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by ttul 1154 days ago
This tech will be used by crooks to automate attacks. Generate the language using GPT-4 and the audio using Bark, and then start making phone calls. Because it’s open source, all you need is GPUs. This is not a criticism. I’m impressed and grateful for the openness. Everyone needs to wake up and recognize that these attacks are coming at us essentially right now.
4 comments

yawn who cares? If it’s an issue, let law enforcement handle it. Everything has nefarious uses. Humanity marches on.
As technology gets more powerful more quickly, and the rule of law becomes more and more unable to prevent societal damage, this response becomes woefully inadequate.

For reference, look at how the societal damage of social networks has been handled: too little, too late. Same goes for RentTech.

But, I don't know the solution. The common computer has become so powerful that we cannot simply rely on inaccessible materials to prevent the danger of overly-powerful tech spreading too fast, as we do with bioweapons or traditional WMDs.

Fight tech with more tech, I suppose.

You'll care when it effects you.

We want to go back to New York in the 90s? Petty theft everywhere?

The technology already exists, shutting down a company and pretending that it doesn't doesn't solve the problem.
Like kitchen knives, which are used to end unhappy relationships. Is this really an argument we should be talking about? Wouldn't you feel silly presenting such an argument, to a household knive maker?
That comparison holds up better if you imagine a world without knives or sharp objects of any kind. Now you can suddenly do tremendous harm by wielding a pointy stick. I don't think it's reaching to point out the dangers you just introduced.

With great power comes .... ? Profit?

Except that world used to exist, back in the stone age, and we're all far better off now because we didn't choose to live in fear of the misuse of powerful tools.
I wouldn’t want to be around the first few guys with pointy weapons, but I am sure you would be fine.
Recommend to encode sub-audible tracking symbols in synthesize speech patterns that includes GPS, IP, timestamp, country of origin. We do that already in bootleg movies so we can apply similar methods in synthesizes speech.
It's open source, and even if it wasn't, it would likely be pretty easy to remove those (not that you would get GPS) from an audio file.
Hmm, I don't know about that. The data rate used by civilian GPS (L1 C/A) is only 50 bps. The symbols are normally spread over a couple MHz of bandwidth to make it possible to recover at levels below the thermal noise floor. I see no reason why the same thing couldn't be done at baseband, adding an imperceptible bit of extra noise to an audio signal.

Of course, you wouldn't encode real-time navigation data, but a small block of identifying text. Either way, though, someone without a copy of the spreading code isn't going to notice it or decode it. Given enough redundancy in both the time and frequency domains, removing it wouldn't be easy either.

The real problem is that bad actors would simply encode some other person's coordinates/metadata into the recordings they produce, and we'll have been trained by then to blindly accept the presence of these markers as strong evidence of guilt.
Nothing stops you from using closed source solutions for that.