Prof. Emily M. Bender(she/her)Feb 3, 2023

It's 2023. "Gosh, we didn't realize how people would misuse this" just isn't believable anymore.

Bare minimum, with any new tech:
1) How would a stalker use this?
2) What will 4chan do with this?

And don't release, not even as alpha or beta, before mitigating those risks.

https://www.theverge.com/2023/1/31/23579289/ai-voice-clone-deepfake-abuse-4chan-elevenlabs

#AIethics #ethNLP

4chan users embrace AI voice clone tool to generate celebrity hatespeech

AI voice cloning software is improving rapidly — as is its accessibility. 4chan users recently discovered free software that lets them clone the voices of celebrities like Joe Rogan and Emma Watson, generating audio samples ranging from hatespeech to erotica.

The Verge
Show threadJoshFeb 3, 2023

@emilymbender

AI is a tool and it’s rather difficult to make sure that a digital tool won’t fall into the hands of someone with ill intent

Photoshop has been publicly available for years now, and people initially thought it would destroy the integrity of all photos

Now in retrospect we can see that it didn’t, it’s not unreasonable to see AI as a similar case

Dystopia is often more boring than we think it will be, in the case of photoshop we got airbrushed instagram photos

Show threadMichael Misamore
@zamallama @emilymbender Yes, but this misses Emily's point: there is an ethical responsibility to mitigate these harms. It's not sufficient to throw up hands and say "we can't stop people from misusing tools".
Feb 3, 2023 at 3:16pmWeb
Show threadtyxFeb 3, 2023
@mmisamore @zamallama @emilymbender You actually cannot. It's just matter of time - sources will leak, tool will be pirated or someone just will replicate it using basic principles from published papers/patents. And the more power a tool brings to you then faster it will get to the black market. Welcome to the cyberpunk. The most hilarious thing about this thread - the Deepfake-like tools are available for ages, used many times for defamation, steal, unauthorized access etc. and TS started moral panic just now. And seems to be completely uneducated about how corp/society power imbalance works.
Show threadhangfireFeb 4, 2023

@mmisamore @zamallama @emilymbender

You wouldn't download a car...

Yes, yes I absolutely would...

Mitigating harms with technical solutions works how well and how often?

You mitigate these harms with social and economic solutions not technical ones that people will engineer their way around.