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Comment by mort96 | Hacker News Reader

Nah, the harm from these LLMs are mostly in how freely accessible they are. Just pay OpenAI a relatively tiny fee and you can generate tonnes of plausible spam designed to promote your product or service or trick people into giving you money. That's the primary problem we're facing right now.

The problem is... keeping them closed source isn't helping with that problem, it only serves to guarantee OpenAI a cut of the profits caused by the spam and scams.

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> Just pay OpenAI a relatively tiny fee and you can generate tonnes of plausible spam designed to promote your product or service or trick people into giving you money. That's the primary problem we're facing right now.

Is content generation really the thing holding spammers back? I haven't seen a huge influx of more realistic spam so I wonder your basis for this statement.

The "spam" is now so good you won't necessarily recognize it as such.

There's a ton of LLM spam on platforms like Reddit and Twitter, and product review sites.

Everyone always says this, that there's "bots" all over Reddit but every time I ask for real examples of stuff (with actual upvotes) I never get anything.

If anything it's just the same regular spam that gets deleted and ignored at the bottom of threads.

Easier content generation doesn't solve the reputation problem that social media demands in order to get attention. The whole LLM+spam thing is mostly exaggerated because people don't understand this fact. It merely creates a slightly harder problem for automatic text analysis engines...which was already one of the weaker forms of spam detection full of false positives and misses. Everything else is network and behaviour related, with human reporting as last resort.

There's a big market for high reputation, old Reddit accounts, exactly because those things make it easier to get attention. LLMs are a great way to automate generating high reputation accounts.

There are articles written on LLM spam, such as this one: https://www.theverge.com/2023/4/25/23697218/ai-generated-spa.... Those are probably going to substantiate this problem better than I would.

I want to see the proof of: bots, Russian trolls, and bad actors that supposedly crawl all over Reddit.

Everyone who disagrees with the hivemind of a subreddit gets accused of being one of those things and any attempt to dispute the claim gets you banned. The internet of today sucks because people are so obsessed with those 3 things that they're the first conclusion people jump to on pseudoanonymous social media when they have no other response. They'll crawl through your controversial comments just to provide proof that you can't possibly be serious and you're being controversial to play an internet villain.

I'd love to know how you dispute the claim that "you're parroting Russian troll talking points so you must be a Russian troll" when it's actually the Russian trolls parroting the sentiments to seem like real people.

Pandora's box is already open on that one.. and none of the model providers are really attempting to address that kind of issue. Same with impersonation, deepfakes, etc. We can never again know whether text, images, audio, or video are authentic on their own merit. The only hope we have there is private key cryptography.

Luckily we already have the tools for this, NFT in the case of media and DKIM in the case of your spam email.

So we needed AI generated spam and scam content for Blockchain tech for digital content to make sense...

Whether it is hindsight or foresight depends on the perspective. From the zeitgeist perspective mired in crypto scams yea it may seem like a surprise benefit, but from the original design intention this is just the intended use case.

Oh I definitely agree that there's no putting it back into the pandora's box. The technology is here to stay.

I have no idea how you imagine "NFTs" will save us though. To me, that sounds like buzzword spam on your part.

An NFT is a way to attribute authorship in a mathematically guaranteed way.

If Taylor Swift signs ownership of a picture of her, you can know it is what she presents as real. If Elon musk signs a YouTube video of him offering crypto doubling giveaways, you can know he intended to represent the message as real. If the New York Times publishes an article signed with their key you can know it is meant to be published by the New York Times.

1) That's just using normal public/private key cryptography to sign messages, there's no need to bring in cryptocurrencies or NFTs

2) Public/private key cryptography would give us a way to verify that a message (or picture or whatever) from Taylor Swift is signed with Swift's private key, but it wouldn't help at all with e.g telling me that I'm responding to a real message and not a bot right now. Not to mention that it wouldn't even help much against deep fakes, since if I publish what I claim to be a secret recording of Swift, there would be no reason to expect her to have signed it with his private key.

Those two are the hallmarks of most of these "legit use cases for cryptocurrencies/NFTs" suggestions I've heard from cryptobros by the way: they're always some combination of "old technology that has nothing to do with cryptocurrencies" and "doesn't actually solve the problem".

NFT's as currently employed only immutably connect to a link - which is in itself not secure. More significantly, no blockchain technology deploys to internet scale content creation. Not remotely. It's hard to conceive of a blockchain solution fast enough and cheap enough -- let alone deployed and accepted universally enough, to have a meaningful impact on text / video and audio provenance across the internet given the pace of uploading. It also wouldn't do anything for the vast corpus of existing media, just new media created and uploaded after date X where it was somehow broadly adopted. I don't see it.

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