• 0 Posts
  • 31 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
Cake day: June 30th, 2023
  • kibiz0r@lemmy.worldtoTechnology@lemmy.world•Teen deepfake victim pushes for federal law targeting AI-generated explicit contentEnglish
    72·
    10 months ago

    Where do we draw the line

    It’s ever-changing. We’re social animals, not math equations, so it’s all according to the kind of society we want.

    how do we do that without limiting free speech?

    All freedoms are in tension between “freedom to” and “freedom from”. I can have the freedom to fire my gun in the air. I can have the freedom from my neighbor’s randomly-falling bullets. I can’t have both of those codified in law (unless I’m granted some special status over my neighbors).

    I think that, many times, what we run into is a mismatch between a group thinking in terms of “freedom to” and a group thinking in terms of “freedom from”.

    The “freedom to” folks feel like any restriction on their ability to act is a breach of liberty, because they aren’t worried about “freedom from”. If, for example, I live in the middle of nowhere and have no neighbors, what falling bullets do I have to fear except my own?

    The “freedom from” folks feel like having to endure the effects of others’ actions is a breach of liberty, because they aren’t worried about “freedom to”. If I spend my life dodging falling bullets, I’m not likely to fire more into the sky.

    And the days of believing everything you see are over but most don’t know it yet.

    We said the same thing about the printing press. And it plunged us into a long period of epistemic chaos, with rampant plagiarism and reverse-plagiarism (attributing words to someone who never spoke them). The fallout of this led the crown to seize presses and allocate exclusive printing rights to a chartered monopoly (with some censorship just for funsies).

    We can either complain it’s too hard and do nothing, eventually leading to an overreaction to a policy that is obviously not sustainable… Or we can learn from history, get our heads in the game, and start imagining a framework that embraces the transformative power of large-scale computing while respecting the humanity of our comrades.

    C2PA is a good start, but it’s probably DOA in the hacker zeitgeist. We tend to view even an opt-in standard for proof of authenticity as a gateway to universal requirements for proof of authenticity and a locked-down tyrannical internet forever and ever. Possibly because a substantial portion of us are terminally online selfish assholes who never have to spend a second worrying about deepfakes of ourselves. And also fancy ourselves utilitarian techno-solutionists willing to sacrifice the squishy unquantifiable touchy-feely human emotions that just get in the way of objective rational progress towards a transhuman future. It’s a noble sacrifice, we say, while profiting disproportionately and suffering none of the fallout.

  • kibiz0r@lemmy.worldtoTechnology@lemmy.world•Teen deepfake victim pushes for federal law targeting AI-generated explicit contentEnglish
    93·
    10 months ago

    People said the same thing when, after the printing press, there was rampant plagiarism and reverse-plagiarism (attributing words to someone who never said them).

    After a period of epistemic chaos, the result was several decades of chartered monopoly and government censorship to get it under control.

    I hope we won’t need heavy-handed regulation this time around. But that will only happen if we learn from history. We need to get this under control now, while we have the chance to start a framework for protecting our fellow human beings from harm. Complaining that it’s hard is not an excuse for doing nothing.

  • kibiz0r@lemmy.worldtoTechnology@lemmy.world•Meta admits using pirated books to train AI, but won't pay for itEnglish
    535·
    10 months ago

    It’s not the same issue at all.

    Piracy distributes power. It allows disenfranchised or marginalized people to access information and participate in culture, no matter where they live or how much money they have. It subverts a top-down read-only culture by enabling read-write access for anyone.

    Large-scale computing services like these so-called AIs consolidate power. They displace access to the original information and the headwaters of culture. They are for-profit services, tuned to the interests of specific American companies. They suppress read-write channels between author and audience.

    One gives power to the people. One gives power to 5 massive corporations.

  • kibiz0r@lemmy.worldtoTechnology@lemmy.world•‘Impossible’ to create AI tools like ChatGPT without copyrighted material, OpenAI saysEnglish
    1·
    10 months ago

    I’m dumbfounded that any Lemmy user supports OpenAI in this.

    We’re mostly refugees from Reddit, right?

    Reddit invited us to make stuff and share it with our peers, and that was great. Some posts were just links to the content’s real home: Youtube, a random Wordpress blog, a Github project, or whatever. The post text, the comments, and the replies only lived on Reddit. That wasn’t a huge problem, because that’s the part that was specific to Reddit. And besides, there were plenty of third-party apps to interact with those bits of content however you wanted to.

    But as Reddit started to dominate Google search results, it displaced results that might have linked to the “real home” of that content. And Reddit realized a tremendous opportunity: They now had a chokehold on not just user comments and text posts, but anything that people dare to promote online.

    At the same time, Reddit slowly moved from a place where something may get posted by the author of the original thing to a place where you’ll only see the post if it came from a high-karma user or bot. Mutated or distorted copies of the original instance, reformated to cut through the noise and gain the favor of the algorithm. Re-posts of re-posts, with no reference back to the original, divorced of whatever context or commentary the original creator may have provided. No way for the audience to respond to the author in any meaningful way and start a dialogue.

    This is a miniature preview of the future brought to you by LLM vendors. A monetized portal to a dead internet. A one-way street. An incestuous ouroborous of re-posts of re-posts. Automated remixes of automated remixes.

    –

    There are genuine problems with copyright law. Don’t get me wrong. Perhaps the most glaring problem is the fact that many prominent creators don’t even own the copyright to the stuff they make. It was invented to protect creators, but in practice this “protection” gets assigned to a publisher immediately after the protected work comes into being.

    And then that copyright – the very same thing that was intended to protect creators – is used as a weapon against the creator and against their audience. Publishers insert a copyright chokepoint in-between the two, and they squeeze as hard as they desire, wringing it of every drop of profit, keeping creators and audiences far away from each other. Creators can’t speak out of turn. Fans can’t remix their favorite content and share it back to the community.

    This is a dysfunctional system. Audiences are denied the ability to access information or participate in culture if they can’t pay for admission. Creators are underpaid, and their creative ambitions are redirected to what’s popular. We end up with an auto-tuned culture – insular, uncritical, and predictable. Creativity reduced to a product.

    But.

    If the problem is that copyright law has severed the connection between creator and audience in order to set up a toll booth along the way, then we won’t solve it by giving OpenAI a free pass to do the exact same thing at massive scale.

  • kibiz0r@lemmy.worldtoTechnology@lemmy.world•A global watermarking standard could help safeguard elections in the ChatGPT eraEnglish
    113·
    10 months ago

    There are ways to watermark plaintext. But it’s relatively brittle, because it loses signal as the output is further modified, and you also need to know what specific LLM’s watermarks you’re looking for.

    So it’s not a great solution on its own, but it could be part of something more comprehensive.

    As for non-plaintext file formats…

    A simple signature would indeed give us a source but not method, but I think that’s probably 90% of what we care about when it comes to mass disinformation. If an article or an image is signed by Reuters, you can probably trust it. If it’s signed by OpenAI or Stability, you probably can’t. And if it’s not signed at all or signed by some rando, you should remain skeptical.

    But there are efforts like C2PA that include a log of how the asset was changed over time, providing a much more detailed explanation of what was done explicitly by humans vs. generative automated tools.

    I understand the concern about privacy, but it’s not like you have to use a format that supports proving that an image is legit. But if you want to prove that it is legit, then you have to provide something that grounds it in reality. It doesn’t have to be personally-identifying. It could just be a key baked into your digital camera (assuming that the resulting signature is strong enough that it’s computationally expensive to try to reverse-engineer the key and find who bought the camera).

    If you think about it, it’s kind of crazy that we’ve made it this far with a trust model that’s no more sophisticated than “I can tell from the pixels and from seeing quite a few shops in my time”.