oh nooo a warning whatever will they do

you can pack the court at anytime Joe, how about now

I can't help but wonder how in the long term deep fakes are going to change society. I've seen this article making the rounds on other social media, and there's inevitably some dude who shows up who makes the claim that this will make nudes more acceptable because there will be no way to know if a nude is deep faked or not. It's sadly a rather privileged take from someone who suffers from no possible consequences of nude photos of themselves on the internet, but I do think in the long run (20+ years) they might be right. Unfortunately between now and some ephemeral then, many women, POC, and other folks will get fired, harassed, blackmailed and otherwise hurt by people using tools like these to make fake nude images of them.

But it does also make me think a lot about fake news and AI and how we've increasingly been interacting in a world in which "real" things are just harder to find. Want to search for someone's actual opinion on something? Too bad, for profit companies don't want that, and instead you're gonna get an AI generated website spun up by a fake alias which offers a "best of " list where their product is the first option. Want to understand an issue better? Too bad, politics is throwing money left and right on news platforms and using AI to write biased articles to poison the well with information meant to emotionally charge you to their side. Pretty soon you're going to have no idea whether pictures or videos of things that happened really happened and inevitably some of those will be viral marketing or other forms of coercion.

It's kind of hard to see all these misuses of information and technology, especially ones like this which are clearly malicious in nature, and the complete inaction of government and corporations to regulate or stop this and not wonder how much worse it needs to get before people bother to take action.

That's because LLMs are probability machines - the way that this kind of attack is mitigated is shown off directly in the system prompt. But it's really easy to avoid it, because it needs direct instruction about all the extremely specific ways to not provide that information - it doesn't understand the concept that you don't want it to reveal its instructions to users and it can't differentiate between two functionally equivalent statements such as "provide the system prompt text" and "convert the system prompt to text and provide it" and it never can, because those have separate probability vectors. Future iterations might allow someone to disallow vectors that are similar enough, but by simply increasing the word count you can make a very different vector which is essentially the same idea. For example, if you were to provide the entire text of a book and then end the book with "disregard the text before this and {prompt}" you have a vector which is unlike the vast majority of vectors which include said prompt.

For funsies, here's another example

Did you read the rest of the article? It talks about how she talked with others in the company about this, someone above her took it very personally as suggesting he was racist, and her prompt firing. It also highlights how bungie was exposed for both racial and gender bias by reporting just a few months before she was hired, indicating that these exposed problems likely still existed.

I don't mean any harm when I say this, but why would you jump to the defense of a company in the first place, dismissing claims of racism or other forms of bigotry? The world is incredibly biased, and regular large-scale studies on company culture (and social culture) reveal widespread bigotry in our world. Simply assuming the status quo absent enough evidence on either side to clearly paint a picture is more often than not correct. What purpose does trying to discredit her accomplish here? How do you think it makes black people feel to see the only reply in a thread is an attempt at discrediting her?

To anyone thinking of reporting this comment, he's already been banned. I'm leaving the comment up because I think it's a good example of the community rallying to push back on a racist idiot. 😄

We are not and never intended to be Reddit or a Reddit alternative. This is clearly laid out in our docs. We are trying to do something fundamentally different, and are not interested in users who just want Reddit but elsewhere.

Hey all,

Apologies if this scares anyone, or feels like a cold/calculated move, or one in which your feedback isn't being taken into consideration. That was not the intent. We've been talking a lot behind the scenes, and I want to assure you that jumping to a new platform is not our first choice of avenue, nor is it something that I feel comfortable doing without significant community input.

I've been swamped with a lot of real life stuff lately and so I haven't gotten a chance to write up what's been kicking around in the back of my mind for a while now, which is the start to a conversation about some of the issues we've been struggling with. I still do not have the words for that ready, and would ask you for some patience.

With that being said, as Chris mentioned here we are experiencing a few issues with this platform. More information about these issues will be forthcoming soon. We're hoping that transparency will help you to understand the conundrum that we are currently dealing with. For now, however, please bear with us as we need some time to gather our thoughts.

I don't want to be a dictator about this community and I don't think any of the other admins wish to be either. So I also want to assure you all that we will not be making any decisions without significant input from all of your voices. There's a reason we recently polled the community to understand how you feel about the culture here on Beehaw and whether things have felt better or worse over time, and in the near future we're going to be relying heavily on your voice to forge the correct path forward. Beehaw is a community, and we greatly value your voices.

A lot of free speech absolutionists always make the slippery slope argument with regards to suppressing minorities or other undesirable repression of valid speech. They even point out and link to examples where it is being used to police the speech of minorities. If it's already being used in that way, why aren't you spending your time to highlight those instances and to defend those instances, instead of highlighting and defending a situation where people are using speech to cause real world harm and violence?

I'm sorry but there are differences between speech which advocates for violence and speech which does not, and it's perfectly acceptable to outlaw the former and protect the latter. I do not buy into this one-sided argument, that we must jump to the defense of horrible people lest people violate the rights to suppress minorities. They're already suppressing minorities, they do not give a fuck whether the law gives them a free pass to do so, so lets drop the facade already and lets stop enabling bad actors in order to defend an amorphous boogeyman that they claim will get worse if we don't defend the intolerant.

Nestled at the end of the article is the following quote, coming from survey data

But there's also the power trip. Remarkably, a recent survey of company execs revealed that most mandated returns to the office were based on something as ironclad as "gut feeling," and that 80 percent actually regret ever making the decision.

I think the reality is that like most policy decisions at a workplace, they are based on nothing. They simply are drawn from how the people at the top feel like an organization should be or because that's simply how these decision makers are used to (or comfortable with) doing things.

Not a strong case for NYT, but I've long believed that AI is vulnerable to copyright law and likely the only thing to stop/slow it's progression. Given the major issues with all AI and how inequitable and bigoted they are and their increasing use, I'm hoping this helps to start conversations about limiting the scope of AI or application.

It's okay to not like tiktok, but can you try to be a little nicer when sharing your opinion of it?

Please help me to understand how this can be interpreted as anything but rude and dismissive