Networks in China and Iran also used AI models to create and post disinformation but campaigns did not reach large audiences
In Russia, two operations created and spread content criticizing the US, Ukraine and several Baltic nations. One of the operations used an OpenAI model to debug code and create a bot that posted on Telegram. China’s influence operation generated text in English, Chinese, Japanese and Korean, which operatives then posted on Twitter and Medium.
Iranian actors generated full articles that attacked the US and Israel, which they translated into English and French. An Israeli political firm called Stoic ran a network of fake social media accounts which created a range of content, including posts accusing US student protests against Israel’s war in Gaza of being antisemitic.
Ah, the old “the only way to stop a bad person with a gun is for all the good people to have guns” argument.
Were the dictators even working on their own large language models, or do these tools only exist because OpenAI made one and released it to the public before all the consequences had been considered, thus sparking an arms race where everyone felt the need to jump in on the action? Because as far as I can see, ChatGPT being used to spread disinformation is only a problem because OpenAI were too high on the smell of their own arses to think about whether making ChatGPT publicly available was a good idea.
Exactly.
Gods this whole “if we outlaw AI only outlaws will have AI” bullshit is so so tiresome and naive
It really is. I’m also not a huge fan of “everyone needs to have access to their own personal open source AI, otherwise only corporations will be able to use it”, like somehow the answer to corporations being shit is to give everyone else a greater ability to be shit too. What the world really needs is even more shit!
Well fortunately it doesn’t matter what you think, and people will keep developing and improving open source AI nonetheless.
Just don’t complain when the world becomes even more shit than it already is. Open source AIs that rely on scraping content without paying the creator are just as exploitative of workers as corporate AIs doing the exact same thing.
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I already write one reply to tell my main point. But whatever argument you come up with, I don’t think that’ll match the reality as viewed by AI researchers. If you give me specific short questions I’d be happy to engage in a discussion, with conditions on time.
In any case, I won’t listen to metaphoric arguments like yours with guns because metaphoric arguments are very difficult to do scientifically. Every situation is different. I mean that anybody can always end the discussion saying “that’s oranges vs apples”, and everything time this happens you’d not have an objective way to counter that.
The metaphoric argument is exactly on point, though: the answer to “bad actors will use it for evil” is not “so everybody should have unrestricted access to this really dangerous thing.” Sorry, but in no situation you can possibly devise is giving everyone access to a dangerous tool the correct answer to bad people having access to it.
I can say it’s both on point and not. For the not, you can ban the gun in the UK and it will be very difficult to bring one from the continent. Peace. But the same is not true for AI. If the UK government bans AI, Russia can still bring it through the internet.
And then I can still counter-argue that one, and then counter-argue this one also. See what a mess a metaphoric arguments bring.
Had OpenAI not released ChatGPT, making it available to everyone (including Russia), there are no indications that Russia would have developed their own ChatGPT. Literally nobody has made any suggestion that Russia was within a hair’s breadth of inventing AI and so OpenAI had better do it first. But there have been plenty of people making the entirely valid point that OpenAI rushed to release this thing before it was ready and before the consequences had been considered.
So effectively, what OpenAI have done is start handing out guns to everyone, and is now saying “look, all these bad people have guns! The only solution is everyone who doesn’t already have a gun should get one right now, preferably from us!”
The reality is, passing this huge amount of data was the only way these crazy current AI models work as powerful as ChatGPT. With a restriction like you fantasize, the AI programs would have been dominated by bad actors and the west would not have a counter technology for a decade if not longer.
Regulating the outputs of AIs would be a separate story. But it’s still overwhelmingly difficult. OpenAI is actually advanced in this region in the sense that they have in pocket the single best technology to politically balance the replies by a chatbot.
AI programs are already dominated by bad actors, and always will be. OpenAI and the other corporations are every bit the bad actors as Russia and China. The difference between Putin and most techbros is as narrow as a sheet of paper. Both put themselves before the planet and everyone else living on it. Both are sociopathic narcissists who take, take, take, and rely on the exploitation of those poorer and weaker than themselves in order to hoard wealth and power they don’t deserve.
This is just labeling. You can label everything as bad at will. I’m fine with that, it’s called “you’re entitled to your opinion”. That’s not objective though.
Well, let’s see about the evidence, shall we? OpenAI scraped a vast quantity of content from the internet without consent or compensation to the people that created the content, and leaving aside any conversations about whether copyright should exist or not, if your company cannot make a profit without relying on labour you haven’t paid for, that’s exploitation.
And then, even though it was obvious from the very beginning that AI could very easily be used for nefarious purposes, they released it to the general public with guardrails that were incredibly flimsy and easily circumvented.
This is a technology that required being handled with care. Instead, its lead proponents are of the “move fast and break things” mentality, when the list of things that can be broken is vast and includes millions of very real human beings.
You know who else thinks humans are basically disposable as long as he gets what he wants? Putin.
So yeah, the people running OpenAI and all the other AI companies are no better than Putin. None of them care who gets hurt as long as they get what they want.