Post by @AwetTesfaiesus@mastodon.social
Let me be advocata diaboli here:
AI is the democratic equalizer, that lifts the general IT crowd to the level of (malicious) state actors and it doesn’t wait to be invited to the party by anybody.
How wrong is that pov?
@AwetTesfaiesus@mastodon.social
Ich versuche, die Rolle von KI bei #php2shell einzuordnen. Ist es das Fieber oder das Fieberthermometer?
Mir scheint: letzteres.
Liege ich falsch?
@AwetTesfaiesus calling AI "democratic" seems quite a stretch to me, seeing it delivered by some of the most influencal anti-democrats or even fascists (musk) world-wide, and with the stated target to abolish human work and concentrate wealth even more.
Right now they are cheap or even free to use, which may look like a boon for people without money, but there are a lot of hidden costs (enviromental damage will have to be paid by all), and also a lot of obvious costs that are currently being shouldered by risk capital betting on the mentioned target, abolishing human work.
@AwetTesfaiesus If you would have to pay the real cost of a LLM query, it would not be that accessible for everybody anymore.
In addition, the companies controlling the compute could decide to disable your access at any time.
Regarding your initial topic, attacking security flaws, i do not see a surge of hackers. The thousands of CVEs detected by AI analysis are underwritten by hundreds of millions of dollars, if you would pay this money to actual open source developers you would get a lot more in return. Primarily, i see AI companies touting their own horn (aka marketing).
@SimonHain the printing press also costs a lot of money. It still historically facilitated journalism and served the public interest
@AwetTesfaiesus wouldn't you differentiate between who owns the printing press?
Do you see Murdoch in the public interest? Nius? Der Stürmer? X?
@SimonHain first: keep in mind that I am playing the devil’s advocate here.
Secondly: of course I see a power struggle here. But the NYT is privately owned for how many generations now?
So: in relation to the states, does AI in general/php2shell in particular currently enhance the states‘ powers or does it limit the states‘ powers?
@AwetTesfaiesus I don't see the state involved in php2shell, it's a (potential) security flaw in code written by open source maintainers, fixed by open source maintainers.
(potential, because i have not seen an exploit doing something else but crashing the server, except for some fabricated cases that used other local access issues - but i am not a specialist for php)
As for AI in general, i mainly see state actors having massive FOMO in Europe (sovereign clouds), deep entanglement to the corrupt trump government, and chinese companies having state connections is not a surprise as well.
I do not see any issues that states would like to solve with LLMs, it's more a "its the future" and not wanting to be left behind.
And a lot of big news outlets in private hand are currently playing a central role in the endangerment of democracy.
The new generation of LLMs could be a great equalizer, it it wheren't mostly in the hands of autocrats.
They have been corrupted by capitalism from the start. To make them a benefit for democracy, they have to be in the hands of the people.
I recently tried Microsofts Copilot. I had a massive tendency to promote technology that is in the hands of Microsoft or benefits Microsoft, except if explicitely asked, not to. From what I hear, grok massively promptes musk.
It's a lot like social media in that regard. It can be a great tool for democracy, but if it is in the hands of a few rich and powerful people, it also is a great tool for manipulation.