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I don't think I see enough discussion about what this means for privacy. There was some protection in the fact that it was prohibitively expensive to get someon

I don't think I see enough discussion about what this means for privacy. There was some protection in the fact that it was prohibitively expensive to get someone to listen to every single one of our phonecalls/read all our emails/etc. Worrying that this will no longer be the case.

lovvtide 3y ago
Now that is something I hadn't considered. Woah.
- HPMOR 3y ago
  Not to sound condescending but really? How is this not immediately your mind goes? Every piece of information ever recorded can now be summarized and cross-linked efficiently. Privacy is beyond dead. Soon every authoritarian government (and Democratic ones albeit secretly) will have integrated platforms that track every single one of your movements, known contacts, internet usage, financial data, and correspondence. Big Brother has NEVER EVER been more effective than it will become.
  - AussieWog93 3y ago
    >How is this not immediately your mind goes? Most people don't really think about things that don't affect their day-to-day lives. This includes the specifics of how Governments might run a mass surveillance plan.
  - Teever 3y ago
    Yeah, I think the NSA is going to get their money's worth for that Utah Datacenter that they started building like 20 years ago.
    - Roritharr 3y ago
      Looking at this from far away, with the Snowden revelations in mind I'd think it's not tinfoil hat territory to assume that some of the progress at OpenAI got achieved with some help from well ressourced folks in the USG/Three Letter Agencies.
      - orangepurple 3y ago
        I doubt it. Scraped tweets and reddit is already huge
      - nr2x 3y ago
        I don’t think they helped them. Now, did they train off the same data sources? Well, since OpenAI isn’t saying what GPT-4 is trained on, and the NSA can hoover up all kinds of non-public data, it stands to reason they may both be doing something slightly shady with emails, texts, and the like.
      - Teever 3y ago
        Yeah, I've started wondering similar things about that too, like how far ahead is the NSA on this stuff? And how does that tie in to the recent policy of denying China semiconductors? Perhaps history will show that the NSA made algorithmic breakthroughs a few years ago and realized what was coming, so political policy was crafted to stymie Chinese progress in this field, and what we're seeing in the public sphere from companies like openAI is a managed release of the technology into the public, openAI at least managing to independently discover the same breakthroughs that the NSA made a a few years ago.
        pixl97 3y ago
        You're seeing the government entity as separate from the corporate entity, but quite often in the US its the other way around. The government entity is a rather hollow shell, and the 'brains' of the operation is contracted out to the corporation. The government entity would almost cease to exist if the corporation under it magically disappeared.
  - lovvtide 3y ago
    I know right! It's so obvious.
alphanumeric0 3y ago
Why do you think there was a mass surveillance of American domestic communications since forever ago, as leaked by Snowden? This technology has been available since then and can effectively summarize millions of pieces of communication.
- malux85 3y ago
  Yeah but have you seen the leaked slides? It's clear that they have only the ability to analyse 10% or less of the data they are storing. GPT-like systems will close that gap, and then comes all of the problems of automated law enforcement - Extrapolation from incomplete data, false positives from coindicences, interpretation errors, all that annoying stuff
  - justinjlynn 3y ago
    Just wait until they go back and have the bandwidth to finally analyse all the historical data they've accumulated...
    - nr2x 3y ago
      I’m guessing they are, and have been, for a while.
  - mztwo 3y ago
    To add to that, the leaked documents from Snowden described a query language not unlike doing Boolean searches. Nothing close to GPT’s ability to comprehend human asks.
    - nr2x 3y ago
      Yes but you can get GPT to write structured queries based on natural language. It works very, very well at turning normal phrases into SQL.
- stevenhuang 3y ago
  > This technology has been available since then No, it hasn't lol.
SketchySeaBeast 3y ago
Man, I can't wait for the AI to start hallucinating crimes.
- dragonwriter 3y ago
  Shotspotter is a thing and it already has been doing that for years (both on its own and on law enforcement request.)
  - SoftTalker 3y ago
    Shotspotter isn't an AI though is it? I thought it was just triangulation of gunshot locations using microphones and synchronized clocks?
    - dragonwriter 3y ago
      > Shotspotter isn’t an AI though is it? Shotspotter has been billed as a “system of sensors, software, AI and expert human review that accurately detects, locates and alerts police to gunfire”, and the company behind it (formerly “Shotspotter” was the company name, its recently been renamed “Soundthinking”) has a number of other AI-involved law enforcement products now, as well.
    - thatsadude 3y ago
      That's a layman explanation. ShotSpotter is likely a passive radar system. In recent years, you can combine signal processing and supervised learn (neuralnet) to get better direction-of-arrival estimations.
- talesvin 3y ago
  I mean, if we get to the point AI is pointing the finger at someone i hope that a human will double check it at least.
  - kevviiinn 3y ago
    You seem to have not heard about the way they do things in the US
Shekelphile 3y ago
> There was some protection in the fact that it was prohibitively expensive to get someone to listen to every single one of our phonecalls/read all our emails/etc. That's already how it worked on platforms like mturk and uhrs, lots of the work was transcribing audio dumps from microphones built into computers/phones/smart home devices. UHRS especially had a lot of that (it's owned by MS) as well as search engine grading type work. They also certainly do not pay well, I'd imagine that in practice there isn't much cost difference to paying a bunch of bored people to do it vs the compute cost for running an AI model to do it, but the AI model will be vastly more accurate and will work 24/7.
fshbbdssbbgdd 3y ago
With regard to privacy, what’s the difference between your email’s text stored on a server, and your email’s text alongside the output of the text processed through a LLM? If “they” can already look at the text, what more privacy is there to lose?
- kerkeslager 3y ago
  There's a great deal of privacy in simply being a needle in a haystack. Part of the processing that's possible with an LLM is filtering. Imagine you've sent an email about transporting a friend's daughter across state lines to get a medically-necessary abortion. Or if you prefer, imagine you've arranged via email to "lose" some firearms which don't comply with your state's new assault weapons ban. Pre-LLMs, trying to find these sorts of emails was very hard. A simple text search for "abortion" or "gun" is going to come up with far more emails where two family members got into a political debate, than emails about lawbreaking. Big Brother will find a few such emails here and there by chance, but the vast majority of such incriminating emails will simply be lost in the pile. Enter LLMs, and Big Brother can feed some of the incriminating emails found my chance into a training dataset along with a bunch of non-incriminating emails, and teach the AI to find incriminating emails, and then apply the model to the entire list of emails and get a nicely filtered list of only the emails which are incriminating, further tuning the model by adding emails it gets wrong to the training dataset when they are found.
lumost 3y ago
The top use case I've been hearing is in legal discovery. Law firms used to play games with diligence by disclosing TBs of email and making it cost prohibitive to find relevant emails. This task would normally require a $60-100/hr paralegal or lawyer. GPT-4 can do that task for fractions of a penny per email now. It doesn't have to be perfect if its competing with nothing. I expect we'll see similar shops for any other high cost paper/trail business.
- pseudo0 3y ago
  Is there a solution to the issue of data stewardship yet? I'd imagine it typically would not be permissible to send a bunch of proprietary legal documents off to OpenAI. What I'd really love to implement is a way for GPT-4 to answer questions based on a corpus of "all our Confluence pages plus random other sources of documentation." Like with the legal document issue, it's a bit of a nonstarter right now given the proprietary nature of corporate documentation.
  - lumost 3y ago
    AFAIK the Azure APIs provide suitable data usage requirements. One of the most fascinating aspects of the AI world is that we've made extraordinarily expensive brute force search a valuable tool.
  - pixl97 3y ago
    GPT-4 based searchability of my works Confluence would save me a ton of time. "Hey, has anyone worked on Problem X, and what was the outcome of their project"
- lazyeye 3y ago
  There's also this.. https://old.reddit.com/r/ChatGPT/comments/12fiwaf/chat_gpt_will_change_washington_dc/ https://old.reddit.com/r/ChatGPT/comments/12fiwaf/chat_gpt_w...

lovvtide 3y ago

Now that is something I hadn't considered. Woah.

HPMOR 3y ago
Not to sound condescending but really? How is this not immediately your mind goes? Every piece of information ever recorded can now be summarized and cross-linked efficiently. Privacy is beyond dead. Soon every authoritarian government (and Democratic ones albeit secretly) will have integrated platforms that track every single one of your movements, known contacts, internet usage, financial data, and correspondence. Big Brother has NEVER EVER been more effective than it will become.
- AussieWog93 3y ago
  >How is this not immediately your mind goes? Most people don't really think about things that don't affect their day-to-day lives. This includes the specifics of how Governments might run a mass surveillance plan.
- Teever 3y ago
  Yeah, I think the NSA is going to get their money's worth for that Utah Datacenter that they started building like 20 years ago.
  - Roritharr 3y ago
    Looking at this from far away, with the Snowden revelations in mind I'd think it's not tinfoil hat territory to assume that some of the progress at OpenAI got achieved with some help from well ressourced folks in the USG/Three Letter Agencies.
    - orangepurple 3y ago
      I doubt it. Scraped tweets and reddit is already huge
    - nr2x 3y ago
      I don’t think they helped them. Now, did they train off the same data sources? Well, since OpenAI isn’t saying what GPT-4 is trained on, and the NSA can hoover up all kinds of non-public data, it stands to reason they may both be doing something slightly shady with emails, texts, and the like.
    - Teever 3y ago
      Yeah, I've started wondering similar things about that too, like how far ahead is the NSA on this stuff? And how does that tie in to the recent policy of denying China semiconductors? Perhaps history will show that the NSA made algorithmic breakthroughs a few years ago and realized what was coming, so political policy was crafted to stymie Chinese progress in this field, and what we're seeing in the public sphere from companies like openAI is a managed release of the technology into the public, openAI at least managing to independently discover the same breakthroughs that the NSA made a a few years ago.
      - pixl97 3y ago
        You're seeing the government entity as separate from the corporate entity, but quite often in the US its the other way around. The government entity is a rather hollow shell, and the 'brains' of the operation is contracted out to the corporation. The government entity would almost cease to exist if the corporation under it magically disappeared.
- lovvtide 3y ago
  I know right! It's so obvious.

alphanumeric0 3y ago

Why do you think there was a mass surveillance of American domestic communications since forever ago, as leaked by Snowden? This technology has been available since then and can effectively summarize millions of pieces of communication.

malux85 3y ago
Yeah but have you seen the leaked slides? It's clear that they have only the ability to analyse 10% or less of the data they are storing. GPT-like systems will close that gap, and then comes all of the problems of automated law enforcement - Extrapolation from incomplete data, false positives from coindicences, interpretation errors, all that annoying stuff
- justinjlynn 3y ago
  Just wait until they go back and have the bandwidth to finally analyse all the historical data they've accumulated...
  - nr2x 3y ago
    I’m guessing they are, and have been, for a while.
- mztwo 3y ago
  To add to that, the leaked documents from Snowden described a query language not unlike doing Boolean searches. Nothing close to GPT’s ability to comprehend human asks.
  - nr2x 3y ago
    Yes but you can get GPT to write structured queries based on natural language. It works very, very well at turning normal phrases into SQL.
stevenhuang 3y ago
> This technology has been available since then No, it hasn't lol.

SketchySeaBeast 3y ago

Man, I can't wait for the AI to start hallucinating crimes.

dragonwriter 3y ago
Shotspotter is a thing and it already has been doing that for years (both on its own and on law enforcement request.)
- SoftTalker 3y ago
  Shotspotter isn't an AI though is it? I thought it was just triangulation of gunshot locations using microphones and synchronized clocks?
  - dragonwriter 3y ago
    > Shotspotter isn’t an AI though is it? Shotspotter has been billed as a “system of sensors, software, AI and expert human review that accurately detects, locates and alerts police to gunfire”, and the company behind it (formerly “Shotspotter” was the company name, its recently been renamed “Soundthinking”) has a number of other AI-involved law enforcement products now, as well.
  - thatsadude 3y ago
    That's a layman explanation. ShotSpotter is likely a passive radar system. In recent years, you can combine signal processing and supervised learn (neuralnet) to get better direction-of-arrival estimations.
talesvin 3y ago
I mean, if we get to the point AI is pointing the finger at someone i hope that a human will double check it at least.
- kevviiinn 3y ago
  You seem to have not heard about the way they do things in the US

Shekelphile 3y ago

> There was some protection in the fact that it was prohibitively expensive to get someone to listen to every single one of our phonecalls/read all our emails/etc. That's already how it worked on platforms like mturk and uhrs, lots of the work was transcribing audio dumps from microphones built into computers/phones/smart home devices. UHRS especially had a lot of that (it's owned by MS) as well as search engine grading type work. They also certainly do not pay well, I'd imagine that in practice there isn't much cost difference to paying a bunch of bored people to do it vs the compute cost for running an AI model to do it, but the AI model will be vastly more accurate and will work 24/7.

fshbbdssbbgdd 3y ago

With regard to privacy, what’s the difference between your email’s text stored on a server, and your email’s text alongside the output of the text processed through a LLM? If “they” can already look at the text, what more privacy is there to lose?

kerkeslager 3y ago
There's a great deal of privacy in simply being a needle in a haystack. Part of the processing that's possible with an LLM is filtering. Imagine you've sent an email about transporting a friend's daughter across state lines to get a medically-necessary abortion. Or if you prefer, imagine you've arranged via email to "lose" some firearms which don't comply with your state's new assault weapons ban. Pre-LLMs, trying to find these sorts of emails was very hard. A simple text search for "abortion" or "gun" is going to come up with far more emails where two family members got into a political debate, than emails about lawbreaking. Big Brother will find a few such emails here and there by chance, but the vast majority of such incriminating emails will simply be lost in the pile. Enter LLMs, and Big Brother can feed some of the incriminating emails found my chance into a training dataset along with a bunch of non-incriminating emails, and teach the AI to find incriminating emails, and then apply the model to the entire list of emails and get a nicely filtered list of only the emails which are incriminating, further tuning the model by adding emails it gets wrong to the training dataset when they are found.

lumost 3y ago

The top use case I've been hearing is in legal discovery. Law firms used to play games with diligence by disclosing TBs of email and making it cost prohibitive to find relevant emails. This task would normally require a $60-100/hr paralegal or lawyer. GPT-4 can do that task for fractions of a penny per email now. It doesn't have to be perfect if its competing with nothing. I expect we'll see similar shops for any other high cost paper/trail business.

pseudo0 3y ago
Is there a solution to the issue of data stewardship yet? I'd imagine it typically would not be permissible to send a bunch of proprietary legal documents off to OpenAI. What I'd really love to implement is a way for GPT-4 to answer questions based on a corpus of "all our Confluence pages plus random other sources of documentation." Like with the legal document issue, it's a bit of a nonstarter right now given the proprietary nature of corporate documentation.
- lumost 3y ago
  AFAIK the Azure APIs provide suitable data usage requirements. One of the most fascinating aspects of the AI world is that we've made extraordinarily expensive brute force search a valuable tool.
- pixl97 3y ago
  GPT-4 based searchability of my works Confluence would save me a ton of time. "Hey, has anyone worked on Problem X, and what was the outcome of their project"
lazyeye 3y ago
There's also this.. https://old.reddit.com/r/ChatGPT/comments/12fiwaf/chat_gpt_will_change_washington_dc/ https://old.reddit.com/r/ChatGPT/comments/12fiwaf/chat_gpt_w...