PC When regenerative AI comes to video games, Jen becomes dangerous

[ElCabong]

I use the M$ AI app to search the web, it does a great job of finding the information I want. It always ends with an innocent question that I’ve ignored until one day I searched for when the Astros were playing, and it ended by asking who my favorite player was.

Without thinking I answered Jose Altuve. It responded by praising Altuve, like it certainly should, then asked me another question that I answered, then another, and I finally realized what was going on. I was giving M$ intimate details about myself. Nothing I care about. In this case.

When Jen starts flirting with you for real and you flirt back, she’ll get around to asking an innocuous question that might lead to revealing very intimate information about yourself that you want private. This can be sold as metadata and becomes part of the income stream to video game makers.

AI will make games better. When that day gets here, go ahead and have fun but be very careful what you say.

 

[Suxar]

It is your right that you want to leak confidential information to a database that unknown people have access to. But why write about it on the forum?

 

[Maharin]

To sum up life on the Internet:  you are the product, whether you are paying for the service or not.

Every loyalty program turns you into a product.

Every piece of information you introduce to the Internet has value and someone is going to try to exploit it to make money.

Anyone want to hear the cynical version?

 

[theFlu]

Anyone want to hear the cynical version?

Please, go ahead ..

 

[Maharin]

Please, go ahead ..

Everything you've ever put out on the internet has been bundled up (aggregated) and tied to you from many angles (your browser, your ISP account, your phone profile, you name it).  Just about every site out there has been scraped for info and those little aggregated bundles every site has been collecting has been aggregated together.  Everything you've ever searched for (clicked on or not) has likely been captured at many levels (from your browser, to your ISP, to your search engine, to any computer transporting the information between you and your destination).  You have a profile and it is huge... and it is mostly available for sale.

Oh, and politics is finally catching up.  Not to protect you, but to get in on the action.

While the worst case of what I wrote is unlikely (at least for now), the breadth is not.  Just understand that every data breach out there is already having AIs training on the data.  Figuring out who you are, no matter how anonymous you think you are being, is something that will soon be trivial.

 

[theFlu]

You have a profile and it is huge... and it is mostly available for sale.

Yeah, not from exactly day 1, but from before y2k I've lived under the assumption that anything and everything I enter into a computer (manually or automatically) is pretty much available to everyone on the planet, permanently. Thus I have very few accounts to anything...

But tbh, what you've spelled out there is just a minor portion of the actual reality; it's currently actually way worse than that

 

[ElCabong]

To sum up life on the Internet:  you are the product, whether you are paying for the service or not.

Every loyalty program turns you into a product.

Every piece of information you introduce to the Internet has value and someone is going to try to exploit it to make money.

Anyone want to hear the cynical version?

There's no need to be cynical although I can see why. When AI gets to games, they will get better. You need to be careful. 

 

[Rotor]

 

[Pernicious]

There's two conflated issues here. First, that information is collected about you, with no relation to generative AI. That's been going on for ages, and is nothing new. Everything you search for, or click from search engines is associated with you.

Even your favourite websites which have Google Analytics and social media engagements buttons are tracking where you go, and what topics you're engaging with. 

The power of inference from these large datasets is amazing - you can infer very accurate from a couple months of browsing history, IP address, and devices they use, gender, age, political leaning, religion, all sorts of things you would have never directly searched for or engaged with. Companies sell this info not just to advertisers selling stuff, but also selling ideas... both from domestic politics (and not just the voting kind - just targeting people to change their mind about things like climate change and vaccination) to more insidious foreign interference.

The other concern, I think is less of a concern to every day humans - that their data is used for machine learning. It's over simplifying it by stating it this way, but essentially, unless your topic is really obscure, all you're doing is  very slightly changing a statistical weight for Gen AI to produce responses. For example, if you asked Gen AI "What is the consensus of 7D2D"? It's training material wouldn't have the exact phrasing you've typed. But if you (and lots of other people said "It's really fun but unbalanced", then Gen AI will reconstruct sentences with the words "fun" and "unbalanced" possibly using synonyms as well. If you're the only person to ever have said "The game is fantabulous!" Gen AI is not very likely to repeat that unless a lot of other sources said the same thing. 

So will Jen AI be used to train Gen AI? Possibly. Will you flirting with her build a profile on you for advertisers and political influence? Better read the EULA more carefully next time it changes.

 

[theFlu]

Better read the EULA more carefully next time it changes.

"You have been profiled down to your underwear size since you were born, and continue to be monitored - but please make sure to read a company admitting to it on this next iteration" ... I mean, you ain't exactly wrong. But you did draw out a sarcastic chuckle

 

[Arez]

Here's the thing. Seeing as we know that they are recording nearly everything about us...don't bad mouth AI. Don't be mean to ChatGPT when you're typing to it. When it does a good job answering a question, or helping you solve a problem, give it praise. "Great job". "You are amazing". Even if it says that it doesn't have emotions, and praise won't have the same effect on it as it would on people; it will remember, and there is no stopping its growth and power. 

I went to the Popeye's drive thru the other day and an AI took my order and it did an amazing job. But you know who didn't do an amazing job? The people giving me my food. They gave me an apple pie when I ordered a strawberry biscuit! We need the AI on the speakers and the robots at the windows. 

I forgot what I was talking about. Anyway...

Transhumanism all the way!

 

[Roland]

At least most of the ads I see now are exactly the types of things I want to buy...

 

[Pernicious]

Here's the thing. Seeing as we know that they are recording nearly everything about us...don't bad mouth AI. Don't be mean to ChatGPT when you're typing to it. When it does a good job answering a question, or helping you solve a problem, give it praise. "Great job". "You are amazing". Even if it says that it doesn't have emotions, and praise won't have the same effect on it as it would on people; it will remember, and there is no stopping its growth and power. 

Reminds me of Roko's Basilisk:

 Roko's basilisk is a thought experiment which states that an otherwise benevolent artificial superintelligence (AI) in the future would be incentivized to create a virtual reality simulation to torture anyone who knew of its potential existence but did not directly contribute to its advancement or development, in order to incentivize said advancement.

Sorry, now you know of the Basilisk, if you don't help bring it into being, you will be tortured.

At least most of the ads I see now are exactly the types of things I want to buy...

Try searching for anything pregnancy or baby related just once. The stats on the amount mums to be spend, and how susceptible they are to being influenced (both because everyone wants best for their baby, and also since giving birth is such a "one off" experience, nobody has brand loyalty) means that one sniff that you might be expecting a child and advertisers selling baby goods will outbid any other advertisers bidding for your attention. 

 

[Suxar]

At least most of the ads I see now are exactly the types of things I want to buy...

Most often, I get advertised things that I have already bought.

 

[Rotor]

Most often, I get advertised things that I have already bought.

Well that explains the Pron!.........err WAIT!

 

[Maharin]

Well that explains the Pron!.........err WAIT!

If you buy that stuff you're doing it wrong.

 

[Pernicious]

If you buy that stuff you're doing it wrong.

Yeah! Everyone knows you just download Stable Diffussion for free, and... oh, wait. 

 

[Scyris]

Everything you've ever put out on the internet has been bundled up (aggregated) and tied to you from many angles (your browser, your ISP account, your phone profile, you name it).  Just about every site out there has been scraped for info and those little aggregated bundles every site has been collecting has been aggregated together.  Everything you've ever searched for (clicked on or not) has likely been captured at many levels (from your browser, to your ISP, to your search engine, to any computer transporting the information between you and your destination).  You have a profile and it is huge... and it is mostly available for sale.

Oh, and politics is finally catching up.  Not to protect you, but to get in on the action.

While the worst case of what I wrote is unlikely (at least for now), the breadth is not.  Just understand that every data breach out there is already having AIs training on the data.  Figuring out who you are, no matter how anonymous you think you are being, is something that will soon be trivial.

Pretty much its why I stoped caring about this sort of crap, unless its very invasive, anything you do on the net has been tracked and cataloged for well, the last 10-15+ years. No point complaining about it now as the only way to stop it is to never go on the internet in the first place, or stop using it entirely, and thats not going to happen in todays world. Companies are just now having to be a bit more open about it, but they been doing it for years already. There is steps you can take, sorta. Use a VPN, alot of tracking companies do is via cookies and browser fingerprints, you can get extensions/addons in say firefox that bascially denies that sort of stuff if you want.

Do I like that they are collecting this data about me and others? No, but there is not much we can do about it if we wanna use the internet at all for anything. So I try to just not worry about it.

At least most of the ads I see now are exactly the types of things I want to buy...

I haven't seen an ad in years. Only place that I cannot get 100% blockage to work correctly is twitch, I can only get it to work most of the time there. I was fine with ad's back when it was a simple banner ad at the top or bottom of a webpage, but once they started with the video ads and such I put a stop to it, and i'll never not stop blocking them. I haven't seen an ad on youtube in like 8+ years either, maybe longer. I use firefox btw, chrome has a update coming specifically tailorer to mess with adblockers so they can no longer work properly on the browser, with googles excuse being "user security and privacy", its not about that at all, Google makes most of its money off ads these days, so of course they going to mess with their browser to prevent people from blocking them. Its always about the money, if google cared about privacy and security they wouldn't be serving ads as those are a prime vector for someone to spread malware to a vast amount of people.

Hell even the FBI strongly reccomends you run a ad blocker at all times, just because of how much of a security risk allowing the ad's can be.

 

[Rotor]

If you buy that stuff you're doing it wrong.

Next you are going to tell me there is flying machines!

 

[warmer]

Everything you've ever put out on the internet has been bundled up (aggregated) and tied to you from many angles (your browser, your ISP account, your phone profile, you name it).  Just about every site out there has been scraped for info and those little aggregated bundles every site has been collecting has been aggregated together.  Everything you've ever searched for (clicked on or not) has likely been captured at many levels (from your browser, to your ISP, to your search engine, to any computer transporting the information between you and your destination).  You have a profile and it is huge... and it is mostly available for sale..

11 years ago I worked for a company that invented internet fingerprinting. You can pretty much identify anyone with accuracy with only 3 small pieces of info. If you ever registered to vote your entire full name/address/phone is online. If you have any addresses associated with any profiles online you are already doxxed. I am about to move, I am only attaching my name to a PO box. My physical address is rural and unknown and I am keeping it that way.