Hacker News Reader

Comment by joshuak | Hacker News Reader

Oh now I get it, the people who are not disturbed by this contemplate that it'll only be used in innocuous contexts in which we already accept an unknown voice. That's not intended to sound sarcastic, I genuinely mean that now I understand the reasoning.

However, the reason these are not comparable is proof of work/investment. Presumably Duplex can or will soon be able to make millions of calls for any purpose whatsoever. Unlike a human being with a foreign accent perhaps or other alerting auditory factors Duplex massively reduces the cost of experimental manipulation.

One of the most successful hacking techniques is phishing. Its success is directly tied to how compelling it is at counterfeiting a legit communication.

And this does not even touch on larger institutional deception.

View on HN

You just gave me a great idea on how to finally get my congress critter to listen to me!

It sounds like your concerns are based on what some eventual form of this technology might become. Duplex is incredibly domain-specific, and will only make calls on behalf of Google, not random phishers.

Being worried about Duplex in its current form is like being worried about Siri becoming conscious. Your concerns about malicious AI voices are valid, but that eventual technology will be nothing like Duplex in its current form, and it's still a long way off

I'm not talking about AI

The outcomes I speak of, which are nothing compared to all potential exploits, are possible with the existing Duplex technology, in that they do not happen it is only in Google's good gatekeeping. That is too thin a standard for me.

Duplex only works because it was highly optimized for specific domains, like booking haircuts and booking tables. Every conversation in these domains pretty much goes the same way. If you go off the standard reservation script, it falls apart.

I suppose Duplex could maliciously attempt to book a bunch of fake reservations, but the technology behind it really can't do much more than that

Also, I'm not really sure what you mean by "Google's good gatekeeping". 3rd parties have no control over Duplex, other than initiating specific tasks through Google Assistant. If Duplex does anything malicious, it would be because Google went rogue, and there would obviously be massive legal and PR consequences for that.

I feel like Google as a whole are aware this could be used for phishing, and will have methods preventing malicious use.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com