[egeozcan]

Chatting with random people on the internet is much more unpredictable. Try writing on 4chan that you are depressed and gasp in horror how horrible humans can be when anonymous.

Okay maybe it is indeed very predictable what would happen on 4chan, but I hope you get my point.

Here the AI is just a tool, we shouldn't categorize them as some "special" software.

[_s_a_m_]

> Chatting with random people on the internet is much more unpredictable

Not particularly the best comparison, we are talking here about applications and services which we sell and we have to make sure that we have the confidence that we can trust our own systems and the customer can rely on our word and engineering skills. Right now we are still in the primordial soup of AI. As long as we do not have proper methods to verify and certify our models, they are dangerous and unpredictable.

[egeozcan]

Please see my other response: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29576981

As a summary, generating content isn't new and just increases your moderation load. AI is not something "special". It's just software, at the end.

[_s_a_m_]

You are comparing apples and oranges. "generating content" does not yet say HOW the data is generated. Here we are specifically talking about probabilistic generative model, which are inherently unsuited for mission critical purposes, as they are engineered right now.

I don't need to do this discussion, this is basic introductory education and consent in University courses about AI and especially about system engineering verification and certification, which is required for most customers on a large scale and mission critical purposes.

[egeozcan]

> I don't need to do this discussion

Then why are you on HN, replying to exactly that discussion?

We are not teenagers, I may be wrong, I would be okay with it.

> Here we are specifically talking about probabilistic generative model, which are inherently unsuited for mission critical purposes, as they are engineered right now

In what qualitative way does that differ from any kind of data generation?

[ceejayoz]

That’s a bit like saying machine guns aren’t an improvement over bows and arrows because they both throw projectiles, isn’t it?

[egeozcan]

I'm not talking about improvements.

You need gun control with bows and arrows, and you still need gun control with machine guns.

That's what I'm saying.

[ceejayoz]

And what we're saying is stuff like GPT-3 may be improvements on the level of archery --> machine gunning when it comes to online trolling, misinformation, and the like.

Casually dismissing it with "well it's just extra moderation load" is a mistake, I think.

[egeozcan]

First of all: You were down voted, but I up voted your comment because I respect it.

I still humbly think that it'd still be a cat and mouse game on every side imaginable.

You may argue that this leaves individuals vulnerable (people not being able to discern actual people from chat bots, which was the given example), but in the end, people learn to adapt. They get their own AI assistant to do the job or they keep doing what they did before: Just don't trust anonymous people online. They can be murderers, molesters, terrorists or worse, bots :)

[bsjks]

If you ask in certain boards and make an effort to write your post detailing what’s going on, you will only receive helpful responses.

[egeozcan]

Those boards have better moderation, something you need regardless of AI, which is my point.

AI doesn't add more danger to the situation, you just need to moderate as usual. If you are using some computer program to add more content to your web site, you will just have more content to moderate. News aggregators do have this problem for example, as sometimes automated crawlers post sensitive content and that needs to be marked & deleted before being published.

Saying, "oh but our algorithm can cause depression, so we moderate the access to it" doesn't make sense, as any content can cause it and needs to be moderated.

That's why content moderation is one of the hardest problems of this age.

You use computers to do it? Computers develop biases. Humans? Same! It's very hard to scale and is a problem only remotely related to AI-generated content because AI generating content increases the input to your moderation system.

Now I hope it is clear what I'm trying to say :)

[speedcoder]

Does "moderation" require bias? For that matter, can knowledge exist without bias?

[egeozcan]

> Does "moderation" require bias?

Objectively yes. Information on correctly peeling a pineapple is ok? Processing chicken to cook it? What about a dog? A rat? Fish? Insects? Is killing millions of bacteria with a single drop of chemical okay? Ways to commit suicide? What if this video is for prevention?

When it comes to moderation, we can't even set a consistent rule set to "deal with it all (c)". We just wing it, and hope it matches the expectations of our majority of our users... and the government(s)! Yeah governments have rules, but they tend to change towards the expectations, and a lot of rules for interpretation. It's a very hard task.

> For that matter, can knowledge exist without bias?

Umm... I don't know what that would mean. Isn't science there to reduce the amount of bias in knowledge? So, maybe, no? We can hope to reduce it, but we cannot get rid of it? At this point I don't really know what I'm talking about to be honest :)