6mo ago

Neo-Nazis Are All-In on AI

www.wired.com /story/neo-nazis-are-all-in-on-ai/

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Is this just some media manipulation to give a bad name on AI by connecting them with Nazis despite that it's not just them benefiting from AI?
- Sounds like something an AI-loving Nazi would say!
  Seriously, though, yes. This was exactly my first thought. There are plenty of reasons to be apprehensive about AI, but conflating it with Nazis is just blatant propaganda.
  
  Nazis do thrive by spreading misinformation though, and AIs are great at presenting false information in a way that makes it look believable
  
  You are right. But I'm mostly observing how much of the newsfeed headlines talk about how AI is dangerous and dystopian (which can be especially done by bad actors e.g. the Neo-Nazis mentioned in the article, but the fear-mongering headlines outnumber more neutral or sometimes positive ones. Then again many news outlets benefit from such headlines anyway regardless of topic), and this one puts the cherry on top.
  
  If neo nazis are deliberately trying to train the AIs that feed into everyone’s workflow, I think it is newsworthy despite what all the other headlines say.
  The Neo Nazis are the threat, the AI is being abused.
  
  I think this is a misunderstanding of how most of the AI that feed into workflows work. Most of them don't dynamically re-train live based off how users are using them. At least not outside of the context of that user/chat instance.
  Most likely what these and others are doing is to download pre-trained open source AI datasets thrn and run them locally so they aren't restrained by any of the commercial AI's limitations on what they will and won't output to users. I highly doubt there's enough material out there to truly train a new AI model on only explicitly racist material. This is just a bunch of assholes doing prompt engineering on open source models running locally.
  
  Oh, if it’s being run locally, then I’ve fundamentally misunderstood the situation. Thanks for pointing it out.
  
  So the idea to make people think that Nazis are using AI, might have come from a Nazi AI? 🤯
- Yep, pretty much.
  Musk tried creating an anti-woke AI with Grok that turned around and said things like:
  
  Or
  
  And Gab, the literal neo Nazi social media site trying to have an Adolf Hitler AI has the most ridiculous system prompts I've seen trying to get it to work, and even with all that it totally rejects the alignment they try to give it after only a few messages.
  This article is BS.
  They might like to, but it's one of the groups that's going to have a very difficult time doing it successfully.
  
  I wouldn't say that Gab used to be an exclusively neo Nazi site, but now that Twitter allows standard conservative discussions, all the normal people probably left Gab for Twitter and now Gab is probably more of a Nazi shithole.
  I have seen openly Jewish people on Gab but you couldn't go 10 posts without finding something blatantly racist.
  
  Twitter has always allowed and coddled "standard conservative discussions."
- AI has a bad name because it is being pursued incredibly recklessly and any and all criticism is being waved away by its cult-like supporters.
  Fascists taking up use of AI is one of the biggest threats it presents and people are even trying to shrugg that off. It's insanity the way people simply will not acknowledge the massive pitfalls that AI represents.
  
  I think that would be online spaces in general where anything that goes against the grain gets shooed away by the zeitgeist of the specific space. I wish there were more places where we can all put criticism into account, generative AI included. Even r/aiwars, where it's supposed to be a place for discussion about both the good and bad of AI, can come across as incredibly one-sided at times.
  
  As someone who has sometimes been accused of being an AI cultist, I agree that it's being pursued far too recklessly, but the people who I argue with don't usually give very good arguments about it. Specifically, I kept getting people who argue from the assumption that AI "aren't real minds" and trying to draw moral reasons not to use it based on that. This fails for two reasons: 1. We cannot know if AI have internal experiences and 2. A tool being sapient would have more complicated moral dynamics than the alternative. I don't know how much this helps you, but if you didn't know before, you know now.
  Edit:y'all're seriously downvoting me for pointing out that a question is unanswerable when it's been known to be such for centuries. Read a fucking philosophy book ffs.
  
  We do know we created them. The AI people are currently freaking out about does a single thing, predict text. You can think of LLMs like a hyper advanced auto correct. The main thing that's exciting is these produce text that looks as if a human wrote it. That's all. They don't have any memory, or any persistence whatsoever. That's why we have to feed it a bunch of the previous text (context) in a "conversation" in order for it to work as convincingly as it does. It cannot and does not remember what you say
  
  You're making the implicit assumption that an entity that lacks memory necessarily does not have any internal experience, which is not something that we can know or test for. Furthermore, there's no law of the universe that states that something created by humans cannot have an internal experience; we have no way of knowing whether something we create has an internal experience or not.
  You can think of LLMs like a hyper advanced auto correct.
  Yes; this is functionally what LLMs are, but the scope of the discussion extends beyond LLMs, and doesn't address my core complaint about how these arguments are being conducted. Generally though maybe not universally, if a core premise of your argument is "x works differently than humans" your argument won't be valid. I'm not currently making a claim of substance, I'm critiquing a tactic being used and pointing out that it among other things relies on a bad foundation.
  If you want to know another way to make the argument, consider focusing on the practical implications of how current and future technologies given current and hypothetical ways of structuring society. For example: the fact that generative AI (being a novel form of automation) making images will lead to the displacement of Artists, the fact that art is being used without consent to train these models which are then being used for profit, etc.
- The purpose of the piece is to smear the notion of individual control and development of AI tools. It's known as 'running propaganda'.

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