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Comment by root_axis

8 hours ago

LLMs aren't magic, there's nothing they can do to persuade people to do weapons testing, it's an absurd scenario.

It feels like I don’t understand your definition of “persuade”, because the notion that people cannot be persuaded of things via reports and flashy animations is to me, absurd.

  • Do we have reason to believe they would be successful at other extreme feats of persuasion such as persuading a financial institution to transfer all of its holdings to an account controlled by the AI or persuading the Pope to renounce God?

  • For what value of N do you think there exists a string of N characters I could have responded to your comment with that would have infected you with a stably self-replicating and capability-augmenting memetic virus with human extinction as its latent goal?

    If not you, in this situation, with N characters delivered via a HackerNews comment, then who, in what situation, with what media and how much of it?

    • Ah yes, the "just do what a smarter person than you would do in this situation" argument. If I had that power, would I be wasting it shitposting here? We know humans have infectible little minds. At their worst, humans are just stoichastic parrots. Throw something obviously AI generated at a stoichastic human-parrot and you'll inevitably get the answer "Why should I read something if you didn't bother to write it?" UBI as a memetic virus comes close tho.

      Personally, I've been duped by a good ad into buying something I totally didn't want or need so I admit the possibility that the exact right tailored argument to me at the right time and place would get me to do something I'd regret later. Fortunately I'm not in charge of anything serious/am smart enough to not install software for an interview on my work laptop while working at Binance.

      I don't know that there exists some N for which that is true, because people are different, so what would convince me to do something isn't the same aa needed to convince someone else to do that something.

If Putin can persuade/bribe/blackmail people to fly drones around European airports, then why wouldn't an LLM be able to do similar things?