[EvanAnderson]

I had an ELIZA-like "chatbot" written in BASIC on the laptop I carried in high school (1991-1995). I added logging, let classmates interact with it, and then read the logs. The extent to which people treated the program as though it had agency was kind of horrifying. I can only imagine what's happening with LLMs today. It scares the willies out of me.

re: my ELIZA-like logs - I was at least somewhat ethical, insofar as I didn't share the logs with others, nor did I ever tell anybody that they had been logged or acted upon what I read in the logs. Still, I was pretty shitty to the people who interacted with my computer. The extent to which current "AI" companies won't be shitty to users is, I assume, much less than I was back then.

[diggan]

> The extent to which people treated the program as though it had agency was kind of horrifying

It's also horrifying how much intention people think they can see from looking at logs of people using something. I know there are a lot of "data driven" decisions that people use the same way, where people are reaching all sorts of conclusions to why X suddenly is Y, or likewise.

I'm sure if someone inspected the logs of what I've written to various LLMs they'd think they can extrapolate all sorts of personal characteristics about me, but I'm also a person who plays around with things, tries to find limits and whatever, so just because see me treating a LLM like shit for some reason doesn't mean you can understand the intention behind that.

> Still, I was pretty shitty to the people who interacted with my computer

I think as youngsters exploring computing without limitations, restrictions or honestly much thoughts at all in the beginning, many of us been in the same situation. As long as we learn and improve with experience :)

[mindcrime]

I'm sure if someone inspected the logs of what I've written to various LLMs they'd think they can extrapolate all sorts of personal characteristics about me, but I'm also a person who plays around with things, tries to find limits and whatever...

If you looked at my LLM interaction logs you would probably assume that I have an unhealthy obsession with pirates and a napalm fetish.

In reality, I use the "can I get it to tell me how to make napalm" thing as a quick "acid test" around the extent and strength of censorship controls, and simply find asking LLM's to "talk like a pirate" amusing. And, also, I've found occasions where doing nothing more than instructing the LLM to talk like a pirate will bypass it's built-in inhibitions against things like giving instructions for making napalm.

[rossant]

Now explain that to the police. And to the court.

[kbelder]

Way back when, I had a simple hobby site where visitors could upload an image, I'd process it and return a transformed version of it in a template for papercrafting. Nowadays, I'd do it all client-side in javascript, but that wasn't really an option at the time.

So the images were saved when they were uploaded, not for any nefarious reason, but more out of laziness. Then one day, I looked at the images. Yikes. I immediately rewrote it to delete the images after returning them, and pretty soon let the site die.

[closewith]

> nor did I ever tell anybody that they had been logged

So the opposite of acting ethically.

No wonder we've ended up in the surveillance nightmare we find ourselves in.

[EvanAnderson]

> So the opposite of acting ethically.

I think ethical behavior is a continuum and I don't see it as binary. Then again, I'm not formally trained in ethics either.

I clearly stated I handled it only somewhat ethically, at best (i.e. "...pretty shitty to people..."). Even then, I'd argue I acted closer to the "ethical" end of that continuum than the opposite. I could have shared the logs, for example. That would be much closer to the "unethical" end of that spectrum to my mind.

I definitely handled it poorly but I could have handled it worse. For the people who were "surveilled" the impact to their lives was the same as if they had not been.

> No wonder we've ended up in the surveillance nightmare we find ourselves in.

The "user surveillance" on my personal standalone laptop computer 30 years ago doesn't have much bearing on the for-profit companies who profit from mass user surveillance today, except perhaps as being emblematic of the human nature to find novelty in "secrets". I don't think I bear any personal responsibility for the world we live in today in this regard.