One way to look at it: Why wouldn't they use this capability? (Moral qualms?)
Powerful interests, including corporations and foreign powers, have long worked effectively to frame public perceptions, even when their access to the members of the public was as limited as newspapers and a few broadcast TV stations, and filtered through editors. And they did it effectively.
Have they stopped for some reason?
And would they be less effective for some reason? The new tools - direct access to billions of individuals, wide bandwidth, no filters - should make them far more effective.
It's amazing to me that the fact of them doing it isn't well-known (there is plenty of research and evidence) and assumed, but still a question even on HN. Bring it up to most people and they will ostracize/ridicule you - an odd response which I can't explain well, given the evidence, likelihood, and very serious consequences which those same people are unhappy with.
Interestingly, over the last several years powerful interests have worked - successfully - to shut down research on this issue, including at places like Stanford and Harvard.
* So many people using the same nonsense talking points at the same time. Did they coincidentally make up the same lies? With no anchor in objective reality, why would they converge on the same talking points?
* The sophistication of the talking points: IME they are often very well-crafted - seemingly professionally crafted - public communication. They effectively frame the debate, shift attention (often attacking the messenger), use powerful emotional impact to bypass reasoned discussion, and acheive the main goal of disinformation - paralyze discussion. Did people invest the time and effort to craft these talking points on their own, and do it so effectively?
It's not exclusively random people doing random stuff, but it also doesn't require a large, well funded, conspiracy. People see a fake poll that confirms their preferences and then proceed to propagate the message.
Also, consider who controls what propogates and what nobody sees.
Social media operators are like news (newspaper, tv news) editors, deciding what gets covered and how, and what doesn't. But they operate on a far larger scale, more powerful scale, and very few realize they do it.
Normalize into flat xml that I could then parse in Nokogiri.
Edit for clarity: I am a Rubyist at heart so I reach for Ruby for almost all of my automation, ML, and even now AI stuff. Fro a very long time, I have been able to use CLI LibreOffice to do amazing things. It can read everything, even obscure formats by today's standards, going back into the 1990s. And then once in OpenOffice XML you have one target to parse in your scripting language of choice to do document analysis, data loss prevention detection, and more. All with a clean open source license with no server usage restrictions, unlike MS Office.
Which products that sell this are broadly popular? I can see some people on HN wanting it, but people I know who are outside that bubble don't even think of it as an issue.
? It's not hard to find material based on primary evidence and direct observations of it. That is fundamental to all scholarship and also, to a significant degree, journalism, law, etc.
> Most software isn't built that way. It can't be because the priorities of developers and customers work against it.
The most significant such priority may be the costs of paying developers and of time to delivery.
The dramatic reductions in those costs due to LLMs enable us to produce much more quantity and/or quality. Many complain now about quantity, so perhaps we are finally at a stage where we don't need much more software, and can focus on quality. Also, LLM attackers create demand for higher quality.
In other words, LLMs might enable us to some of these things that were impossible before.
It's very exciting to see the work on combining AI models with static analysis, test generation, formal proof, and refactoring. All of these suggests we might see high assurance (EAL6+) developed rapidly in the future. At least for combinations of well-understood concepts.
You don't mention generating code from scratch; is that on purpose? Perhaps a developer could add many constraints that would have been too expensive previously - e.g., code in Spark, use only these ___ system calls, never use this riskier capability, use only these ___ libraries, etc.
The LLM might take longer than otherwise, but still be fast enough. The new technology, like every useful one, changes the tradeoff equation.
That's theoretically arguable. Still, for the many reCaptcha users in the world, Google dropped it on them and they are at least temporarily stuck with it. Not everyone has the time or energy to implement another solution, and what solution is better? Cloudflare's infinite turnstile?
Second: the US justice system is also a joke. I could fight Google in justice and win in my country (France) and in pretty much any other developed country because a working system doesn't let big actor DoS smaller player out of justice. You obviously can't fix a corrupt syatem with technology.
Remember that depicting their software as out of control is part of their marketing - our software is extremely powerful, our organization is very cutting edge.
And with these radical, disruptive narratives they are getting people accustomed to the organization doing radical, disruptive things. It removes social and political constraints on their power.
They control it very well when they want to - especially when they want to invest resources. Their software isn't doing things that destroy their company. Has it hacked into OpenAI executives' and partners' personal data yet, and exposed it to the world? Blackmailed them? (Maybe that will be an upcoming move.)
It doesn't show as flagged. Do other see the same? Anyone know what is going on?
(And now HN is rate-limiting me, so you probably won't see this for a little while.
@mods - mysterious UX issues are starting to suck.)
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