise of fascism during World War II, part of what the historian Fritz Stern called “the politics of cultural despair.” Despair is closely tied to loneliness, which as both artist Annie Dorsen and technology writer LM Sacasas have noted seems to result from dealing with Generative AI projects, and is *the* emotion the great philosopher Hannah Arendt tied to the rise of totalitarianism. – ChatGPT Should Not Exist (Medium)
ChatGPT Should Not Exist (Medium)
– Alex 2023-02-11 20:40 UTC
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Bruce Schneier:
When we humans do these things, we call it lobbying. Successful agents in this sphere pair precision message writing with smart targeting strategies. Right now, the only thing stopping a ChatGPT-equipped lobbyist from executing something resembling a rhetorical drone warfare campaign is a lack of precision targeting. AI could provide techniques for that as well. – AI and Political Lobbying
At the end, he adds this quote:
We used autoregressive large language models (LLMs, the same type of model behind the now wildly popular ChatGPT) to systematically conduct the following steps. (The full code is available at this GitHub link: https://github.com/JohnNay/llm-lobbyist.)
Summarize official U.S. Congressional bill summaries that are too long to fit into the context window of the LLM so the LLM can conduct steps 2 and 3.Using either the original official bill summary (if it was not too long), or the summarized version:If the bill is deemed relevant to the company by the LLM, draft a letter to the sponsor of the bill arguing for changes to the proposed legislation.
https://github.com/JohnNay/llm-lobbyist
This is the group where the above quote is from:
Part of the law-making process currently – like it or not – involves human lobbying. ChatGPT and Large Language Models more generally have demonstrated the rapidly advancing capabilities of AI. A novel concern is that, with these additional advancements in AI and further deployments of AI systems (even without the agents having instrumental power-seeking goals per se) influencing law through lobbying may be the first crack in AI influence on public policy. – Large Language Models as Lobbyists
Large Language Models as Lobbyists
The paper:
We demonstrate a proof-of-concept of a large language model conducting corporate lobbying related activities. An autoregressive large language model (OpenAI’s text-davinci-003) determines if proposed U.S. Congressional bills are relevant to specific public companies and provides explanations and confidence levels. For the bills the model deems as relevant, the model drafts a letter to the sponsor of the bill in an attempt to persuade the congressperson to make changes to the proposed legislation. – Large Language Models as Corporate Lobbyists
Large Language Models as Corporate Lobbyists
– Alex 2023-02-15 14:03 UTC
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The Internet is mostly bots. This is from 2018.
Studies generally suggest that, year after year, less than 60 percent of web traffic is human; some years, according to some researchers, a healthy majority of it is bot. … The internet has always played host in its dark corners to schools of catfish and embassies of Nigerian princes, but that darkness now pervades its every aspect: Everything that once seemed definitively and unquestionably real now seems slightly fake; everything that once seemed slightly fake now has the power and presence of the real. – How Much of the Internet Is Fake? Turns Out, a Lot of It, Actually.
How Much of the Internet Is Fake? Turns Out, a Lot of It, Actually.
– Alex 2023-02-21 17:45 UTC