AI Futures

[AriLea]

OK, this is definitely off topic, and could open some very troubling dialog.
A.I., yep lots of fear based talk out there on the subject. Much of it, I'm not worried about.

But in the relm of deep fakes, I'm more worried where it concerns attempts to tribalize people then weaponize them.

The con-men of the world have always wanted to leverage manipulation of the public through retoric and other media, for everything from ecconomic rip-offs to political control.
And we have had some recent scary things in the relm of 'tribalism' in American religieon and politics, I won't go into those particular specifics. You know all about it I would guess, or you should by now.

Suffice to say, it is now a big tool of foreign advesarial governments,, companies, individuals and cults (aka political parties), to use social media to inspire either control or chaos in the US (and world at large) for various nefarious effects.

But look at this quote;

By applying machine learning to neurophysiologic data, we could almost perfectly identify hit songs,” said Paul Zak, a professor at Claremont Graduate University and senior author of the study. “That the neural activity of 33 people can predict if millions of others listened to new songs is quite amazing. Nothing close to this accuracy has ever been shown before.

It is not a far reach to say various bad actors will use this tech to develop and test various content and methods to weaponize populations toward various goals. I guarentee Russia and China intelligence will look into it. As will the CIA.

I say, we better all get much better at sorting out truth from BS going forward. And it's not just information. It's emotional reaction formation and triggering. A long known trick; get them mad, then inspire them where to focus that emotion, and they will not be open to or even aware of any counter point.

The only counter point to AI learning is that it is backward looking, modeling on what was, and less so on what is possible next. It's not actually creative, it's reconstructive projection. Social reverse engineering if you will.

 

[Hog]

AI is not really what it says it is. Quite a big deception in my mind. the models are "trained" from various sources, whether social media, direct interactions, or scraping websites. Each of these sources contains bias and misinformation. As a result, the output will also contain bias and misinformation under the ironclad rule that "garbage in = garbage out". Once one attempts to "sort" the garbage, a built in bias occurs from the sorting. I have noticed this has been necessary to "train" with "sanitized" sources in an attempt to avoid the garbage, but we can clearly see what happens when the training is done based on direct interaction or social media. Remember the two AI models creating their own private language? Others have been shut down after the AI has gone "rogue" and turned into an "evil madman". The ability of AI to synthesize new ideas from existing ones is also its weakest point, as those ideas need to be "true" for the synthesis to be valid. And who determines truth? I see it as a marketing gimmick, no more advanced than my programming a PDP-8 educomp to spit out "good morning [students_name]" when a student logged in and fired up the teletype.

 

[AriLea]

Then I would say, for now it will at best be lousy for the purpose of controlling a social vista to a predetirmined goal. I'm maybe about 5 to 10 years early with my conjecture.

But as a tool to create chaos, it probably will be of immediate use. Like you say, if they feed the right stuff to it. And 'they' certainly will work at that.

It's already too easy to create chaos. We don't need it made more easy to do.

 

[Hog]

In the minds of many people, AI is seen as "infallible" and "authoritative", which is a big concern, to me anyway.

 

[AriLea]

So here's a sampler;

How to protect your family from scams amid rise of artificial intelligence
A cybersecurity expert spoke to ABC News about ways people can protect their families and themselves from the increasingly believable scams.

Basically, AI is used to write various materials or other media, including believable scams and deep fakes. It certainly spells better than I do.

 

[Hog]

People habitually put way too much information on social media, it's a gold mine for scammers. AI can only "impersonate" your voice or a family members if there is a recording of it on social media. The words don't matter as much as "tuning" the timbre to the same pitch and pace. So you (the scammer) records a message and then modifies it to match the subjects voice and shazam! ears are easily fooled!
I put NO personal info on the web, and that which I "have" to disclose is all fake. You can even use an app like "Blur", (now "Iron Vest") to provide temporary disposable email accounts and phone numbers. They even offer a "masked" credit card, which I have found quite useful over the years. Internet OpSec is not taken seriously by most people because they feel "I have nothing to hide", but they really do, they need to hide from scams and stalkers. They don't realize that until something happens, even then they fail to make the connection. Needless to say I don't own a smartphone, and never will. The price of convenience is far too high. Even my TV is dumb, technologically and what's on it. The object of privacy is not to "disappear", but to obfuscate. This targets the technology directly (I am looking at you AI). Lots of conflicting and wrong information spread over the web as to my person, and I make a habit of adding more every day. It drives the algorithms nuts. Many email addresses, changing IP and MAC addresses, Tor, VPN, even modifying my regular snail mail address and who is in the house. I find it amusing and enjoyable. Oh, and never post a picture of yourself of the web, or let anyone else do it, that's a serious mistake.

 

[AriLea]

Oh lordy, how much evil can 7.5 billion humans think of doing? Quite a lot apparently.
Logic should help each of us sort it out.
Socrates was dead on about the importance of reasoned logic. He was practically a Spoc about it.

Relentless questioning was the logic of Socrates. ...... Aristotle studied under Plato. According to the text, Plato is the founder of logic as an academic subject. According to the text, logic was founded in ancient India and then copied by the ancient Greeks. According to the text, Socrates is the founder of logic.

Socrates was a Greek philosopher from Athens who is credited as the founder of Western philosophy

But lesser known, he was also a medium in the broader sense of that.

Socrates' reliance on what the Greeks called his “daemonic sign”, an averting (ἀποτρεπτικός) inner voice that Socrates heard only when he was about to make a mistake. It was this sign that prevented Socrates from entering into politics.
....Socrates often mentions that he is guided by a daemon, a kind of divine spirit, oracle, or “sign,” that takes the form of an inner voice or non-vocal nudge. The guide never tells Socrates what to do. It only indicates when Socrates is not to do something.

Modern readers accepted that 'voice' as hearing your own conscience as verbalized thoughts. I think it was likely bigger than that.
Either way, we're going to need more conscientiousness going forward.

I got smacked by one of those nudges once. And it likely saved my life. So for me, I know it can be a resource.

Edited Followup: I didn't want to disturb the perfect post #9 below. So I will say it here. Dune was an exquisitly complex and deep series in the books.
In the movies? Not as much. Same said for the Hobbit /&/ Two Towers. But I liked both the books and movies.

 

[dbacksfan81]

AI faked kidnapping of 15 year old in Arizona

CNN —
Jennifer DeStefano’s phone rang one afternoon as she climbed out of her car outside the dance studio where her younger daughter Aubrey had a rehearsal. The caller showed up as unknown, and she briefly contemplated not picking up.

But her older daughter, 15-year-old Brianna, was away training for a ski race and DeStefano feared it could be a medical emergency.

“Hello?” she answered on speaker phone as she locked her car and lugged her purse and laptop bag into the studio.


She was greeted by yelling and sobbing.

“Mom! I messed up!” screamed a girl’s voice.

“What did you do?!? What happened?!?” DeStefano asked.


“The voice sounded just like Brie’s, the inflection, everything,” she told CNN recently. “Then, all of a sudden, I heard a man say, ‘Lay down, put your head back.’ I’m thinking she’s being gurnied off the mountain, which is common in skiing. So I started to panic.”

As the cries for help continued in the background, a deep male voice started firing off commands: “Listen here. I have your daughter. You call the police, you call anybody, I’m gonna pop her something so full of drugs. I’m gonna have my way with her then drop her off in Mexico, and you’re never going to see her again.”

DeStefano froze. Then she ran into the dance studio, shaking and screaming for help. She felt like she was suddenly drowning.

After a chaotic, rapid-fire series of events that included a $1 million ransom demand, a 911 call and a frantic effort to reach Brianna, the “kidnapping” was exposed as a scam. A puzzled Brianna called to tell her mother that she didn’t know what the fuss was about and that everything was fine.

https://www.cnn.com/2023/04/29/us/ai-scam-calls-kidnapping-cec/index.html

 

[Hog]

My point, exactly. I tend to agree some with Musk, AI can be a very dangerous toy. And also a very useful one. It is a tool, and in the wrong hands can be a deadly tool. I remember the Butlerian Jihad. "You shall not create an automaton with the mind of man." Automation is useful, algorithms are useful, Automated Algorithms can be dangerous. Especially since people put all their trust in a "non human brain" as somehow superior.

 

[AriLea]

OK, I must continue that train of thought.

The quantitative conclusion about Dune, and why it applies here; Dune ultimately was about the failures of profits. That is to say, no mater the source of the voices in your head, YOU are still the one responsilbe to evaluate via your free will and do the right thing(s).

Socrates used (personnality neutral) logic and moral philosophy to evaluate.

The characters in Dune, all of them, had a supream lack of moral logic or any altruistic philosophy. They mosly applied "Alexander the Great" philosopy, which is limited to, "We deserve to win, because we can." Alexander eventually got the result he deserved which was a camoflauged jail lined with wine and song and sex addition until an early death. (possibly poisoned)

In dune, at the start, it was the world(s) that everyone had earned via previous mis-adventures. So at the end of the series, was anyone at all better off? Yes, there were winners and loosers. But was anything really different? How and why? (Always a question at the end?)

Will a souless existance like AI have any intrinsic moral logic or any altruistic philosophy? Is AI the only reason that Dune became what it was?
Relentless questioning. (Socrates! Take-a-break!)