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Tristram Smith's avatar

Really interesting. Hopefully a bit of a "stretch", but (re. your final paragraph), I could imagine "indirect nefariousness", whereby Bad Actors use the authenticity that LLMs can emulate to tell *real humans* to commit wicked acts (as per the various "white coat" experiments over the decades). I see that as both more likely (and potentially more dangerous) than just "the machines" being bad

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Justin Tan's avatar

That’s a really good point, Tristram. With “deepfake” technologies these days being so good (e.g., HeyGen, ElevenLabs), the threat of identity theft has never been so high. It’s not inconceivable that you might get a call from a family member in a panicked voice asking for you to send them some money urgently. One advice I’m giving my friends and families these days is to have a “code word” known only to you and the other person that you inject into conversations to check that it’s really you / them. In a world that becomes dominated by technology and AI, we may ironically need to resort to more human / basic methods for verification.

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