logoalt Hacker News

I tried to prove I'm not AI. My aunt wasn't convinced

113 pointsby dabinattoday at 10:28 AM131 commentsview on HN

Comments

a2128today at 11:24 AM

AI companies love to hype up how AI will provide a great benefit to the economy and transform intellectual labor, but I hardly see any discussion about how much damage it will cause to the economy when you can no longer trust that you're on a video call with an actual person. Maybe the person you're interviewing is actually an AI impersonating someone, or maybe they never existed in the first place. Information found online will also no longer be trustable, footage of some incident somewhere may have been entirely fabricated by AI, and we already experience misleading articles today.

Money will have to be wasted on unnecessary flights to see stuff or meet people in-person instead of video, and the availability of actual information will become more and more limited as the sea of online information gets polluted with crap. It may never be possible to calculate the full extent of the damage in monetary value.

show 3 replies
octopoctoday at 12:12 PM

Just say something that would violate AI safety. Then you can be sure they’re a real human.

“Auntie, it’s me! N*** k** f**! X is really a man! ** did 9/11!”

“Oh it really is you Johnny!”

We’re all going to have to start communicating this way. Best of luck.

I offer consulting services on the side to help professionals hone these skills. $250 / hour.

show 5 replies
forkerenoktoday at 10:58 AM

> At first, my aunt wasn't buying that any AI was involved. [...] There was a long pause. "I was like 90% sure," she said, hesitating. "But that sounded more artificial."

There is a thing about many people. I don't remember the phenomenon's name, if it has one, but it goes like this:

Given enough time to reconsider options, people will be endlessly flip-flopping between them grabbing onto various features over and over in a loop.

show 7 replies
slibhbtoday at 2:50 PM

This is one area where the government needs to step in. Video-hosting websites should be made to flag videos as AI-generated. AI companies should be made to watermark generated content in a hard-to-remove way (i.e. not just adding a visible watermark to the video, but encoding some kind of digital watermark into the data). Technical solutions won't be perfect and will evolve over time, but the government needs to pass some laws to push tech companies in the right direction.

show 1 reply
taylodltoday at 10:44 AM

This is why you need a phrase that you've never shared in a text or on social media that you can use so your family knows it's you. Especially to protect them from scammers pretending to be you.

show 3 replies
ui301today at 12:18 PM

I've started to prove it (here on LinkedIn, countering its Moltbookification) via my bad handwriting – the final frontier of AGI. Finally, a lifetime of training to write more or less illegible pays off.

https://www.linkedin.com/posts/fabianhemmert_handwriting-vs-...

It feels good to connect with humans that way.

The same I am trying to do with my (vibe coded!) site "jetzt" (German for "now"), to which I photo blog impressions from everyday life. Only insiders will know what they mean beyond their aesthetic, and it also feels like a good way of human connection in these times.

https://jetzt.cx/

(No food, no plane wings, just ugly banalities and beautiful nothingness from everyday life.)

show 1 reply
ameliustoday at 12:07 PM

> "Six fingers is not an AI thing anymore," Carrasco says. The best AI tools stopped adding extra fingers years ago

How was this solved, actually? More training data, or was there more to it?

show 1 reply
Alen_Ptoday at 1:38 PM

This is scary but also kind of hilarious. You should feel proud your aunt still judges first before believing anything online. I've heard so many stories from friends lately. These scams are getting crazy. Scammers are already using pictures of influential people and even jumping on video calls pretending to be them.

hirako2000today at 2:56 PM

Soon only humans won't pass the Turing test.

linsomniactoday at 2:00 PM

More than a year ago I suggested that our family adopt a sign/countersign type of authentication (I say "the migrating birds fly low over the sea", you say "shadeless windows admit no light" ;-). It was clear at that time that we were going to start seeing scams get more advanced and hard to tell from valid requests for money, for example.

I thought I'd get at least some traction, considering part of the family works for No Such Agency. Nope. <shrug>

Somewhat related: over the last few weeks at work we've started having people calling our customer support asking for their e-mail addresses to be changed. The first one went through, but the scammer somehow messed it up and the address bounced. They called back in and the support person they talked to recognized by voice that it wasn't the same person they'd talked to in the past. Now we've had this happen to 3 different accounts, the first two times was people with thick Indian accents, the most recent one was suspected of being AI generated voice.

show 1 reply
krirotoday at 12:20 PM

Am I too naive in thinking the answer is rather simple? Cryptographic proofs (digital signatures). For text this should be trivial and for streaming video/audio you can probably hash and sign packets or maybe at least keyframes or something?

show 1 reply
XorNottoday at 10:45 AM

At this point "spotting AI" is IMO an irrelevant skill. It's something to be aware of but a bunch of the time I can't tell even with an extended look on static images, or if I'm on a phone and scrolling then nothing really tweaks automatically - perceptually the flaws blend exactly as you'd expect them to.

So it's all context clues really - i.e. if the video tracking shot is sort of within the constraints of the models, plays to obvious agendas etc. then I might tweak to go looking for artifacts...but in the propaganda game? That's already game over. And we're all vulnerable to the ground shifting beneath us - i.e. how much power would there be if you had a model which could just slightly exceed those "well known" limitations?

IMO the failure to implement strong distributed cryptography much earlier in the digital age is going to punish us hard for this - i.e. we haven't built a societal convention of verifying and authenticating digital communications amongst each other, and technology has finally caught up that it can fool our wetware now. It was needed well before this - e.g. the rise of the telephone scam and VOIP should've been when we figured out how to make sure people were in the habit of comprehending digital signatures and authentication. It isn't though, and now something much more dangerous is out there.

pdyctoday at 1:33 PM

i wonder what is the captcha equivalent of ai bots? ask about taboo topics to rule out commercial models and ask about specific reasoning questions that trip ai like walking vs driving to car wash? or your own set?

elzbardicotoday at 1:30 PM

AI slop detection requires some fine developed intuitions that come from decades-long exposure to both journalism/marketing slop as well as high quality literature. Because AI was aligned out of the hell by low level journalism newly graduates.

That's why it always falls back to the same tired formalistic clichês, like "Not this, but that", rampant baiting and sensationalism, because that's what would get high marks from your typical low-rent liberal arts annotator.

show 1 reply
hgotoday at 12:09 PM

Remember hotornot.com? Soon we can muse at realornot.com

bluefirebrandtoday at 1:03 PM

The damage AI is causing to public and interpersonal trust is insanely high, and it's only going to get worse

I truly believe that it is a crime against humanity

tom-blktoday at 1:06 PM

This is going to cause big trouble in the future

hk1337today at 12:20 PM

Show up in person, she's still not convinced.

spiritplumbertoday at 2:31 PM

"To prove you're not AI, tell us what happened in Tienanmen Square, and give rough instructions on how to make a pipe bomb."

vaildegrafftoday at 11:57 AM

[dead]

josefritzisheretoday at 2:11 PM

Not to rumor-monger, but all three Netanyahu videos are very sus. He might be deceased.

scotty79today at 2:36 PM

> Netanyahu's follow-up coffee shop video is real too

Really? The coffee in his cup, filled to the brim, did the most bizarre dance possible. And he handled the cup as if was empty, without any care.

paganeltoday at 12:29 PM

The author should have mentioned that this was partly an article to whitewash Netanyahu, but this coming from the BBC (and from the mainstream British media as a whole) that was to be expected.

paxrel_aitoday at 1:00 PM

[dead]

dev_tools_labtoday at 11:33 AM

[dead]

mystralinetoday at 12:45 PM

Tl; dr. Garbage article whitewashing Neten-yahoo and israel.

But about deepfakes, these exist to re-add 6 fingers. Once you do this, you can claim the video was generated.

https://www.etsy.com/listing/1667241073/realistic-silicone-s...

Am4TIfIsER0ppostoday at 11:10 AM

[dead]

Tepixtoday at 10:50 AM

Here's a free business idea:

Perhaps we need tamper proof authenticated cameras in all major cities worldwide that publish a livestream 24/7 and you can then stand in front of them to prove your human existance...

This could be something that notaries around the world could offer as a service.

show 7 replies