Comment by stego-tech
5 months ago
This is...disquieting. It's one thing to know that it's possible, another thing to know nation states or large megacorps are doing it, but another thing entirely to see such verbose output from free models about, well, me.
The first two, I've made peace with (nothing I can do about it anyway). The last one picks quite fiercely at old trauma that really makes me reconsider my socials in general, not just HN.
But maybe that's just the anxiety and trauma talking, encouraging me to recede back into the shadows and re-apply the old mask of "acceptableness" I've been trying to toss aside. Maybe the fact a free chatbot can do such a thorough analysis is in fact reason enough to stop worrying about every aspect of my identity and its perception by others, and instead just...be me, and deal with whatever consequences arise from that.
I dunno. Just...lot of emotions, here, most of them quite bad.
Right, as is so often the case with AI stuff the thing that's disconcerting is how cheap and low friction and friction adopt available this ability is now.
Anyone with access to a decent LLM can now perform a version of this in just a few seconds.
It's a lot to take in, if I'm being honest. Growing up in the sort of cultures where gossip and tabloids were the norm, this tool is painful to me in a way I'm not sure many folks can understand. It's not even low friction anymore; it's no friction, in the sense that anyone with a chatbot and minimal rails can just ask it to do these sorts of profiles now, on anyone they choose.
We desperately need to modernize laws around discrimination in light of the proliferation of these tools. No longer does someone need to thread the needle in interviews around "illegal" questions to find something to (metaphorically) hang an interviewee with, as these tools can pick it apart quite cleanly. People in protected classes are going to get reamed by bad actors leveraging these tools.
That said, after rubber ducking with a friend on this, I've come to the conclusion that there's two paths forward from this point: flight (scrubbing socials, hiding online, creating an acceptable persona) or fight (being firmly authentic, owning your weirdness, and accepting you can't control the outcomes of others' actions using these tools). I've spent decades in 'flight', and I'm tired of it. I can't control who uses these tools and to what end, so I may as well just be my damn self anyhow and do regular threat assessments accordingly. The more people who behave authentically, the less power these tools have over us.
I think it's not unreasonable, if one is in an oft discriminated protected class, to aim ones career / expense trajectory towards stability for the next couple decades. (Prioritizing remote, focusing towards subfields where there's more tolerance, working for companies in financially stable industries)
The law, currently predicated on the difficulty of discriminating en masse without leaving a paper trail, will take a while to catch up with de facto use.
Hell, there's still no legal prohibition in most of the US on things like Equifax's salary history reporting. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Work_Number
We've come a long way in some aspects, while staying pretty much in place in others.
I taught infosec 101 course at a university ~20 years ago. (Twice.) On the topic of privacy I used an example of harvesting data on peoples' habits, movements and behaviours and then said that as a society we use two different terms for the same thing. "When an individual does this, it's called stalking. When a company does this, it's called data mining."
The economics department students, many of who already knew they would want to work in marketing, were quite offended.
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From another perspective, it's like hearing others judging you behind your back. First few times it's awkward and maybe even annoying, but given enough time you stops to give a damn about it.
But, the problem is real if it's a nation states or megacorps are doing it. They'll use such tech in an unjustified way, make a misjudgement, and then ask you to explain yourself out of the situation. Yeah, they're definitely going that, because they don't give a damn about it.
I have a sneaking suspicion this is going to be 21st century communism's (read China's) fatal flaw: the corrosive effect of panopticon monitoring on population productivity.
Because eventually apparatchiks with the data at their fingertips are going to use it to rule out the next Einsteins from participating in {insert major Chinese project}, and you've effectively self-selected at scale for people whose shared characteristic is "not being different."
We'll see if the US and Europe course correct on individual freedom enough to reap the benefits of that though.
as an exercise, you could simply repost the last 1000 of simonw's comments as your own