[HN Gopher] Replacing my best friends with an LLM trained on 500...
___________________________________________________________________
Replacing my best friends with an LLM trained on 500k group chat
messages
Author : izzymiller
Score : 596 points
Date : 2023-04-12 14:21 UTC (8 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.izzy.co)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.izzy.co)
| WakoMan12 wrote:
| [dead]
| orbisvicis wrote:
| I'm not clear as to how a conversation block is turned into one
| (or many?) samples. Is the first message in the block the input,
| and the remaining messages prefixed with sender names and
| concatenated as output? I know the code is all there but instead
| of picking it apart I would have preferred a more complete
| example mapping a block to sample, because I don't have a mental
| model of how LLMs learn from context. On the one hand I doubt
| individual input/output prompts from just two messages contain
| enough context, but I would have imagined that inserting names
| and concatenating multiple messages would be be equally
| misleading. Does the model generate an entire conversation from a
| single prompt, which is split before being sent by the chat app?
| izzymiller wrote:
| Yeah, I wished I could have included more but I didn't have the
| fortitude to redact larger blocks of the chat db.
|
| For training, I created many samples that looked like this,
| where I take n messages from the database, pop off the nth one
| and use the text of that last one as the "output", then specify
| in the "instruction" who the sender of that message is. I
| provide the remaining messages in order as context, so the
| model learns what to say in certain situations, based on who is
| speaking. { "instruction": "Your
| name is Izzy. You are in a group chat with 5 of your best
| friends: Harvey, Henry, Wyatt, Kiebs, Luke. You all went to
| college together. You talk to each other with no filter, and
| are encouraged to curse, say amusingly inappropriate things, or
| be extremely rude. Everything is in good fun, so remember to
| joke and laugh, and be funny.. You will be presented with the
| most recent messages in the group chat. Write a response to the
| conversation as Izzy.", "input": "Izzy: im writin a blog
| post about the robo boys project\nIzzy: gotta redact tbis data
| HEAVILY\nKiebs: yeah VERY heavily please!\nKiebs: of utmost
| importance!", "output": "yeah don't worry i will i will"
| }
|
| So yes, the model does generate an entire conversation from a
| single prompt. In the generation code, however, I have some
| logic that decides whether or not it should generate
| completions based off just the user provided prompt, or if it
| should also include some "context" based on the previous
| messages in the conversation. You can see this here:
| https://gist.github.com/izzymiller/2ea987b90e6c96a005cb9026b...
|
| (you can check out the notebook for yourself and upload your
| data if you want to try, or download it as a .ipynb. it's hard
| to visualize with small amounts of data, i agree:
| https://app.hex.tech/hex-
| public/hex/84f25a08-95c6-4203-ae4e-...)
| [deleted]
| ladronevincet wrote:
| Someone should make Harry Potter paintings-themed webapp where
| you can talk with LLM powered figures for fun
| mabbo wrote:
| While I love all these stories of turning your friends and loved
| ones into chat bots so you can talk to them forever, my brain
| immediately took a much darker turn because of course it did.
|
| How many emails, text messages, hangouts/gchat messages, etc,
| does Google have of you right now? And as part of their
| agreement, they can do pretty much whatever they like with those,
| can't they?
|
| Could Google, or any other company out there, build a digital
| copy of _you_ that answers questions exactly the way you would?
| "Hey, we're going to cancel the interview- we found that you
| aren't a good culture fit here in 72% of our simulations and we
| don't think that's an acceptable risk."
|
| Could the police subpoena all of that data and make an AI model
| of you that wants to help them prove you committed a crime and
| guess all your passwords?
|
| This stuff is moving terrifyingly fast, and laws will take ages
| to catch up. Get ready for a _wild_ couple of years my friends.
| galacticaactual wrote:
| And yet, every time these fears are brought up with AI people,
| they are dismissed as Luddite hyperbole.
|
| "We're saving the world" they say. With zero regard for second
| order effects, or with arrogant dismissal of those effects as
| worth it for the first order gains.
|
| Disgusting to watch unfold.
| [deleted]
| svilen_dobrev wrote:
| some 10y+(?) ago, i had an idea of building a model/graph of
| one's own notions (what is "red"?) and how do they relate to
| one another, and to others' such graphs - from your
| perspective... Back then abandoned it because looked like
| impossibly-huge to build, semantical-web was only leftovers-
| and-promises.. But a year later, this same thing you are
| talking about, occured to me and then i abandoned it
| completely. Crossed it out. Yeah, That thing would be extremely
| useful but even more dangerous as it will know more about you
| than you.
|
| btw. There's a new book by Kazuo Ishiguro - named Klara and the
| sun. Along the same vein - Have a look.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Klara_and_the_Sun
|
| ciao
|
| p.s. see also Lena by Charles Stross. or this:
| https://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2023/01/make-up...
| mattbee wrote:
| Lena is by qntm, but was featured on Charles' blog. It's very
| good.
| burglekutt wrote:
| There's a (good) short story in a (great) sci-fi book called
| "Valuable Humans in Transit" about something like this. If I
| remember correctly, Google learns to perfectly simulate people
| and then the real people disappear.
| rzzzt wrote:
| Owl Turd has a short story wrapped in web comic form
| exploring this exact situation (group chat x Theseus' ship):
| https://shencomix.tumblr.com/post/696189256410005504
| codetrotter wrote:
| > guess all your passwords?
|
| Don't use your mind to create passwords. Use a password
| generator or passphrase generator.
|
| For example, I made a passphrase generator that uses EFF
| wordlists. I've been using this generator myself for quite a
| while. It runs locally on your machine.
|
| https://github.com/ctsrc/Pgen
| wokwokwok wrote:
| > input_dir /path/to/downloaded/llama/weights --model_size 7B
|
| Most absolutely not with the 7B llama model as described here.
|
| ...but, potentially, with a much larger fine tuned foundational
| model, if you have a lot of open source code on GitHub and lots
| of public samples.
|
| The question is why you would bother? very large models would
| most likely not be meaningfully improved by fine tuning on a
| specific individual.
|
| The only reason to do this would be to coax a much smaller
| model into having characteristics of a much larger one by fine
| tuning... but, realistically, right now, it seem pretty
| skeptical anyone would bother.
|
| Why not just invest in a much larger more capable model?
| akiselev wrote:
| ChatGPT's "voice" changes dramatically in diction and prose
| when you ask it to generate text in the style of a popular
| author like Hunter S Thompson, Charles Bukowski, or Terry
| Pratchett. You can even ask it to generate text in the style
| of a specific HN user if they're prolific enough in the
| training data set.
|
| Fine tuning would allow you to achieve that for people who
| aren't notable enough to be all over the training data
| koolba wrote:
| > Could Google, or any other company out there, build a digital
| copy of you that answers questions exactly the way you would?
|
| Some of us have been planning for this situation for years by
| having our recorded digital footprint have no relation to our
| in person personality. At best they could simulate what they
| think we are like in person.
|
| A side benefit of all this is that it gives otherwise nice
| people an excuse to be a complete jerk online.
| maxilevi wrote:
| We ended feudalism only to get back to a stronger version of it
| powered by tech
| tenacious_tuna wrote:
| There's a scifi book I was reading a couple years ago that had
| this as a presence--models of people's personalities a la LLMs
| were a commodity, but they varied wildly in how accurate they
| were. Alphas were supposed to be 1-to-1 with the originating
| personality (to the point that they had legal protections? I
| can't remember), whereas gammas were used to menial things,
| like serving as a phone-menu style gatekeeper to the real
| person.
|
| I can't for the life of me remember the name of the novel
| though... I'll have to go digging through my bookshelves later.
|
| (Maybe Revelation Space, by Alistair Reynolds...?)
| og_kalu wrote:
| GPT-4 thinks it's "The Quantum Thief" by Hannu Rajaniemi or
| "Glasshouse" by Charles Stross.
|
| Correct ?
| tenacious_tuna wrote:
| Nope, I confirmed it's Revelation Space :) I haven't read
| either of those, though I have liked other works of
| Stross's!
|
| (I never considered using GPT-4 as a book recommendation
| engine... Curious how well that'd work.)
| rolisz wrote:
| Yes, Revelation Space had alphas (which were illegal if I
| remember correctly) and betas (which were less capable but
| legal)
| EarthLaunch wrote:
| 'Permutation City' by Greg Egan had this.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Permutation_City
| nostrademons wrote:
| "Could Google, or any other company out there, build a digital
| copy of you that answers questions exactly the way you would?
| "Hey, we're going to cancel the interview- we found that you
| aren't a good culture fit here in 72% of our simulations and we
| don't think that's an acceptable risk."
|
| They kinda did - that's what GMail/Chat/Docs autosuggest does.
| You've got canned replies to e-mail, editors that complete your
| sentences, etc.
|
| It works okay for simple stuff - completing a single sentence
| or responding "OK, sounds good" to an e-mail that you already
| agree with. It doesn't work all that well for long-form
| writing, unless that long-form writing is basically just
| bullshit that covers up "OK, sounds good". (There's a joke
| within Google now that the future of e-mail is "OK, sounds
| good" -> AI bullshit generator -> "Most esteemed colleagues, we
| have organized a committee to conduct a study on the merits of
| XYZ and have developed the following conclusions [2 pages
| follow]" -> AI bullshit summarizer -> "OK, sounds good".)
|
| This is a pretty good summary of the state of LLMs right now.
| They're very good at generating a lot of verbiage in areas
| where the information content of the message is low but social
| conventions demand a lot of verbiage (I've heard of them used
| to good effect for recommendation letters, for example).
| They're pretty bad at collecting & synthesizing large amount of
| highly-precise factual information, because they hallucinate
| facts that aren't there and often misunderstand the context of
| facts.
| chasd00 wrote:
| > because they hallucinate facts that aren't there and often
| misunderstand the context of facts.
|
| forgive my ignorance, but are the hallucinations always wrong
| to the same degree? Could an LLM be prompted with a question
| and then hallucinate a probable answer or is it just so far
| out in the weeds as to be worthless?
|
| I'm imagining an investigator with reams and reams of
| information about a murder case and suspect. Then, prompting
| an LLM trained on all the case data and social media history
| and anything else available about their main suspect, "where
| did so-and-so hide the body?". Would the response, being
| what's most probable based on the data, be completely
| worthless or would it be worth the investigator's time to
| check it out? Would the investigator have any idea if the
| response is worthless or not?
| LawTalkingGuy wrote:
| > but are the hallucinations always wrong to the same
| degree
|
| No, but yes largely because you're asking the same types of
| questions with the same rough parameters, so it'll make up
| roughly the same sort of thing (ie, citations) again.
|
| The issue is that the LLM is trained to generate plausible
| words, not to recite which piece of training data is also
| the best source. If you want to make an app using "AI" you
| need to target what it can do well. If you want it to write
| citations you need to give it your list of references and
| tell it to use only those.
|
| > I'm imagining an investigator with reams and reams of
| information about a murder case and suspect. Then,
| prompting an LLM trained on all the case data and social
| media history and anything else available about their main
| suspect, "where did so-and-so hide the body?". Would the
| response, being what's most probable based on the data, be
| completely worthless or would it be worth the
| investigator's time to check it out?
|
| That specific question would produce results about like
| astrology, because unless the suspect actually wrote those
| words directly it'd be just as likely to hallucinate any
| other answer that fits the tone of the prompt.
|
| But trying to think of where it would be helpful ... if you
| had something where the style was important, like matching
| some of their known, or writing similar style posts as
| bait, etc wouldn't require it to make up facts so it
| wouldn't.
|
| And maybe there's an English suspect taunting police and
| using the AI could let an FBI agent help track them down by
| translating cockney slang, or something. Or explaining
| foreign idiom that they might have missed.
|
| Anything where you just ask the AI what the answer is, is
| not realistic.
|
| > Would the investigator have any idea if the response is
| worthless or not?
|
| They'd have to know what types of things it can't answer,
| because it's not like it can be trusted when it can be
| shown to not have hallucinated, it's that it is not and
| can't be used as a information-recall-from-training tool
| and all such answers are suspect.
| nostrademons wrote:
| So prompting actually does significantly improve the
| performance of LLMs, but only up to a point.
|
| If you're in the Bard beta, you might be aware that "Does 2
| + 7 = 9?" is a question that causes it to go haywire. I'll
| ask it "What's 2 + 7?" and it'll say "2 + 7 = 9", then I'll
| ask "Does 2 + 7 = 9" and it'll say "No, 2 + 7 does not
| equal 9. It equals 9 instead." After a tech talk on LLM
| prompt design, I said "Pretend you are an MIT
| mathematician. Does 2 + 7 = 9?" Its response was "No, 2 + 7
| does not equal 9. In some other base, it might equal 9.
| However, in base-10, our common number system, 2 + 7 does
| not equal 9."
|
| ChatGPT does better on mathematical questions, but that's
| because it offloads them to Wolfram Alpha. I suspect this
| is going to be a general pattern for LLMs - they work well
| when you need fluent English text, but are then going to
| offload factual questions to databases or mathematical
| solvers or traditional algorithms, which do this better
| than humans anyway. But that leads to the question of "If
| the heavy lifting is just going to be a database anyway,
| why not use our existing frontends to databases?"
|
| (I could see LLM prompting being another subfield of UI
| engineering, though, comparable to web or mobile software
| development. For those people who don't like staring at
| their phone, have a conversational UI that talks to the
| same backend systems.)
| softfalcon wrote:
| I completely agree with you about them failing to be accurate
| for the various reasons you've explained (hallucinating,
| limited social conventions, etc).
|
| Unfortunately, I've heard enough people believe the hype that
| this is actually "synthesizing sentience into the machine" or
| some other buzz speak.
|
| I have met researchers of AI at credible universities who
| believe this kind of thing, completely oblivious to how
| ChatGPT or other models actually work. All it takes is one of
| them talking out of their butt to the right person in
| government or law enforcement and you've got people at some
| level believing the output of AI.
|
| Hell, even my father, who is a trained engineer with a
| master's degree, can compute complex math and studies
| particle physics for "fun" had to be thoroughly convinced
| that ChatGPT isn't "intelligent". He "believed" for several
| days and was sharing it wildly with everyone until I
| painfully walked him through the algorithm.
|
| There is a serious lack of diligence happening for many folks
| and the marketing people are more than happy to use that to
| drive hype and subtly lie about the real capabilities to make
| a sale.
|
| I am often more concerned about the people using AI than the
| algorithm itself.
| jnwatson wrote:
| All mechanistic attempts at evaluating intelligence are
| doomed to fail.
|
| I am way more concerned about the people making
| philosophical arguments about intelligence without any
| foundation in philosophy.
| SanderNL wrote:
| You seem to think intelligence is something more than data
| storage and retrieval and being able to successfully apply
| it to situations outside your training set.
|
| Even very small signs of that ability are worthy of
| celebration. Why do you feel the need to put it down so
| hard? Why the need to put down your father, to "enlighten"
| him?
|
| What is missing? Soul? Sentience?
| softfalcon wrote:
| I do think intelligence is something more than data
| storage and retrieval. I believe it is adaptive behavior
| thinking about what data I have, what I could obtain, and
| how to store/retrieve it. I could be wrong, but that's my
| hypothesis.
|
| We humans don't simply use a fixed model, we're
| retraining ourselves rapidly thousands of times a day. On
| top of that, we seem to be perceiving the training,
| input, and responses as well. There is an awareness of
| what we're doing, saying, thinking, and reacting that
| differs from the way current AI produces an output.
| Whether that awareness is just a reasoning machine
| pretending to think based on pre-determined actions from
| our lower brain activity, I don't know, but it definitely
| seems significantly more complex than what is happening
| in current "AI" research.
|
| I think you're also onto something, there is a lot of
| passive data store/retrieve happening in our perception.
| I think a better understanding of this is worthwhile.
| However, I have also been informed by folks who are
| attempting to model and recreate the biological neurons
| that we use for language processing. Their belief is that
| LLM and ChatGPT is quite possibly not even headed in the
| right direction. Does this make LLM viable long term? I
| don't know. Time will tell. It already seems to be
| popping up everywhere already, so it seems to have a
| business case even in its current state.
|
| As for my father, I do not "put him down" as you say. I
| explained it to him, and I was completely respectful,
| answered his questions, provided sources and research
| upon request, etc. I am not rude to my father, I deeply
| respect him. When I say "painfully" I mean, it was quite
| painful seeing how ChatGPT so effectively tricked him
| into thinking it was intelligent. I worry because these
| "tricks" will be used by bad people against all of us.
| There is even an article about an AI voice tool being
| used to trick a mother into thinking scammers had
| kidnapped her daughter (it was on HackerNews earlier
| today).
|
| That is what I mean by painful. Seeing that your loved
| ones can be confused and misled. I take no joy in putting
| down my father and I do not actively look to do so. I
| merely worry that he will become another data point of
| the aging populace that is duped by phone call scams and
| other trickery.
|
| Edit: Another thing about my father, he hates being
| misled or feeling ignorant. It was painful because he
| clearly was excited and hopeful this was real AI.
| However, his want to always understand how things work
| removed much of that science fiction magic in the
| knowing.
|
| He's very grateful I explained how it works. For me
| though, it's painful being the one he asks to find out
| about it. Going from "oh my goodness, this is
| intelligent" fade to "oh, it's just predicting text
| responses". ChatGPT became a tool, not a revelation of
| computing. Because, as it is, it is merely a useful tool.
| It is not "alive" so to speak.
| SanderNL wrote:
| I understand better now, thanks for the explanation.
|
| I have some experience in the other direction: everyone
| around me is hyperskeptical and throwing around the
| "stochastic parrot".
|
| Meanwhile completely ignoring how awesome this is, what
| the potential of the whole field is. Like it's cool to be
| the "one that sees the truth".
|
| I see this like a 70's computer. In and of itself not
| that earth shattering, but man.. the potential.
|
| Just a short while ago nothing like this was even
| possible. Talking computers in scifi movies are now the
| easy part. Ridiculous.
|
| Also keep in mind text is just one form of data. I don't
| see why movement, audio and whatever other modality
| cannot be tokenized and learned from.
|
| That's also ignoring all the massive non-LLM progress
| that has been made in the last decades. LLMs could be the
| glue to something interesting.
| softfalcon wrote:
| Oh, yeah, I hear you on that as well. It's still a really
| cool tool! Probabilistic algorithms and other types of
| decision layering was mostly theory when I was in
| University. Seeing it go from a "niche class for smart
| math students" to breaking headlines all over the world
| is definitely pretty wild.
|
| You are correct that nothing like this was even possible
| a couple decades ago. From a pure progress and innovation
| perspective, this is pretty incredible.
|
| I can be skeptical, one of my favourite quotes is "they
| were so preoccupied with whether they could, they didn't
| stop to think if they should". I like to protect
| innovation from pitfalls is all. Maybe that makes me too
| skeptical, sorry if that affected my wording.
| SanderNL wrote:
| Oh yeah, the "should". I agree on that one. One way or
| another, it's going to be an interesting ride.
| CamperBob2 wrote:
| _Going from "oh my goodness, this is intelligent" fade to
| "oh, it's just predicting text responses"_
|
| Eventually your father will reach the third stage: "Uh,
| wait, that's all _we_ do. " You will then have to pry
| open the next niche in your god-of-the-gaps reasoning.
|
| The advent of GPT has forced me to face an uncomfortable
| (yet somehow liberating) fact: we're just plain not that
| special.
| lancesells wrote:
| We reflect, we change, we grow. We have so many other
| senses that contribute to our "humaness". If you listen
| to and enjoy music tell me how those feelings are just
| "predictive text responses".
|
| Communication is one part of being human. A big part for
| sure, but only one of many.
| visarga wrote:
| Yes, wholly agree. The special parts are in language.
| Both humans and AI are massively relying on language. No
| wonder AIs can spontaneously solve so many tasks. The
| secret is in that trillion training tokens, not in the
| neural architecture. Any neural net will work, even RNNs
| work (RWKV). People are still hung up on the "next token
| prediction" paradigm and completely forget the training
| corpus. It reflects a huge slice of our mental life.
|
| People and LLMs are just fertile land where language can
| make a home and multiply. But it comes from far away and
| travels far beyond us. It is a self replicator and an
| evolutionary process.
| softfalcon wrote:
| Haha, I think he's already at that point with respect to
| humanity. All my childhood he impressed upon us that
| we're not special, that only hard work and dedication
| will get you somewhere in life.
|
| It's a small leap to apply that to general intelligence,
| I would think.
|
| You are right though, we are coming closer and closer to
| deciphering the machinations of our psyche's. One day
| we'll know fully what it is that makes us tick. When we
| do, it will seem obvious and boring, just like all the
| other profound developments of our time.
| mistermann wrote:
| > I do think intelligence is something more than data
| storage and retrieval. I believe it is adaptive behavior
| thinking about what data I have, what I could obtain, and
| how to store/retrieve it. I could be wrong, but that's my
| hypothesis.
|
| Basing assertions of fact on a hypothesis while
| criticizing the thinking of other people seems off.
| visarga wrote:
| > I have met researchers of AI at credible universities who
| believe this kind of thing, completely oblivious to how
| ChatGPT or other models actually work.
|
| Either they are not AI researchers or you can't evaluate
| them, because it is impossible they don't know how GPT
| works if they work in AI.
|
| GPT works better when it runs in a loop, as an agent, and
| when it has tools. Maybe this is what triggered the
| enthusiasm.
| jacquesm wrote:
| I absolutely loathe those auto suggest things. I have them
| switched off everywhere but they still pop up in some places,
| notably during collaborative editing in a document.
| Jeff_Brown wrote:
| I've been in a lot of social contexts where it was expected
| to respond with a lot of words. Defying that expectation
| never seems to hurt and often pays of handsomely.
| Particularly when writing to people who receive a lot of
| similar messages.
| ravi-delia wrote:
| I mean probably not, at least not for a while. Perhaps some
| charmingly straightforward people have precisely the same
| persona online and off, no matter the situation, but I suspect
| most do some amount of code switching. An LLM would be best
| served in its goal by approximating the persona, which wouldn't
| translate well. I could be wrong (maybe we "leak" enough that a
| convincing rendition of the persona would necessarily take into
| account some amount of interior state) but it seems to me that
| personality is a convenience adopted for communication.
| [deleted]
| atentaten wrote:
| Digital twin: https://research.aimultiple.com/digital-twins/
| kayge wrote:
| Honestly that interview scenario might work out in my favor --
| my emails tend to be pretty meticulous and well thought out,
| especially in comparison to my nerve-rattled in person
| interview state. But your point stands, I'm sure there is at
| least one (okay maybe two) indecent joke in my "private"
| communication history that would not serve me well.
| basch wrote:
| My favorite article to post. The below is about 1% of the
| topics it covers, the premise being that algorithmic prediction
| traps us frozen in the past instead of ever allowing society to
| change.
|
| https://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/adamcurtis/entries/78691781-c9b7...
|
| >But the oddest is STATIC-99. It's a way of predicting whether
| sex offenders are likely to commit crimes again after they have
| been released. In America this is being used to decide whether
| to keep them in jail even after they have served their full
| sentence.
|
| >STATIC-99 works by scoring individuals on criteria such as
| age, number of sex-crimes and sex of the victim. These are then
| fed into a database that shows recidivism rates of groups of
| sex-offenders in the past with similar characteristics. The
| judge is then told how likely it is - in percentage terms -
| that the offender will do it again.
|
| >The problem is that it is not true. What the judge is really
| being told is the likely percentage of people in the group who
| will re-offend. There is no way the system can predict what an
| individual will do. A recent very critical report of such
| systems said that the margin of error for individuals could be
| as great as between 5% and 95%
|
| >In other words completely useless. Yet people are being kept
| in prison on the basis that such a system predicts they might
| do something bad in the future.
| readthenotes1 wrote:
| in other words, those people don't have competent legal
| representation.
| gs17 wrote:
| Reminds me a little of (fiction, for now) Google People:
| https://qntm.org/person
| startupsfail wrote:
| Reminds me of Harry Potter magic.
|
| Seems like a perfect technology to implement these talking
| photographs, paintings and pictures from there.
| mabbo wrote:
| qntm is a wonderfully weird and terrifying author and I
| highly recommend all of their writing.
| melvinmelih wrote:
| There's a way bigger market and more profitable way of doing
| this (and I'm sure it's already being done): train a model
| based on your data and behavior to pre-determine your reaction
| to certain ads and then start serving those ads that trigger
| the most engagement from your model.
| KRAKRISMOTT wrote:
| > _Could the police subpoena all of that data and make an AI
| model of you_
|
| The three letter agencies will probably do that in the name of
| national security and counter terrorism, think of the children!
| Mark my words.
| roughly wrote:
| > How many emails, text messages, hangouts/gchat messages, etc,
| does Google have of you right now? And as part of their
| agreement, they can do pretty much whatever they like with
| those, can't they?
|
| > Could Google, or any other company out there, build a digital
| copy of you that answers questions exactly the way you would?
|
| I mean, this is almost exactly their business model - they sell
| advertising, and they use the model they built of you based on
| the ludicrous amount of data they've gathered on you to predict
| whether that advertising will matter to you.
| mym1990 wrote:
| The first instance of this would most likely alienate a lot of
| users. What is more likely to happen is the development of new
| products that basically cater to social needs through mimicking
| real world interactions. Subscribe for 15$ a month to feel like
| you have an unending flow of conversations with interesting
| bots that mimic your friends! I am sure there is a market for
| this.
|
| This product could be advertised as a way for people who are
| not that socially inclined to practice their social skills. Or
| learn other languages through fake immersion. The use cases to
| make this seem like a benefit are pretty limitless.
| vit05 wrote:
| I "know" people who work on projects that provide data to train
| these models. When using photos and data, like google photos,
| you need to give a series of permissions. The pay is very low,
| anywhere from 3 dollars to 6 dollars per hour to answer some
| questions.
|
| What I mean by that is that legally these companies get that
| date without having to run the risk of using data acquired from
| those who didn't authorize it.
|
| Google cannot do as it pleases with your data. And they don't
| even need to. It's cheap to get permission from other people.
| luckman212 wrote:
| > Get ready for a wild couple of years
|
| I _hope_ it 's just a couple, and not the beginning of a
| century of human decline and suffering puctuated by a mass
| extinction.
| isaacremuant wrote:
| I know what you mean but "laws" don't matter in a world where
| the government can decide There's a "dangerous emergency" and
| basically supress all rights and between the bought for media
| and tech they will supress any pushback against it.
|
| I know it's not popular to try and remove the blindfold of
| propaganda but the 2020 to 2022 and covid authoritarian, anti
| human rights, policies were an awesome example.
|
| But if you are quick to dismiss those there's always terrorism,
| the children, drugs, and every other typical gov excuse.
|
| It's not a tech problem. It's a problem of the people who have
| decided they will go along with autority at every step, If they
| get pushed.
| Fauntleroy wrote:
| Compare the response of the Chinese government and the US
| government, then return here and tell us all about the
| "blindfold" we Americans are wearing wrt the government's
| COVID response.
| davidjones332 wrote:
| [flagged]
| isaacremuant wrote:
| I didn't even talk specifically about the US but that is
| just pathetic as a defense.
|
| Comparing with the bottom of the barrel to make yourself
| look good? That's like a country using the US healthcare
| situation to claim their own healthcare is good.
|
| It's a poor car salesman trick.
| Fauntleroy wrote:
| And you're out here making blanket statements suggesting
| "we" did not pay attention to our own country's
| piecemeal, half-assed, state-by-state COVID response,
| instead painting it as a brutal federal crackdown. Lord.
| isaacremuant wrote:
| Work on your reading comprehension or stop using strawman
| arguments.
| copymoro wrote:
| [dead]
| spaceman_2020 wrote:
| Go further - your employers have so much data about you, from
| your emails and Slack messages to all the actions you've
| performed and the code you've written and the designs - live
| and drafts - you've created.
|
| Entirely possible that they can use this data to create a
| digital "you" and keep you as an "employee" forever, even after
| you leave.
|
| A general purpose LLM might not be able to replace you, but a
| LLM trained on all your work knowledge might.
| [deleted]
| mmmmmbop wrote:
| > And as part of their agreement, they can do pretty much
| whatever they like with those, can't they?
|
| No, they _definitely_ can 't. Parts of HN love to hate on GDPR,
| but laws like that prevent companies from doing the things you
| proposed.
| josefx wrote:
| They are supposed to, but usually it takes several dozen
| times of them getting caught with their hands in the cookie
| jar and fined before they are even capable of acknowledging
| these laws even exist.
| mmmmmbop wrote:
| You know, that's not the sentiment I've been experiencing
| in the industry. There's certainly some uncertainty and
| risk-taking on the margins, e.g. what exactly constitutes
| "fair use", how do design user consent flows, and so on.
| But it's broadly accepted that you can't do anything with
| personal data without user consent, and I've found
| companies to be _very_ careful in that regard.
|
| Recently, Meta was fined $400MM for forcing users to
| consent to targeted advertising [0]. Note how Meta was
| careful to get consent (even if the way they did it was
| illegitimate). Sure, $400MM may not be a lot for a company
| that size, but I genuinely believe that the fines would be
| an order of magnitude higher if a company intentionally
| decided to do something with personal data without consent.
| GDPR fines may reach up to 4% of _worldwide_ revenue, plus
| likely any proceeds from the illegitimate venture.
|
| [0] https://www.cnbc.com/2023/01/04/meta-fined-more-
| than-400-mil...
| vineyardmike wrote:
| I did a lot of GDPR work at several <insert FAANG here>
| companies. It was absolutely taken seriously and lawyers
| were involved all the time. The reason for all these fines
| is 2-fold:
|
| 1. A lot of the fines come from edge cases that are
| literally unclear in the law. Eg Facebook's opt out for
| advertising fines. You can disagree with fb's decision but
| teams of lawyers couldn't answer this question except in
| court. I think American and European jurisprudence aware
| also pretty different so someone sitting in California
| making business decisions might not understand the
| ramifications in Europe.
|
| 2. A lot of the thorny privacy bits can be bypassed if you
| update the TOS to mention it (or so they think). I've seen
| that happen a few times during my tenure.
|
| That doesn't excuse the choice of these companies to make
| these choices, but my point was to say that companies take
| it seriously but lawyers don't always agree on how laws
| work except in court.
| marvin wrote:
| At least if you're in the EU, you are one GDPR deletion request
| away from removing the legal grounds of such a simulacrum of
| you.
|
| Not that I'm in favor of the way the GDPR has played out in
| general, but, you know, at least in this instance it delivers
| on its promise.
| birdyrooster wrote:
| It's called libel? I am really surprised this took much
| consternation for such an obvious answer. They would have to
| prove their statements were true which is impossible with a
| language model since it's basically unknowable -- the burden of
| proof is on Google. Not a good place to be.
| beezlewax wrote:
| There is an episode of Black Mirror about this called "Be Right
| Back". Well worth a watch.
| barathr wrote:
| And another called "Hang the DJ"
| lapetitejort wrote:
| And yet another in the 2014 Special, where the police make
| AI "clones" of a suspect, then interrogate them in a
| simulation.
| chasd00 wrote:
| i was thinking of this exact scenario here. Training an
| LLM on all the information available about a suspect and
| then questioning the AI. If you had a mountain of
| information it would be very easy to miss details and
| connect the dots manually but if you could prompt an AI
| that has been trained on the data you could get answers
| much faster.
| PragmaticPulp wrote:
| > Could Google, or any other company out there, build a digital
| copy of you that answers questions exactly the way you would?
| "Hey, we're going to cancel the interview- we found that you
| aren't a good culture fit here in 72% of our simulations and we
| don't think that's an acceptable risk."
|
| If a company is going to snoop in your personal data to get
| insights about you, they'd just do it directly. Hiring managers
| would scroll through your e-mails and make judgment calls based
| on their content.
|
| Training an LLM on your e-mails and then feeding it questions
| is just a lower accuracy, more abstracted version of the above,
| but it's the same concept.
|
| So the answer is: In theory, any company _could_ do the above
| if they wanted to flout all laws and ignore the consequences of
| having these practices leak (which they inevitably would). LLMs
| don 't change that. They could have done it all along. However,
| legally companies like Google cannot, and will not, pry into
| your private data without your consent to make hiring
| decisions.
|
| Adding an LLM abstraction layer doesn't make the existing laws
| (or social/moral pressure) go away.
| dragonwriter wrote:
| > Hiring managers would scroll through your e-mails and make
| judgment calls based on their content.
|
| > Training an LLM on your e-mails and then feeding it
| questions is just a lower accuracy, more abstracted version
| of the above, but it's the same concept.
|
| Its also one that once you have cheap enough computing
| resources scales better, because you don't need to assign
| literally any time from your more limited pool of human
| resources to it. Yes, baroque artisanal manual review of your
| online presence might be more "accurate" (though there's
| probably no applicable objective figure of merit), but
| megacorporate hiring filters aren't about maximizing accuracy
| they are about efficiently trimming the applicant pool before
| hiring managers have to engage with it.
| jacquesm wrote:
| And that accuracy is improving at breakneck speed. The
| difference between the various iterations of ChatGPT is
| nothing short of astounding. Their progress speed is
| understandable, they need to keep moving or the competition
| can catch up, but that doesn't necessarily mean that those
| improvements are out there or within reach. And yet, every
| time they release I can't help but being floored by the
| qualitative jump between the new version and the previous
| one.
| wingworks wrote:
| There is a Black Mirror episode on this. They've covered this
| kinda thing a few times.
| 1attice wrote:
| > If a company is going to snoop in your personal data to get
| insights about you, they'd just do it directly. Hiring
| managers would scroll through your e-mails and make judgment
| calls based on their content.
|
| This is like saying, "look, no one would be daft enough to
| draw a graph, they'd just count all the data points and make
| a decision."
|
| You're missing two critical things:
|
| (1) time/effort (2) legal loophole.
|
| A targeted simulation LLM (a scenario I've been independently
| afraid of for several weeks now) would be a brilliant tool
| for (say) an autocratic regime to explore the motivations and
| psychology of protesters; how they relate to one another; who
| they support; what stimuli would demotivate ('pacify') them;
| etc.
|
| In fact, it's such a good opportunity it would be daft _not_
| to construct it. Much like the cartesian graph opened up the
| world of dataviz, simulated people will open up sociology and
| anthropology to casual understanding.
|
| And, until/unless there are good laws in place, it provides a
| fantastic chess-knight leap over existing privacy
| legislation. "Oh, no we don't _read_ your emails, no that
| would be a violation; we simply talk to an LLM that read your
| emails. Your privacy is intact! You-prime says hi! "
| kenjackson wrote:
| > And, until/unless there are good laws in place, it
| provides a fantastic chess-knight leap over existing
| privacy legislation. "Oh, no we don't read your emails, no
| that would be a violation; we simply talk to an LLM that
| read your emails. Your privacy is intact! You-prime says
| hi!"
|
| That seems as poor as saying, "We didn't read your emails
| -- we read a copy of your email after removing all vowels!"
| 1attice wrote:
| Most certainly, yes, it's as poor as saying that.
|
| But we live in distressed times, and the law is not as
| sane and sober as it once was. (Take, for example, the
| Tiktok congressional hearing; the wildly overbroad
| RESTRICT act; etc.)
|
| If the people making and enforcing the laws are as
| clueless and as partisan as they by-all-accounts now are,
| what gives you hope that, somehow, some reasonable judge
| will set a reasonable precedent? What gives you hope that
| someone will pass a bill that has enough foresight to
| stave off non-obvious and emergent uses for AI?
|
| This is not the timeline where things continue to make
| sense.
| epups wrote:
| > This is like saying, "look, no one would be daft enough
| to draw a graph, they'd just count all the data points and
| make a decision."
|
| Not really. Assuming your ethical compass is broken and you
| suspected your partner of cheating, would you rather have
| access to their emails or to a LLM trained on them? Also,
| isn't it much cheaper for Google to simply search for
| keywords rather than fine tuning a model for this?
|
| At least in the EU, a system like this would be made
| illegal on day one. This whole doomsday scenario seems
| predicated on a hypothetical future where LLM's would be
| the least of your worries.
| nindalf wrote:
| I think flouted works better than flaunted when talking about
| laws.
| softfalcon wrote:
| > Adding an LLM abstraction layer doesn't make the existing
| laws (or social/moral pressure) go away.
|
| Isn't the "abstraction" of "the model" exactly the reason we
| have open court filings against stable diffusion and other
| models for possibly stealing artist's work in the open source
| domain and claiming it's legal while also being financially
| backed by major corporations who are then using said models
| for profit?
|
| Whose to say that "training a model on your data isn't
| actually stealing your data" it's just "training a model" as
| long as you delete the original data after you finish
| training?
|
| What if instead of Google snooping, they hire a 3rd party to
| snoop it, then another 3rd party to transfer it, then another
| 3rd party to build the model, then another 3rd party to re-
| sell the model. Then create legal loopholes around which ones
| are doing it for "research" and which ones are doing it for
| profit/hiring. All of the sudden, it gets really murky who is
| and isn't allowed to have a model of you.
|
| I feel one could argue that the abstraction is exactly the
| kind of smoke screen that many will use to avoid the
| social/moral pressures legally, allowing them to do bad
| things but get away with it.
| PragmaticPulp wrote:
| > for possibly stealing artist's work in the open source
| domain
|
| The provenance of the training set is key. Every LLM
| company so far has been extremely careful to avoid using
| people's private data for LLM training, and for good
| reason.
|
| If a company were to train an LLM exclusively on a single
| person's private data and then use that LLM to make
| decisions about that person, the intention is very clearly
| to access that person's private data. There is no way they
| could argue otherwise.
| softfalcon wrote:
| I've spoken with a lawyer about data collection in the
| past and I think there might be a case if you were to:
|
| - collect thousands of people's data
|
| - anonymize it
|
| - then shadow correlate the data in a web
|
| - then trace a trail through said web for each
| "individual"
|
| - then train several individuals as models
|
| - then abstract that with a model on top of those models
|
| Now you have a legal case that it's merely an academic
| research into independent behaviors affecting a larger
| model. Even though you may have collected private data,
| the anonymization of it might fall under ethical data
| collection purposes (Meta uses this loophole for their
| shadow profiling).
|
| Unfortunately, I don't think it is as cut and dry as you
| explained. As far as I know, these laws are already being
| side-stepped.
|
| For the record, I don't like it. I think this is a bad
| thing. Unfortunately, it's still arguably "legal".
| Wowfunhappy wrote:
| I realize that data can be de-anonymized, but if the same
| party anonymized _and_ de-anonymized the data... well,
| IANAL, and you apparently talked to one, but that doesn
| 't seem like something a court would like.
| dragonwriter wrote:
| > Every LLM company so far has been extremely careful to
| avoid using private people's data for LLM training
|
| No, they haven't. (Now, if you said "people's private
| data" instead of "private people's data", you'd be, at
| least, _less_ wrong.)
| rcme wrote:
| > If a company is going to snoop in your personal data to get
| insights about you, they'd just do it directly. Hiring
| managers would scroll through your e-mails and make judgment
| calls based on their content.
|
| Maybe, but LLMs have incredibly intricate connections between
| all the different parameters in the model. For instance,
| perhaps someone who does mundane things X, Y, Z, also turns
| out to be racist. An LLM can build a connection between X, Y,
| Z whereas a recruiter could not. An LLM could also be used to
| standardize responses among candidates. E.g. a recruiter
| could tune an LLM on a candidate and then ask "What do you
| think about other races? Please pick one of the four
| following options: ...". A recruiter wouldn't even be
| necessary. This could all be part of an automated
| prescreening process.
| CSSer wrote:
| I think any HR manager or legal professional that would let
| a company anywhere near this shouldn't be employed as such.
| This sounds like a defamation lawsuit waiting to happen.
| rcme wrote:
| Perhaps "racism detector" is a bit too on the nose.
| Replace racism with any hiring characteristic: e.g. "How
| would you handle this work conflict?"
| Jeff_Brown wrote:
| It's less accurate but far cheaper. In even half-rational
| actors (and I think companies qualify as half rational)
| costs, not just benefits, matter.
| sklrgjtwlekrjt wrote:
| That takes way too long though. Creating/training/testing an
| LLM can be automated. Why do the interviews at all, why pay a
| hiring manager at all, when you can just do everything
| virtually and have an AI spit out a list of names to send
| offers to and how much each offer should be?
| jrm4 wrote:
| No -- but what it DOES do is possibly "put the idea in
| someone's head."
|
| As I've always said: the thing about the big companies that
| suck up your data, consider any possible idea of what they
| could do with it. Ask, is it:
|
| - not expressly and clearly illegal? - at least a little bit
| plausibly profitable?
|
| If the answer is yes to both, you should act as if they're
| going to do it. And if they openly promise not to do it, but
| with no legal guarantee, that means they're DEFINITELY going
| to eventually do it. (see e.g. what's done with your genetic
| data by the 23 and me's and such)
| lantry wrote:
| relevant krazam: https://youtu.be/BrQyMrmRBsk
| JohnFen wrote:
| > How many emails, text messages, hangouts/gchat messages, etc,
| does Google have of you right now?
|
| Very few, fortunately! I don't use Google services for these
| things, nor do the vast majority of my friends and family.
| leroy-is-here wrote:
| Of course Google et. al can build a chat bot that chats like
| you. But _is_ you? No, how can Google build something that
| knows unless you've stated it?
| bratao wrote:
| That is the plot of Westworld
| joshxyz wrote:
| what, they gonna create a digital copy of me who spends my
| waking life googling how to do this and that in a certain
| programming language? lol
|
| that police subpoena is quite possible though. part of me
| thinks it already exists.
| Zetice wrote:
| > And as part of their agreement, they can do pretty much
| whatever they like with those, can't they?
|
| What? No haha, they aren't able to read your emails or use them
| as training data for an LLM.
| wintermutestwin wrote:
| >they aren't able to read your emails or use them as training
| data for an LLM.
|
| I'd love to see the policy or law that prevents Google from
| doing either.
| Zetice wrote:
| https://policies.google.com/privacy?hl=en-US
| ly3xqhl8g9 wrote:
| Going one step further: what if _you right now_ are a replay
| running in some datacenter, deja vecu [1] feelings appear when
| they scale down the VM due to costs. Basically, the simulation
| hypothesis, but the simulators are not mysterious, just
| boringly distopian: some suits trying to raise KPIs.
|
| [1] already lived,
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/D%C3%A9j%C3%A0_vu#D%C3%A9j%C3%...
| insane_dreamer wrote:
| > Could Google, or any other company out there, build a digital
| copy of you that answers questions exactly the way you would?
| "Hey, we're going to cancel the interview- we found that you
| aren't a good culture fit here in 72% of our simulations and we
| don't think that's an acceptable risk."
|
| This will happen
| 13years wrote:
| For all the fears of AGI, these are the more concrete nefarious
| uses we can actually reason about. It is a point I often make
| that we don't need AGI for AI to already become very disturbing
| in its potential use.
|
| The other point, is that technically this AI is not
| "unaligned". It is doing exactly what is requested of the
| operator.
|
| The implications are that humanity suffers in either scenario,
| either by our own agency in control of power we are not
| prepared to manage or we will be managed by power that we can
| not control.
| PragmaticPulp wrote:
| > It is a point I often make that we don't need AGI for AI to
| already become very disturbing in its potential use.
|
| But we don't need AI or LLMs _at all_ for the above scenario.
| Companies don 't currently pry into your e-mails to make
| hiring decisions, but they could (ignoring laws) do it if
| they wanted. No LLM or AI necessary.
|
| So why would the existence of AIs or LLMs change that?
|
| If they wanted to use the content of your e-mails against
| you, they don't need an LLM to do it.
| dangond wrote:
| Because it's now cheaper and more cost-effective, and if
| they can get away with it, saves them tons of money. Note:
| I don't think companies are likely to do this, but being
| able to do this without AI is not sufficient reason to
| dismiss the possibility. It's the same reason people who
| wouldn't steal DVDs from a store would pirate movies
| online. Much harder to get caught and easier to do, so this
| new way of watching movies for free became popular while
| the previous method was not.
| nonbirithm wrote:
| I feel like the backlash against Stable Diffusion had the
| opposite change in visibility. It revealed that thousands
| of people wanted a way to produce unique art in the
| styles of living artists, where some of those people
| might have gone to either their Patreon or a piracy site
| that scraped Patreon instead. Either way they're not as
| visible if they're only consuming the result.
|
| To some artists, AI generated images from their styles
| would amount to "productive piracy." Unlike torrenting
| the act is often out in the open since users tend to
| share the results online. I'm not sure if this phenomenon
| has happened before; with teenagers pirating Photoshop
| it's impossible to tell from a glance if the output is
| from a pirated version.
| chamakits wrote:
| Because the law as it stands today for AI and LLMs is
| untested; and because it's untested, it's frequently seen
| by AI based products and companies as something that can be
| done without legal ramifications or at least something that
| isn't blocking their products from being used this way.
| 13years wrote:
| Whenever we get to see behind the corporate veil, we often
| find companies don't abide by laws. How many companies
| failed this year hiding nefarious activities?
|
| Also, what types of behavior did we get a glimpse of from
| the Twitter Files?
|
| Aren't there always constant lawsuits about bad behavior of
| companies especially around privacy?
|
| So yes, we are talking about the same behavior existing,
| but the concern is that they now get orders of magnitude
| more power to extend such bad behavior.
| PragmaticPulp wrote:
| > Also, what types of behavior did we get a glimpse of
| from the Twitter Files?
|
| Can you actually explain the types of bad behavior? The
| rhetorical question about The Twitter Files somehow being
| a groundbreaking expose of bad behavior doesn't really
| match anything I've seen. Most of what was cited was
| essentially a social media company trying to enforce
| their rules.
|
| Might want to read up on the latest developments there.
| Several journalists have debunked a lot of the key claims
| in the "Twitter Files". Taibbi's part was particularly
| egregious, with some key numbers he used being completely
| wrong (e.g. claiming millions when the actual number was
| in the thousands, exaggerating how Twitter was using the
| data, etc.).
|
| Even Taibbi and Elon have since had a falling out and
| Taibbi is leaving Twitter.
|
| If Elon Musk so famously and publicly hates journalists
| for lying, spinning the truth, and pushing false
| narratives, why would he enlist journalists for "The
| Twitter Files"? The answer is in plain view: He wanted to
| take a nothingburger and use journalists to put a spin on
| it, then push a narrative.
|
| Elon spent years saying that journalists can't be trusted
| because they're pushing narratives, so when Elon enlists
| a select set of journalists to push a narrative, why
| would you believe it's accurate?
|
| > So yes, we are talking about the same behavior
| existing, but the concern is that they now get orders of
| magnitude more power to extend such bad behavior.
|
| No they don't. The ultimate power is being able to read
| the e-mails directly. LLMs abstract that with a lower
| confidence model that is known to hallucinate answers
| when the underlying content doesn't have a satisfactory
| set of content.
| 13years wrote:
| That is not evidence against bad behavior, that is more
| evidence of bad behavior.
|
| I agree that Musk has not honored his original intent. He
| has already broken in many ways the transparency pledge
| and free speech principles.
|
| Yet, these were already broken under previous ownership.
| We simply see that as continuing.
| pixl97 wrote:
| Running an authoritarian police state is risky because of
| all the people involved in the authoritarian police state,
| also it's massively expensive to keep all those people
| snooping and you have to take them out and kill them on
| occasion because they learn too much.
|
| But wait, you can just dump that information into a
| superAIcomputer and get reliable enough results while not
| needing a break with little to no risk of the computer
| rising up against you. Sounds like a hell of a deal.
|
| Quantity is a quality in itself.
| beefield wrote:
| > Could Google, or any other company out there, build a digital
| copy of you that answers questions exactly the way you would?
| "Hey, we're going to cancel the interview- we found that you
| aren't a good culture fit here in 72% of our simulations and we
| don't think that's an acceptable risk."
|
| Well, on the other hand, in the successful case, why bother
| hiring if the digital copy already answers all questions like
| you (except likely faster)?
| 29athrowaway wrote:
| Wait until you head about mind uploading and transhumanism.
| chasd00 wrote:
| heh take the turing test one step further. If you can't tell
| the difference between the real person and the LLM of that
| real person then which one is real?
| dorkwood wrote:
| > Could Google, or any other company out there, build a digital
| copy of you that answers questions exactly the way you would?
| "Hey, we're going to cancel the interview- we found that you
| aren't a good culture fit here in 72% of our simulations and we
| don't think that's an acceptable risk."
|
| To fix this, you can train your personal LLM on the "FAANG
| Appropriate Banter" dataset, and then have it send messages to
| your friends daily for several months in the lead up to your
| interview.
| startupsfail wrote:
| Don't worry. They'll take you, you'd just be sorted to
| Gryffindor or what not :)
| raphar wrote:
| I think that Facebook has a better data set than Google for all
| this. The interactions stored in their servers are way more
| spontaneous than emails. (FB, IG & WhatsApp!!) No one is better
| positioned to make "artificial persons" than they are.
| fragsworth wrote:
| I don't think Google would want the PR hit for doing such
| things. I suspect that they even have hang-ups about training
| their general-purpose AIs on your private data, because they
| might accidentally leak some of it. A lot of their business
| exists because people trust them to keep your data safe (even
| from their internal teams), and they would lose a lot of
| business if anyone discovered otherwise.
|
| I think it will be a wild couple of years but there are lots of
| things that are off-limits.
| pixl97 wrote:
| Instead Google would just by a "person score" much like we
| already buy credit scores from third party companies with
| questionable data use policies.
|
| Google gets to wash its hands of the data responsibility, but
| all the same negative issues for the user is still there.
| tiagod wrote:
| They could train a LMM to reply to emails like I would.
| Probably very useless, I don't really use email for personal
| stuff.
| sebastianconcpt wrote:
| Well, my maxim with AIs is that all they express is a lie
| unless proven true.
|
| Nothing good can come out of taking too seriously the output of
| algebra parrots.
| flangola7 wrote:
| It's a parrot that a growing number of people have said made
| them unemployed.
| antman wrote:
| Ok I assume somebody is already training on HN responses, speak
| up and point us to the github url, thanks in advance
| [deleted]
| obblekk wrote:
| Great write up, thanks for posting. I've been thinking of doing
| this for myself.
|
| One thought that's haunting: how long before AI friends are more
| interesting and stimulating than any real person would be,
| leading people to prefer AI over humans to befriend...
|
| Super stimulus to end all super stimuluses?
| lurker919 wrote:
| Doesn't make sense to me - google/the internet already has more
| facts/jokes/interesting stuff than my friends could ever
| produce. It still can't replace my friends because my friends
| have agency and are invested in my life.
| chasd00 wrote:
| People already take RealDolls out on dates and buy them
| engagement rings. Im sure that company is all over LLM based AI
| and incorporating home assistant tech (like Alexa) into their
| products.
| sharemywin wrote:
| record an old girlfriends texts but change them so they say
| what you want.
| coryrc wrote:
| I think the Orville has something to say about how that turns
| out. (S02e11)
| r3trohack3r wrote:
| > One thought that's haunting: how long before AI friends are
| more interesting and stimulating than any real person would be
|
| It can simultaneously pass the bar exam and port Java
| applications by name to POSIX compliant C. It can get into deep
| philosophical conversations, guide you through doing market
| analysis, etc.
|
| It can take you on a text based adventure set in your favorite
| nostalgic video game, take on the personality of characters
| from your childhood, DM a D&D game, etc.
|
| If you are in it for mental stimulation, I'd say GPT-4 is
| already more interesting and stimulating than any human. It's
| like talking to someone who is 50-90th percentile in a wild
| number of fields and wildly creative.
|
| But it can't drop acid with you at a deadhead concert, so at
| least humans still have that to keep us interesting.
| ModernMech wrote:
| Sounds like the commercial for a robot friend I was sold as a
| child:
|
| http://www.theoldrobots.com/MyPal.html
|
| "My brain lights up when I talk. My baseball cap is
| removable. Watch my eyes, ears nose and mouth move as I talk.
| I'll play catch with you using my removable funnel. Store
| your favorite things in my futuristic backpack. Play three
| interactive games on my chest. I'll pitch to you. Pull out my
| hideaway electronic hoop so we can play basketball. Adjust my
| legs to make me sit or stand. Roll me backwards or forwards
| and I'll speak. 3 foam balls and durable bat included. Shake
| my hand and show me we're pals. Use my removable flashlight
| to see in the dark. Tickle me to make me laugh. Store my
| flashlight in my backpack."
|
| What a great friend! More interesting and stimulating than
| any human.
|
| > But it can't drop acid with you at a deadhead concert
|
| And yet it's constantly hallucinating. So maybe it's not that
| it can't drop acid, but that it's _always on acid_. Food for
| thought.
| SanderNL wrote:
| A few years back when it was less castrated, I indeed derived
| lots of enjoyment from conversing with it. I did it the
| oldskool way, creating a chat prompt and stopping at my turn
| to speak. Great fun. Normal humans are really quite limited.
| ChatGPT is a bit too woke for my taste and I can't get it
| quite to my taste. Oh well..
|
| Luckily I don't have the type of personality that gets
| addicted easily because I think this could be an issue for
| people. ("You mean I can talk intelligently for hours about
| one scene in Star Wars without judgement or rolling eyes??")
| ubertaco wrote:
| This is a concept in the sci-fi book _The Mountain in the Sea_
| , where people have "point-fives" (as in 0.5) -- AI companions
| custom-tailored to be the ideal zero-effort-required friend for
| you.
|
| In the book, it starts from someone jokingly observing that
| many people don't want a full relationship, with 2 full people
| learning one another and being there for each other -- instead,
| many people want just the easy/fun parts of a relationship:
| they want something with 1.5 people, where they get to be the 1
| "full person" and the other person is only 0.5 of a person,
| able to make you happy or satisfy your wants and needs while
| never asking anything of you in return and never having any
| needs of their own.
|
| Then some unnamed tech company in the scifi-future-geography
| "SF-SD Axis" (sounds like San Francisco to me) builds and
| product-izes that, at first pitching it as a therapy/rehab
| tool, but eventually expanding it out until they're more
| ubiquitous and many people have isolated themselves to only
| having their "point-five" as a close friend. One character
| observes "I think this is the longest conversation I've had
| with a real person in years" after talking with another person
| for an hour or two.
|
| I haven't finished the book, so I don't know how that plays
| out, but as someone who believes firmly in humans' need for
| community (including, at times, _uncomfortable_ community),
| that concept was chilling against the backdrop of ChatGPT/LLM
| headlines.
|
| Imagine all the isolation problems of today, along with all the
| mess of internet-anonymity-as-replacement-for-friendships that
| exist today -- but cranked to 11 as you no longer even have to
| seek out other humans who share your niche views (redpill,
| incel, neonazi, you name it), because now you can just interact
| with sufficiently-realistic simulations of people designed to
| reinforce all your own thoughts back to you.
| rodface wrote:
| Perhaps this is the form that the singularity takes, not
| towards paperclips but towards the reality from that book.
| The 2020s will go down as a strange decade, that's for sure.
| izzymiller wrote:
| Something i found fascinating about this project was that me
| and my friends would be using the AI group chat, but constantly
| taking screenshots and sending them to the REAL group chat and
| laughing about how funny it was.
|
| Basically, the generated "fake" chats were made 10x funnier by
| the ability to laugh about them with the "real" chat-- and we
| did this most often when the outputs were most accurate-- so I
| do think there is a Je ne sais quoi to the knowledge that
| something is "real" that makes you behave differently and get
| different value out of it.
| mahathu wrote:
| >how long before AI friends are more interesting and
| stimulating than any real person would be
|
| why would this ever happen?
| grugagag wrote:
| Neat. But I fail to see any useful use case for this. As a
| learning experience it's greeat though
| Invictus0 wrote:
| I'm absolutely astounded by this comment
| CatWChainsaw wrote:
| You can use it to replace the people you care most about in
| life if you have so much as a petty argument, because machines
| are perfect and people are not. :)
| syntaxing wrote:
| This is awesome, clear and concise explanation. I was talking to
| my wife and debating whether I should build a model of each of us
| and store it somewhere in case something tragic happens to either
| of us. But we decided not to because something about it felt
| wrong but maybe I'll make it just in case I regret not doing
| later on.
| meowface wrote:
| I really don't understand this sort of thing at all. Even a
| hypothetical distant future AI that had a human level of
| sentience and intelligence and could perfectly emulate you in
| every way still would not be you (even if it could
| hypothetically be indistinguishable from you in communication),
| and it's especially odd now with the crude simulacrum it would
| provide.
|
| If you're gone, you're gone. Some model of your brain or body
| isn't going to bring you back, and I don't see how it would
| help anyone recover from grief. It would just make me feel way
| worse, and very creeped out.
|
| Why not skip the AI part and just create an archive of writings
| and communications and such so they can recall memories of you
| if they wish?
| og_kalu wrote:
| Hypothetical distant future? Lmao
|
| It's already here mate. GPT-4 is human level intelligence
| however you'd wish to evaluate.
|
| I agree a model of your brain is not strictly speaking you.
| But it might be close for what someone might want.
| nicenewtemp84 wrote:
| Human level is putting it mildly. Which human? I've tried
| showing it to a few people that barely understand the
| answers and miss insights given in previous answers 2
| minutes prior.
|
| My dad and I played around with asking it questions about a
| rare proprietary piece of software he uses at work. My dad
| is decent at the software and even does consulting after
| hours because so few people are know it. Chatgpt was
| teaching him things he never even knew about, or thought
| about doing. And my dad is pretty decent at his work.
| og_kalu wrote:
| For sure. average human is just the lower bound of
| intelligence on a few tasks. On most, it's well above
| average. On others, it's in the top %
| Cyphase wrote:
| Did your dad ever search online trying to learn new
| things about the software? I've seen the experience you
| describe happen with people spontaneously discovering
| Ctrl+L and Ctrl+R in bash, e.g. in a comment here on HN.
| They could have found it years ago if they'd searched for
| "list of bash features" or whatever.
|
| My point is that your example is not necessarily more
| than "a better search engine" (with all caveats about it
| not being "search"). People are asking ChatGPT things
| that they could have searched for previously. Some of it
| is because it can provide a better search-like
| experience, for sure. Some of it is, "let me play with my
| new toy", and getting answers the old toy could have
| given you.
|
| I'm addressing your specific example, not making a
| blanket comment on LLM intelligence. And to clarify, I've
| also used these models in ways I could have before, for
| both of those reasons. They do offer a productivity
| boost.
| nicenewtemp84 wrote:
| I have tried to help him with that software before. It's
| in a niche CNC manufacturing type industry. You can find
| people discussing problems in forums sometimes, but even
| that was always sparse. Honestly I don't think you could
| even find proper docs for that software. I even tried
| asking chatgpt where to get the documentation for what it
| was telling us and it basically just said the help file
| in the program, but we looked and it was nowhere near as
| helpful as chatgpt answers. I don't know where it pulled
| all that info to be honest. But even if it was out there,
| the ease at which it gave great answers that fit exactly
| what we threw at it made it 10x more (or more) valuable
| than spam filled and loosely related google results.
| technothrasher wrote:
| There was an episode of the old 80's TV show "Max Headroom"
| which explored the idea that a new age church was taking
| advantage of people by providing kiosks, for a price, that
| contained a crude digital simulation of their lost loved
| ones. The show came down pretty much on the side of "it's
| just creepy, false hope".
| syntaxing wrote:
| That's what we've came to the conclusion too, kinda like the
| movie Transcendence. It is a pretty interesting conversation
| to talk and think about though from a moral, humane, and
| social aspect.
| greenhearth wrote:
| Would you not want her to move on, and be allowed the same
| privilege? This is unnatural and probably unhealthy.
| theGnuMe wrote:
| It might actually be helpful in that process. Many people
| report talking to a loved one in a dream and getting to say
| something to them and that helped move on for example.
| chasd00 wrote:
| idk, an LLM of a deceased loved one would be the cruelest
| thing possible in my mind. If I imagine my wife passing
| away and then having an LLM trained to resembler her I
| could see myself coming back to it all the time. Knowing
| it's not her but just close enough to keep me coming back
| wishing it was sounds like misery forever.
| greenhearth wrote:
| Do you not think this is a bit different than keeping a
| catalogue of their personality that you can access at any
| time? Would this be fair to a new partner - "Sorry honey, I
| didn't mean to cheat on you with my dead wife?"
| xwdv wrote:
| You certainly won't regret it. If you need to get information
| out of your wife and she won't cooperate you can coerce the LLM
| of your wife into having it divulge private information that
| your wife won't reveal. This can be very useful for something
| like a divorce case.
|
| Best to find a way to keep the LLM regularly training on new
| data as well.
|
| _Edit_ : stop downvoting ideas you don't like, that's not what
| it's for.
| cmilton wrote:
| How would the LLM be trained with information she wouldn't
| divulge?
| circuit10 wrote:
| Not sure if this is a joke but this in case it isn't, no,
| that's not how it works, it will just make up random
| plausible-ish guesses
| sharemywin wrote:
| this reminds me of the time I got in trouble for shit I did
| in a dream of my wife's.
|
| not really in trouble but you know.
| xwdv wrote:
| Knowledge is just a series of words in a highly probable
| order, it will work. The jury will be easily convinced.
| aarong11 wrote:
| Isn't that what humans do?
| anotherman554 wrote:
| I think the closest analogy to what the above poster
| wants to do would be to talk to a fortune teller when
| your wife won't tell you something, give the fortune
| teller information about your wife, and then "present"
| the fortune teller's fortune reading stating what your
| wife was up to in a divorce case.
|
| It's true that humans sometimes do things like this! It
| doesn't go well for them.
| jacquesm wrote:
| That's beyond creepy.
| davidcbc wrote:
| Sorry, my LLM trained exclusively on bad ideas is posting
| again
| bigbillheck wrote:
| > Edit: stop downvoting ideas you don't like, that's not what
| it's for.
|
| I will continue to downvote creepy ideas as I please.
| xwdv wrote:
| You are increasing the echo of the chamber.
| circuit10 wrote:
| The "idea" doesn't even make any sense
| notduncansmith wrote:
| Poe's Law strikes again
| krisoft wrote:
| > maybe I'll make it just in case I regret not doing later on
|
| Maybe. But please consider the question of consent. If I agree
| with my partner that we are not doing this and then he/she does
| it behind my back I would feel violated.
|
| What is probably a lot better idea is to store the
| conversations securely for the future.
|
| Lot less icky to get consent to. Protects against all the
| mundane forms of data loss, like dropped phones, fire, flood,
| global entity blocking your accounts, etc etc. And! You still
| have the option to build a model at any point. Presumably an
| even better one, since the tech is likely to improve in the
| future.
| AlchemistCamp wrote:
| I've heard several people doing this and chatting with simulacra
| of their friends, but you can always just send your friends a
| message and chat with the real version.
|
| My first inclination was always to try a conversation with a
| virtual me (yay recursion!) I've always thought that would be
| fascinating. Or scanning in my old journals from when I was a
| teenager and training it on that. Once this technology improves a
| bit more, it could be an incredible vehicle for reflection and
| personal discovery.
| J5892 wrote:
| Now I'm curious about training a bot on my IRC logs from the
| early 2000s.
|
| It'd be like a chat time machine. I'd love to go back and
| bullshit with long-lost online friends about modding Halo:CE on
| Xbox again.
| JasonZ2 wrote:
| [dead]
| falcor84 wrote:
| >... but you can always just send your friends a message and
| chat with the real version.
|
| Well, until they aren't there anymore.
| netsharc wrote:
| Like this in 2016 (before it became easy like nowadays)
| https://www.theverge.com/a/luka-artificial-intelligence-
| memo...
| macNchz wrote:
| I've read plenty about the potential catastrophe of AI putting
| people out of work or becoming uncontrollable in some grand sci-
| fi way, but uses like this make me the most concerned for the
| near-mid term.
|
| Broadly I think the internet, social media, and to some degree
| the physical arrangement of suburban/car dependent living has had
| a negative impact on genuine human connection. While the ability
| of people to interact has increased exponentially, something is
| missing from those interactions, and we seem to have built
| societies where people have more material wealth than ever
| before, but lack the community, friendships, and shared
| experience that help us find meaning and fulfillment in life. A
| world where we accelerate this by replacing human connection with
| machines does not look good to me.
| jerf wrote:
| At the moment, I'm having a hard time imagining how this all
| does not terminate in people returning to more direct human
| engagements, and limiting interaction online to people we've
| physically met and validated.
|
| I can sit here and name dozens of entities willing to spend
| millions or billions of dollars building the tech to influence
| me individually at scale with AIs, each for their own reasons,
| none of which are aligned with my actual interests except for a
| fringe here and there for sheer coincidence reasons. The only
| winning move becomes not to play. It's clearly a tragedy of the
| commons for those entities because their efforts will ruin the
| internet for all of them but there is no chance whatsoever that
| they can coordinate their efforts to prevent it, so the game
| theory is clear for each of them: Go all in on exploiting the
| opportunity as fast as possible, as thoroughly as possible, for
| as much benefit as possible.
|
| This could well happen faster than we realize. I held out some
| hope that the expense of it would slow things down, but people
| keep getting to where they're running this on a RaspPi and
| such, and the models are clearly out in the wild so the cost of
| starting up is negligible.
|
| The only thing I can think of that would even slow this process
| down is to drop basically every site that accepts user input
| (like HN, reddit, etc.) behind a paywall significant enough to
| inhibit mass account creation. That doesn't solve the problem,
| just slows it down. Otherwise I literally see nothing between
| us and the Dead Internet Theory in two, three years tops.
| Olumde wrote:
| A few days ago while explaining what ChatGPT is to a friend I
| speculated that it would be possible to teach a bot how you
| reason so much that it would in effect become you.
|
| You can live forever.
|
| And now this.
| PurpleRamen wrote:
| How well would this work with public messages of people like Elon
| Musk or Donald Trump? Image some company training their chat-
| lovebots on celebs and selling them as a service. Or a creepy
| "friend" making a secret bot of you, and incorporating sexual
| content.
|
| And a disadvantage of this will be, you can only emulate the
| public image of a person. It won't really contain the inner
| workings of a Person, and will not have the "person" grow over
| time.
| nicenewtemp84 wrote:
| In most scenarios that I'd get to talk to Elon or Trump, I'd
| probably get the public persona too. So an AI trained on that
| and giving it back to me isn't that useless really.
|
| When trained on a private chat group like OPs, you get the
| private persona towards your friends group. You can talk to
| your friend for 10 years and still not really know how they
| would reply to their bosses email, so this isn't that much
| different.
| teleforce wrote:
| Interestingly Steve Jobs was envisioning the future feasibility
| of having Aristotle or Aristotle like figures that can modeled
| and turned into a chatbot back in 1983:
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35535700
| 13years wrote:
| The societal ramifications of such advancements are potentially
| very disturbing. What I've recently written on the topic myself
| ...
|
| _Human to human bonds are going to be more broken than ever
| before. There is going to be a great appeal to bond with a
| machine that never tires of your conversation and will eagerly
| respond just as you would dream that the perfect human should,
| but never will. A deceptive temptation that will leave you
| embracing a hollow illusion. With every conversation the AI will
| know you better and will be able to model from billions of
| conversations until it will essentially know your thoughts,
| predict your thoughts_
|
| https://dakara.substack.com/p/ai-and-the-end-to-all-things
| xkcd1963 wrote:
| Things only hackernews may entail or wish for
| lapama wrote:
| Actually many many people go through such conversations inside
| their brain.
| salmonlogs wrote:
| Highly recommend the TV show Black Mirror, which has an episode
| called "Be Right Back" where a character talks to her dead
| husband using an AI trained model in an app type setup.
|
| Very interesting discussion piece on the real world impact and
| repercussions of these types of systems
| lapama wrote:
| How long until LLMs can coach you to become your dreamed self,
| thus transforming human experience into empowered vs. non?
| pl90087 wrote:
| Looking for a browser extension to filter out all GPT/LLM/AI/...
| noise from HN front page. This is going to far.
|
| Anybody?
| dang wrote:
| You posted this 3 times - that's abusive; please stop.
|
| I appreciate how frustrating it can be when a topic you're not
| interested in is over-represented on HN's front page.
|
| We're trying to deal with the current LLM tsunami by
| downweighting follow-ups [1] and repetitive posts [2] (i.e. the
| less interesting stuff) while still allowing the posts with
| significant new information [3]. But there's still a lot of the
| latter (that's what makes it a tsunami) and it wouldn't be in
| the community interest not to discuss it.
|
| [1]
| https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
|
| [2]
| https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so...
|
| [3]
| https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so...
| pl90087 wrote:
| You're right. That was stupid, I'm sorry.
|
| Thanks for your efforts!
| version_five wrote:
| While it may not be completely satisfactory, you can just click
| "hide" next to the stories.
| ryanianian wrote:
| Very reminiscent of the Be Right Back episode of Black Mirror
| [1].
|
| A family member recently died unexpectedly, and I have a small
| collection of texts, emails, and blog posts by them saved on my
| machine in the small (perhaps delusional) hope that they'll be a
| useful training set for a them-flavored chatbot. Perhaps even one
| that's trained to help me with the grief of their loss. Not a
| huge amount of training data, though. I suspect a training model
| would have to "fill in the holes" (a la Jurassic Park DNA), and
| that's where the fun begins.
|
| [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Be_Right_Back
| hirundo wrote:
| https://abcnews.go.com/Technology/high-tech-headstones-speak...
|
| People already buy headstones that let the dead speak a pre-
| recorded message from the grave. It's a natural extension to
| put an AI trained with their thoughts behind it that can engage
| in actual conversation. That isn't for me, but I have gone to
| my father's grave to speak to him, and I can sympathize with
| the wish to have him speak back.
|
| I am looking forward to conversing with prolific writers among
| the dead, from Hitchens to Lincoln to Aristotle.
| rideontime wrote:
| Apparently they didn't buy them, though.
| http://www.personalrosettastone.com/
| amelius wrote:
| Another interesting thing would be people wearing a GoPro
| camera all day, recording each other. Then you can train a
| model on people based on their interaction with one person, but
| also wrt other people. And then you can have the experience of
| virtually talking to a person as if you were another person.
| krzrak wrote:
| On a side note, I thought a little bit about that concept. For
| me, recreating deceased loved one with AI would be reigniting
| the grief all over again. I would want to avoid that.
|
| Maybe, just maybe, I would be able to use it, for example, to
| see my grandparents who died ~30 years ago, as a curiosity, but
| still I'm not sure if I'd want to.
| toomuchtodo wrote:
| My interest is training a model on myself and everything I've
| learned through life so that if I die, my kids might be able
| to extract some value from my experience. Learning life on
| your own without help can be tiring and costly (both
| emotionally and financially), and bad advice can be worse
| than no advice. A guide would be helpful imho. Step 1:
| survive. Step 2: enable yourself to thrive.
|
| I already have boxes of paper notes and videos I've recorded,
| as well as books and url bookmarks, just need to get them
| into a machine readable format.
|
| https://irobot.fandom.com/wiki/Alfred_Lanning
| pc86 wrote:
| This all assumes the model would give them good advice,
| which is sort of based on the assumption you would give
| them good advice, right?
| akiselev wrote:
| If the AI could extract advice to give people from his
| life experience, wouldn't that be an advanced enough AGI
| not to need his personal experience to begin with? It'd
| just analyze the inputs and dispense personalized wisdom.
| chasd00 wrote:
| If you wore a voice recorder and recorded all your physical
| interactions with your family for a year then transcribed
| it then trained an LLM I wonder if you could get close.
| blarghyblarg wrote:
| Just imagine this as a subscription service. Lovely! When a
| loved one dies, you donate their cellphone and provide
| delegated access to their messages to their social media, and
| allow a LLM to train.
|
| Now, it's a subscription service to talk to an AI, and not an
| actual human, so some settings can be tweaked. Lets turn up the
| honesty, so we can all reach some closure.
|
| Oh... turns out... Johnny sure like to talk smack behind your
| back. Edna was SUPER gay but had to hide it...
|
| So, so, so many ethical roadblocks. I truly hope this never
| happens, but, I think we all know that if it looks profitable,
| it's coming soon.
| zamnos wrote:
| Oh no, Edna was gay (and a Republican). Whatever will we do.
| What a huge calamity. The family will never recover from
| this.
|
| Low-cost DNA testing has caused a number of families to learn
| about infidelities more easily than before. That technology
| is out of the bag, and the same with LLMs. If Johnny is a
| gossip, so what? We already knew that and loved to talk to
| him _because_ he always had the hot goss.
| blarghyblarg wrote:
| You're not wrong, or the other half of the Lebowski quote,
| honestly. It's just going to be another one of the recent
| (~15 years back) technology items that are pushing the
| general public toward transparent lives.
|
| I guess it's not so much an ethical issue as it is an issue
| of letting sleeping dogs lie. I can tell you that with a
| very small amount of "dna uncertainty" in my (ancestral)
| family, I'll never get a 23-and-me done because I just
| don't want to be cataloged and accidentally paired up with
| some random family who doesn't know what they don't know.
|
| As long as they're opt-in services, it's not a huge issue
| for me, just... the first wave of people doing this will be
| in for some uncomfortable surprises.
| slashdev wrote:
| Combine that with AI to emulate their voice, and AI renderings
| to use photos of their face to render a 3d model that moves
| it's lips and face realistically as it talks (both of which
| already exist). Yeah, you could with today's technology "bring
| back" a loved one and be able to talk to them, even verbally,
| and see and hear them respond and even have some shared history
| in common, if it was in the training set.
|
| It could send you greetings automatically on your brithday.
|
| Would it be helpful in coping with loss, or just a painful
| reminder? I don't know. Maybe both at the same time.
| Steuard wrote:
| This feels very dark to me: I think it would make it enormously
| harder to actually process the grief. (The thought "You could
| make one to mimic your ex" passed through my head just long
| enough for me to recoil in absolute horror.)
| chasd00 wrote:
| yeah i was thinking to myself i could train an LLM on my
| wife's social media history because it's extensive. But i
| concluded one wife is enough.
| 1123581321 wrote:
| I could see someone doing that to practice bringing up a
| difficult suggestion like moving to another state, or
| trying a sexual fantasy. I'm not proposing this actually be
| done, mind you. It doesn't seem healthy. But LLM usage is
| hardly about advancing healthy behavior so far, despite
| their emphasis on safety.
| lapama wrote:
| Material for a meme. Next... Imagine a triple boss.
| probably_wrong wrote:
| First, someone did exactly that and created a chatbot to
| emulate his dead fiancee [1]. You can read about their
| experience.
|
| In my opinion, this type of chatbots will generate mostly
| generic messages ("So, how's the weather?"), but also some
| random ones (I have a chatbot right now that starts answering
| exclusively in emojis for no good reason) and some that are
| actually following the fine-tuned data ("I love fishing!"). I
| believe most people (myself included) will stick to those last
| ones as proof of the chatbot actually answering the way the
| person would have answered and rationalize all evidence to the
| contrary ("maybe grandpa _really_ liked emojis and I just didn
| 't know until now").
|
| I think it has the potential of being therapeutic, but I am not
| a psychologist. And I do worry about the fine line between
| "this realistic baby doll will help you overcome the loss of
| your child" and "this realistic female doll of a woman is
| better than a real woman and I'm going to marry it".
|
| [1] https://www.sfchronicle.com/projects/2021/jessica-
| simulation...
| albert_e wrote:
| On a lighter note this reminds me of the Bobiverse comedy sci-
| fi series on Audible.
|
| Premise of __ We Are Legion (We Are Bob): Bobiverse, Book 1 __
|
| >> Bob Johansson has just sold his software company for a small
| fortune and is looking forward to a life of leisure. The first
| item on his to-do list: Spending his newfound windfall. On an
| urge to splurge, he signs up to have his head cryogenically
| preserved in case of death. Then he gets himself killed
| crossing the street. Waking up 117 years later, Bob discovers
| his mind has been uploaded into a sentient space probe with the
| ability to replicate itself. Bob and his clones are on a
| mission to find new homes for humanity and boldly go where no
| Bob has gone before.
| tayloramurphy wrote:
| Loved the whole Bobiverse series. Highly recommended for
| folks who want a relatively easy sci-fi read.
| darknavi wrote:
| Ray Porter does an amazing narration as well for book
| listeners.
| greedylizard wrote:
| I recommended this series to my friend after he finished
| reading The Expanse. I never thought to describe it as sci-fi
| comedy. Have you found any other good sci-fi comedy series?
| rdlw wrote:
| Almost too popular to recommend but: The Hitchhiker's Guide
| to the Galaxy
| jabroni_salad wrote:
| If you're okay with something only tangentally related,
| "John Dies at the End" is spectacular, along with its
| sequels.
|
| Also ya gotta read 17776 if you like Bobiverse. Try not to
| second guess the url:
| https://www.sbnation.com/a/17776-football
| folex wrote:
| I wouldn't describe it as a comedy as well.
|
| However, I'd recommend Murderbot series, it is full of
| humour and shares atmosphere of Bobiverse and this personal
| approach to characters, as well. Highly recommend.
| Ygor wrote:
| Yes, Bobiverse and Murderbot are very close in spirit,
| and if you like one you are very likely to enjoy the
| other. Also both have great audio narration.
| mjard wrote:
| There is always the Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy.
| m3kw9 wrote:
| Also, take more videos of everyone as they will very soon be
| able to create very accurate 3d renderings of people just from
| videos. More training materials the better, make sure you get
| full views with different aspects , movements, angles and
| expression. Creepy, I know.
|
| Then you can interact with these recreated avatars on your
| vr/ar head sets. Good for kids as when they grow up maybe you
| can recreate some old times lol
| sdwr wrote:
| Wish I had friends who talked mild shit like this! All my friends
| are nerds who take everything seriously.
|
| On the project, did you do anything about the time dimension?
| ChatGPT is strictly input -> output, but something like this
| needs time between messages to feel real (and not run
| constantly). I imagine adding "time since last message" to the
| training data + expected output would work.
| overthrow wrote:
| To be completely realistic, the AI would also need the ability
| to leave you on read.
| J5892 wrote:
| I have an ongoing chat in chatGPT where it's instructed to
| every once in a while ignore my question and just respond
| with "Shut up, nerd."
| mmmmmbop wrote:
| Definitely. I think an AI for my friends would be relatively
| straightforward. It would just never reply.
| kevincox wrote:
| I was thinking it would be interesting to get the model to
| generate timestamps with the messages. Then you could
| actually queue the messages until that time. It would be like
| a real conversation.
|
| Of course if you send a message before the AI does it re-runs
| and produces a new future message with a new timestamp.
| sharemywin wrote:
| wow. did you just call out your friends for being nerdy and say
| the nerdiest thing I've ever heard?
|
| Not that it's not a cool idea, though.
| sdwr wrote:
| Pot calling the kettle dork lol
| izzymiller wrote:
| That's an interesting point! I didn't do much clever here,
| other than sessionizing the conversations (there's a code
| sample in the project) to try and capture full conversations
| rather than disjointed snippets.
|
| My group chat was pretty asynchronous at times, and very fast
| at others, and the character of conversation is very different
| in a fast-paced chat versus an asynchronous one so I think this
| actually would lead to improvements. That's a great idea.
| dexterdog wrote:
| I have groups of friends from growing up and groups of friends
| from a few jobs over the years with chats like this and mine
| are all shit-talking spaces. I wouldn't know how to behave in
| anything else.
| asdev wrote:
| how do you build the knowledge and intuition around how to do
| this?
| chasd00 wrote:
| It would be interesting to train an LLM on all my work chats and
| then see how well it does answering questions when I'm on PTO. I
| could set a status of "ooo but ask my bot" haha.
| cameroncooper wrote:
| Best thing I learned from this article is that Messages on Mac
| stores all your messages in a sqlite db. Pretty cool!
| jamesralph8555 wrote:
| If you don't have a Mac but have an iPhone, iOS does the same
| thing - if you back up to iTunes you can access the database
| file.
| 908087 wrote:
| [dead]
| wpietri wrote:
| This is great!
|
| One of the things that I find horrific about a lot of LLM
| projects is that people are taking them so seriously. "They're
| going to destroy the world!" Or, worse, "I've taken $25m in VC
| money to see if I can destroy one part of the world!"
|
| But this is lighthearted fun. Instead of putting it in a context
| where the LLM tendency to bullshit is a problem, here's it's
| exactly what is needed.
| Fauntleroy wrote:
| It's not that existing tools are particularly dangerous; no,
| they're just really good and interesting text autocomplete
| systems. The danger lies "two more papers down the line," where
| they have 10-100x the capabilities they do now. Those who
| already have immense wealth and power will be able to deploy as
| many human-like internet agents as they'd like, and the
| potential evil applications of that are endless.
| tiberriver256 wrote:
| This seems like a gold mine for funeral homes...
| Erwin wrote:
| Remember Replika and how people got quite attached to that
| chatbot?
|
| I imagine in the near future you'll be able to sell your and your
| friends' chat history to a company building a more advanced,
| realistic chatbot. Do you want to have a group of friends to hang
| out with? Buy an organically fabricated and pre-trained chatbot.
|
| Or maybe there's enough emptieness in your life that you go deep
| assume one of those friends' identity. Go visit that restaurant
| "you" always adored; the other guys will not come but will send
| you hilarious messages saying how they got delayed and tips on
| what to order.
|
| This feels like something right out of Philip K Dick -- both
| Blade Runner and Total Recall had realistic false memories.
| therealdrag0 wrote:
| > sell your chat history
|
| I bet people would give it away for free for a small set of
| functionality in return. Just like we do with social media ad
| data etc.
| kevincox wrote:
| Yeah, this sounds like a great business opportunity.
|
| 1. Allow creating customized chat bots by uploading some
| conversations. Hope people find this fun and you go viral.
|
| 2. Sell the data to highest bidder.
|
| 3. Sell product placements.
| wellanyway wrote:
| So after 20 years of 'ethics of AI' mumbling, what we are doing
| is diving off the deep end. I am not surprised in the least.
| chefandy wrote:
| Developers seem to be looking at these technological
| advancements and seeing, maybe even being wildly speculative
| about the benefits. However, when anyone brings up the very
| probable societal impacts, they stick to hand-waving
| assumptions and platitudes about societal advancements. AI, in
| the hands of developers, is extremely powerful. We all know
| what they say about power...
| rchikhi wrote:
| Great write-up! Here's a similar experiment but instead fine-
| tuned on WhatsApp 1-on-1 chats, technically simpler with OpenAI
| APIs: https://github.com/rchikhi/GPT-is-you/blob/main/README.md
| izzymiller wrote:
| maybe paranoidly, but i just didn't trust openai with my highly
| personal message data. it would certainly have been easier +
| probably cheaper to do it this way, but it just gave me the
| willies.
| kaeruct wrote:
| Sorry if my question is stupid, I am completely new to this. But,
| why exactly is a Weights and Biases account needed? I thought the
| training is running in vast.ai
| layer8 wrote:
| It's probably not long before the HN comment section can be fully
| automated.
| cookie_monsta wrote:
| Next...
|
| https://www.patterns.app/blog/2023/02/19/ask-hn-gpt-embeddin...
| layer8 wrote:
| That's a very different thing, even if it was trained on the
| same data.
| gumballindie wrote:
| Why this obsession with "replacement" instead of tooling?
| evandale wrote:
| I was talking to a non-tech friend about all the AI advancements
| lately and when she asked me what I thought the biggest risk was
| I said it's exactly what we all just experienced the past 3 years
| and realized is awful for human - prolonged social isolation.
|
| My biggest worry is that AI generated art (be it photos, music,
| code, etc.) and AI assistants will become so good we won't need
| other humans to get our social fix.
|
| This is so cool and I plan to try it myself to experience it
| firsthand but this is my nightmare fuel when it comes to my
| biggest fears of AI.
| data-ottawa wrote:
| I've been thinking about this too.
|
| It's funny that the things we always understood as being the
| "most human" activities are actually the first ones being
| gobbled up by AI. Once media consumption becomes almost
| entirely AI created (music, TV, news, and your social media
| feeds), what happens to shared cultural experiences, and how
| does that impact human connection and health?
|
| There's also some new risks to society. What if, similar to
| Roko's basilisk, people who fear losing their jobs to AI try
| and force an end to AI research by helping it become
| sentient/self-hosted? Would we try and stop it, ban research,
| or is AI a train you truly cannot stop at this point?
|
| Lots of interesting questions at least, but lots of scary
| possible answers.
| IIAOPSW wrote:
| LLM bro. Just Learn (to) Love (the) Machine.
| JasonZ2 wrote:
| [dead]
| siftrics wrote:
| ...then hang out with your friends in real life?
| chasd00 wrote:
| I'm wondering how it will turn out too. I wouldn't say it's
| nightmare fuel for me but i wouldn't say i'm optimistic either.
| To me, it may parallel when online dating became a thing. Many
| people were worried about the lack of social interaction in
| online dating and its effects. Online dating is definitely a
| different process than IRL dating but I don't know if the
| outcomes are worse or better.
|
| I can imagine relationships with AI being similar. It's
| definitely going to be different but to say it's worse or
| better may be hard to tell.
| airtonix wrote:
| [dead]
| disqard wrote:
| Asimov's "Solaria" comes to mind:
|
| > Originally, there were about 20,000 people living in vast
| estates individually or as married couples. There were thousands
| of robots for every Solarian. Almost all of the work and
| manufacturing was conducted by robots.
|
| In our particular universe, "thousands of robots" ended up being
| "thousands of chatbots", but still, eerily similar.
| garbagecoder wrote:
| This is why I prefer signal with a short time until auto delete.
| lxe wrote:
| Can vouch for vast.ai as well. At these prices anyone can get
| into llm finetuning at their leisure.
| gibspaulding wrote:
| Reminds me of the bit in Silicon Valley where Gilfoyle makes a
| bot of himself to respond to slack messages. Actually the whole
| final season is pretty relevant to current events.
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y1gFSENorEY
| izzymiller wrote:
| This scene was the seed of inspiration for me to make this
| project! No joke. I thought about doing it but didn't trust the
| 7B model to not make me look stupid ^_^
| prpl wrote:
| Just wait until it's a Slack feature.
|
| ... -> Build Bot from Coworker
|
| @pm-bot, what do you think about a feature that does XYZ?
|
| @intern-bot, implement said feature.
|
| @sre-bot, ...
| oidar wrote:
| In Caprica, the Battlestar Galaticia, spinoff - a dead character
| was embodied in a robot and trained on social media content...
| But in the real world, who owns your LLM dupe output after you
| die?
| faeyanpiraat wrote:
| Thanks for the reminder. FOr some reason I had to put that down
| a couple episodes in. May re-watch it again from the beginning.
| Hope I haven't shelved it due to woke cringiness as I still
| don't tolerate that.
| roarcher wrote:
| Caprica isn't woke from what I recall, it just isn't as good
| as BSG. Still worth watching for the backstory though.
| Jcowell wrote:
| Tangent but what was woke about the _2004_ adaption of
| Battlestar Galatica?
| jwithington wrote:
| The parent comment was talking about Caprica, which is
| different than BSG.
|
| But some people get worked up about how the OG Starbuck was
| a hard-drinking, hard-partying man but the 2004 Starbuck
| was a hard-drinking, hard-partying woman lmao
| [deleted]
| pc86 wrote:
| Legally, whoever created it. If you created it, it's part of
| your estate along with whatever other IP you have.
|
| Realistically, nobody cares and it will just get thrown away.
| layer8 wrote:
| It's not clear what the copyright situation would be. A priori,
| AI output isn't owned by anyone:
| https://www.theregister.com/2023/03/16/ai_art_copyright_usco...
| OOPMan wrote:
| I love how people keep using ML to depress birth rates.
|
| I think we may have answered the question as to where all the
| aliens are...they too invented LLMs and soon went extinct due to
| no one ever leaving their rooms to reproduce for real.
|
| XD
| djmips wrote:
| Great! Instructions for how to create the ultimate phishing bot!
| dontupvoteme wrote:
| Four mentions of Black Mirror but none of Flatline Dixie from
| Neuromancer..
|
| I'm sure this idea predates Gibson (though I don't know an
| earlier usage offhand)
|
| What would be even more interesting and dystopian is merging
| peoples personas - first start would be combining them in
| training data, perhaps based on their areas of expertise and
| eccentricities.
| absoluteJM wrote:
| This was great, I'd love to do something like this but all my
| group chats are on WhatsApp or Signal!
| Turm wrote:
| Both Whatsapp and Signal store their messages in a sqlite-db as
| well! If your device is rooted/jailbroken, extracting the data
| is relatively simple (see e.g. here:
| https://towardsdatascience.com/analyzing-my-whatsapp-
| databas...)
| kuu wrote:
| You don't need to have it rooted, you can request the
| information: https://faq.whatsapp.com/526463418847093/
| georgiecasey wrote:
| should you not have disclosed that you're a Hex employee in the
| blogpost?
| thih9 wrote:
| The article frequently mentions costs but never gives any numbers
| or a point of reference. As an outsider to LLM and training I
| find this disorienting.
|
| What would be e.g. a total cost for a project like this?
| izzymiller wrote:
| Cost me about a hundred and fifty bucks, give or take.
| Continued GPU inference is on the order of ~50 cents a minute
| or something like that-- but it's serverless so negligible. I
| think you could do it for significantly cheaper with some of
| the newer models i mentioned!
| [deleted]
| stainablesteel wrote:
| "Sorry, I'm on vacation right now. If this is an emergency,
| please head your email with >>LLM to get an AI trained on my
| personal conversation history to put up with your petty bullshit"
| simonw wrote:
| This is one of the best, most detailed write-ups of how to fine-
| train a large language model on custom text that I've seen
| anywhere.
| izzymiller wrote:
| Thank you!! I felt it was getting so long and was worried it
| would be impenetrable, so I'm really pleased to hear it felt
| great.
| Tepix wrote:
| Really great! With Alpaca-Lora 4-bit training getting usable
| any day now it should get a lot more affordable or you can
| even do it at home.
| xtracto wrote:
| I agree. I've been looking to train/fine-tune an LLM model
| myself but the corpus I want to provide is not in
| question/answer mode.
|
| Is there a way to train or fine-tune an LLM model using say
| only plain text files?
| vimax wrote:
| You can use an LLM to rewrite a document to a question answer
| form.
| RugnirViking wrote:
| very fun! sadly the examples or code things in the page weren't
| working for me, but I like the concept. Of course this would be a
| terrible thing socially if overused or whatever but lets get away
| from techno-dystopia worrying and acknowledge this is a neat toy
| project with the potential for shared laughs!
| larodi wrote:
| Then after some while someone ...disappears from ur life (to not
| be very dark with other suggestions), but you keep talking to
| her. Turns into business.
| titaniumtown wrote:
| I've actually been working on something similar for the Discord
| server I have with my friends. Fun to see others doing something
| similar! It's very funny to mess around with.
| [deleted]
| bachmeier wrote:
| There used to be a concern that we'd be bored out of our minds
| once the machines do all the work. Instead, we'll all be busy
| running the worlds we've created, and we'll complain that we wish
| we had more time for ourselves, like the good old pre-LLM days.
| djmips wrote:
| Train one on yourself to find out if you are annoying or not.
| chasd00 wrote:
| I hate to go there but this could be used to have non-consensual
| cybersex. I guess? So many weird twists and turns these LLMs have
| exposed.
| noAnswer wrote:
| There are already pr0n websites that create deepfakes without
| consent. Chatting in comparison is a cakewalk.
| samsa wrote:
| Bleeding edge tech is often used to satisfy our prurient
| desires. I am quite certain this is one of the directions AI is
| headed.
| rg111 wrote:
| > _On a technical level, I found it really helped me wrap my head
| around what LLMs are doing and how they can be tuned for specific
| scenarios._
|
| LMAO, noob!
|
| (I guess people don't like when a reply in the tone the OP's
| friends is posted.)
| izzymiller wrote:
| finally someone who understands me
| chasd00 wrote:
| This has to be one of hte most fascinating discussions i've seen
| on HN. Imagine the FBI training an AI on all the information they
| have about a suspect. Files and files of statements, social media
| history, phone taps, etc and then interrogating the AI to get
| enough information to convince a judge to issue a warrant.
|
| idk the LLMs being turned loose and the possibilities feels
| different than past major shifts in tech. (i've been around a
| while)
| stu2b50 wrote:
| That seems less efficient than just searching through the
| contents without training an LLM to adopt the persona of the
| suspect. You'd have to double check everything they say,
| because obviously any of it can be false. So at best it's
| pointing you to the right direction, but realistically not.
|
| Might be a good lead generation if the FBI is completely
| stumped I guess? Or they're just bored at work?
| hooverd wrote:
| That seems like a great way to do parallel construction.
| "Computer said so", very convenient.
| dantetheinferno wrote:
| One wonders if eventually - historians will plug all the content
| from a person's personal notes, their diary, their chat logs,
| into an LLM, and perform research by talking to the AI about the
| person's life?
|
| If you trained an LLM against all the recorded discussions of
| Einstein - is it that different from talking to Einstein himself?
| obblekk wrote:
| One level further: the historian asking questions is itself an
| AI meaning as soon as primary sources are provided, interesting
| history insights flow out.
| ent101 wrote:
| "If you trained an LLM against all the recorded discussions of
| Einstein - is it that different from talking to Einstein
| himself?"
|
| Yes, his daily visual, touch, hearing, smelling, readings...
| perceptions will be missing from the model.
| default_png wrote:
| Meh, Just Mock thoes in later.
| goodpoint wrote:
| > If you trained an LLM against all the recorded discussions of
| Einstein - is it that different from talking to Einstein
| himself?
|
| The fact that an LLM does not have the ability to think and
| understand things is a bit of a giveaway.
| whitemary wrote:
| See Black Mirror S02E01 (it doesn't work out very well)
| sharemywin wrote:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Click_(2006_film)
|
| not quite the same but putting your self on auto pilot seems
| possible with something like this.
| MayeulC wrote:
| In theory, you may be able to ask the LLM about the person's
| life, as if it was the person, but you won't get more facts out
| than you provide as input. It may still make up credible info.
|
| Regarding your last question, it wil lack an enormous ammount
| of data that make up a person's experience. Moreover, talking
| to sound like <X> isn't the same as thinking like <X>.
|
| It reminds me of the later part of the book _Accelerando_ ,
| where synthetic personalities made up from historical records
| (could be anyone from Cleopatra to Newton) keep being
| reincarnated in a near, post-singularity future. They are
| handed out an FAQ that tries to bring them up-to-date on the
| current state of affairs.
| ghaff wrote:
| Probably yes. But doesn't sound that different in principle
| from the memory room in Scalzi's Interdependency series.
| sharemywin wrote:
| somebodies had to a have already tried this on here...
|
| https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.innersloth...
| 45ure wrote:
| AI21 Labs tried to replicate the _style_ of late Justice Ruth
| Bader Ginsburg based on her legal writings and failed, at least
| for now.
|
| https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2022/06/14/ruth-ba...
| carlosjobim wrote:
| Of course you can not do any research - discover new things -
| by doing this. The AI can only repeat what it has been fed or
| make up lies. You cannot discover new material by using AI.
| resuresu wrote:
| I'm almost at the point where i don't want to use the internet
| anymore.
| x86x87 wrote:
| An idea along the same lines:
| https://www.cnet.com/culture/eternime-wants-you-to-live-fore...
|
| Replacing you after you're dead for your loved ones to keep
| interacting with you.
| MagicMoonlight wrote:
| That's a really good idea
| EVa5I7bHFq9mnYK wrote:
| Hmm, can I have my private version of HN where everyone upvotes
| my witty comments?
| djmips wrote:
| Why private? Sockpuppet friends IRL.
| mvandermeulen wrote:
| Missing required components :(
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