alt Hacker NewsThe Banality of Surveillance
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I was using Grok with speech and discovered their "paralinguistic" information storage. At first it claimed that the storage was temporary, but then admitted that long term data was stored for training.
Some of the dimensions they store are prosody, intensity, timbre, non-verbal vocalizations, pauses, timing and emotional inflection. In other words, another large layer of information on top of just the prompt text. This data doesn't get translated into text, it goes straight into a speech-to-speech model.
It strikes me that from just a few minutes of such data and the associated semantic content, an AI can assemble a detailed and accurate emotional/psychological dossier of any user, on demand. In the hands of a federal agent it would be a powerful tool to impose their department's will, or their own. Also it's an ad targeting mother load. And if that were already in place we would have no way to know.
Talking to a machine seems banal already, but the metadata contains an instruction manual on where your buttons are and how to press them.
I'm fully expecting my next employer to grill me on my grocery purchasing habits and inferred medical history in my next job interview. Its all there for purchase and AI can put it all together into a compelling narrative. Suddenly my preference for prunes becomes a lifelong dire struggle with irregular bowel movement that may distract me from my work. Expect pointed questions about bathroom break lengths.
People overestimate the power of digital surveillance enormously. You'd think that's not a problem, but at the same time, most people underestimate more banal sources of repression.
You don't have to buy mouse click data on every John Smith when you've handed the handful of media empires to your buddies, reporters are jailed, dissidents are killed and CEOs willingly bend the knee to make a quick buck.
The most precious we normal people have are our attention and the most value is attached to our wallets. Guess what, we part with both when we willingly watch ads.
You don't need an LLM writing 600 lines of SQL, because Google already has a billion lines of code in production, serving ads. Stealing your attention when you should be meeting friends, or meeting a family member's gaze.
> People were compensated for being in the Stasi, and they're compensated for participating on Facebook. It's just in Facebook, they're compensated by social credits - they get laid by their neighbour, instead of being paid off directly.
> The Banality of Surveillance
Posted on Substack
The original quote is "The banality of evil", about the shoa in the third reich?
Reminder to never accept any cookie requests
> It’s who’s looking at your profile; it’s the profiles that you’re looking at. That was the holy grail
Facebook actually implemented this as a user facing feature.
I think it was very early days, but I used it, it was fucking creepy, and everyone hated it. I think Facebook probably removed it because it drove people away. It made you feel like a creep for checking on your friends page.
Because of this I am finding the internet more and more useless. I cannot tell you how much reading this freaks me out. I mean, is anyone else here as freaked out as I am?
The only way out is to unplug. Something I am realizing is very hard to do mainly because of my conditioning. My goal it to become the next Jesus (in the human sense), or the next St. Francis.
Just like my compulsive intent to keep coming back here to make these useless comments. What does it really do for me?
The capitalists (and you cannot tel me this is not because of capitalism) have ruined everything about the internet.
My goal: A flip phone (with a faraday bag) and a laptop with no connection to me at all, just to use to look up things, like a library.
I'm in my 50s and when I was early 20s I crossed from US to Canada for a business meeting. "Why are you coming to Canada?" "To work." "Where's your work permit?" "Huh, I don't have one." That simple "wrong word" slip STILL gets me flagged and cordoned off into hours-long border diversions whenever I go to Canada.
Just imagine how it'll be now... for decades you'll be fending off some hidden receipts from an IG comment you made.