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veen  ·  507 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: I feel like we need to talk about AI language models

One of the lenses through which to view socially impactful technology is that they are technologies that move too fast for our society to adapt to it - the boomers can't handle misinformation bots, the millenials are all addicted to their phones, yadda yadda. It's not a perfect metaphor but it is a useful way to think about this, because these AI models feel like a large new virus when our society hasn't yet fully developed the antibodies to withstand the previous changes. I'm still having a hard time teaching my parents to distinguish phishing mails from regular ones, and now there's the chance that someone writes a fully personal email automatically?! It might just make emails 10x less useful in the process.

It's not that I need this, it's that it is becoming stupidly easy to wrap these models around any nefarious text-based thing (which is most of the internet) and I feel like we do not have the tools to deal with this soon enough. So even if this does end up screwing most of social media and the internet over, if the patient is dead is the operation still succesful?