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thunky 4 hours ago

> damage it will cause to the economy when you can no longer trust that you're on a video call with an actual person

What damage are you talking about?

I'm not sure I understand why it matters that there is no real person there if you can't actually tell the difference. You're just demonstrating that you don't actually need a human for whatever it is you're doing.

bigfishrunning 3 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Your wife or mother calls you or video calls you and says to meet her somewhere, or to send money, or to pick up groceries or whatever. Does it not matter that it wasn't her? Could it be someone trying to manipulate you into going somewhere, to be robbed or whatever? At any rate, you'll need to verify that information came from the source you trust before you act on it, and that verification has a cost.

The damage is to the trust we have in our communication media. The conclusion here is that every person is trivial to impersonate; that's the damage.

thunky 3 hours ago | parent [-]

Not disagreeing, but the context of GP was business/economy/hiring.

Also it was already possible for someone to impersonate your mother via text or similar, and even easier to pull off.

bigfishrunning 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Ok fine, let's put it in the context of business. Your competitor impersonates your customer, gives you bad instructions. After following the bad instructions, you lose the contract with your customer, and your competitor (the attacker) is free to try and replace you.

If you got a suspicious text, the logical thing is to call up the person who sent it and try to verify it. AI impersonation makes that much harder.

thunky 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

> If you got a suspicious text, the logical thing is to call up the person who sent it and try to verify it

The communication channel is what you trust. So you would call the person using that trusted channel.

It's just like when you get a scam email or popup from "Microsoft" saying your laptop is compromised and you need to call their number ASAP.

Habgdnv 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Or even better, open the on-prem AI portal and type something like "I just got a suspicious call from client X, but I am on a lunch break. Call him and use a fake video of me. Ask him if what he said is true..."

contagiousflow 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

You don't think people getting scammed is part of the economy?

rdevilla 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Because what you are actually doing is exchanging symbols, tokens, if you will, that may be redeemed in a future meatspace rendezvous for a good or service (e.g. a job, a parcel). These tokens are handshakes, contracts, video calls, etc. to be exchanged for the actual things merely represented therein.

Instead what we have now with AI is people exchanging merely the tokens and being contented with the symbol in-and-of itself, as something valuable in its own right, with no need for an actual candidate or physical product underlying the symbol.

There is a clip by McLuhan I can't be assed to find right now where he says eventually people will stop deriving pleasure from the products themselves and instead derive the feelings of (projected) accomplishment and pleasure from viewing advertisements about the product. The product itself becomes obsolete, for all you actually need to evoke the desired response is the advertisement, or the symbol.

A hiring manager interviewing an AI and offering it a job is like buying the advertisement you just watched, and.... that's it. No more, the transaction is complete.

pixl97 2 minutes ago | parent [-]

>McLuhan

Hmm, this guy may have been on to something

>Instead of tending towards a vast Alexandrian library the world has become a computer, an electronic brain, exactly as an infantile piece of science fiction. And as our senses have gone outside us, Big Brother goes inside. So, unless aware of this dynamic, we shall at once move into a phase of panic terrors, exactly befitting a small world of tribal drums, total interdependence, and superimposed co-existence. [...] Terror is the normal state of any oral society, for in it everything affects everything all the time. [...] In our long striving to recover for the Western world a unity of sensibility and of thought and feeling we have no more been prepared to accept the tribal consequences of such unity than we were ready for the fragmentation of the human psyche by print culture.

--The Gutenberg Galaxy, 1962

skydhash 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

> What damage are you talking about?

Not GP, but there's a lot of damage that can be done with impersonation.

chii 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

The grandparent post has the belief that human interaction is intrinsically better. Not sure i agree, but i can understand the POV.

However, the increase in fake videos that are difficult to tell from real is indeed a potential issue. But the fact that misinformation today is already so prevalent is evidence that better video doesn't make it any worse than it already is imho.

collinmcnulty 2 hours ago | parent [-]

You're not sure if human to human interaction is intrinsically more valuable than a human talking to a facsimile? That feels like a very dangerous position to hold for one's ethical calculations and general sanity. I'm clinging tightly to the value of the bond with other people, even the passing connection, but certainly with my family members as this article is about.

esseph 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Imagine how this plays out in courtrooms the world over for evidence.

We're in deep shit.