Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by conqrr 68 days ago
Wasnt this as accessible pre AI with just Google search too?
4 comments

Craigslist invented prostitution, Facebook invented suicide, and OpenAI invented terrorism.

Ask any trial lawyer in America! The world was perfect in the 1990s without any of these things.

Replace ‘invented’ with ‘facilitated’
Doesn't google facilitate all those things? Doesn't internet itself facilitate?
the information is not new. how easy it is to get step by step instructions is new. Try it yourself. Google is good but not instant, step by step good. you need to do your own research that takes time. time that anti-terrorist units use to track you down. now this time factor is very limited you don't need to do research, cross reference materials, sources, etc. LLM does it for you. a research that could take days is done in 1 hour.
> time that anti-terrorist units use to track you down.

Speaking from the perspective of a USian, I wish Federal law enforcement was that hypercompetent. (If they were, perhaps folks would stop to question the ever-broader expansion of 24/7 surveillance of ordinary folks.)

The distressingly-complete Panopticon that has been built over the past several decades [0] makes it really easy for them to get you when they know to search for you, specifically. History (both recent and not-so-recent) has shown that if they don't know who they're looking for, or don't even know that they should be looking for anyone, they're just godawful.

[0] ...and whose continued construction is vociferously cheered on by folks on all sides of all of the aisles...

To play devil's advocate, it's not inconceivable that machine learning may eventually allow well-heeled governments to finally realize the dream of finding needles by building sufficiently large haystacks, or at the very least coerce otherwise unruly citizens into compliance based on the belief that it is able to do so.
Seems like the general state of the world is the greatest facilitator for all three.
Facilitation is not an idempotent operation.
What if the LLM made you solve a really complex math equation before it gave you the results? Would that make it ok?
Google and other search engines link (after the AI response and ads) to information hosted somewhere created/published by someone who is usually not Google.

OpenAI et al are creating the information and publishing/delivering it to you. Seems like a more direct facilitation.

Of course, after all knowledge is centralised in an OpenAI deatacenter I'm sure they will be happy to deal fairly with the liabilities /s.

Should Ryder be held responsible for the two very serious terror attacks carried out using Ryder trucks in the 90s?
the people that want to make sure the AI never gives you any "potentially dangerous information" also want to rigorously control your google search results, and also what books you're allowed to read
And what bathroom you go into, and what your genitals look like.
Evidently as it needs to be in the training data for the next word predictor to work
I found it exceptionally good at finding reactions that you wouldn't find online to produce some of these chemical compounds by changing them together, only something a very educated chemist could do which is why people are concerened about this.
I suspect if you gave it purely shakespeare as its training data it couldnt do science anymore, hence my comment. It's still novel, impressive work though, I'm not shitting on the clanker entirely
The anarchist cookbook has been around online in some form or another since the mid 90’s.
1971
Was there internet back then?
No, but there were VERY active anarchists.