They're not. If there's nothing wrong with it, one could ask whether the person here would be okay sitting in a room with their supervisor, the head of the company, and 10 customers, say the same things they're saying here, and get a consensus that this is how this should all work out.
"The [AI researchers] have known sin, and this is a knowledge which they cannot lose."[0]
which is what I would hope would happen, but they're probably fine not thinking about the consequences of their actions looking at their 7 figure salaries
exactly! while there may be some neutral to slightly positive use of this tech (haha funny video) I can only really see the evil uses of it: scams, misinformation, propaganda, easily available to create by anyone at massive scale.
I really don't see the argument for this tech to be any kind of good, unless you think moving into an era where you cannot trust any image or video is somehow a neutral outcome, AND are happy about the people who are in control of this tech. which I guess captures a larger part of the HN crowd than I'd hoped
My perspective is different: we never could trust videos and images in the past. Our hopes, back then, were that the costs of faking said media (despite us being in the age of information and media) would remain permanently high and would deter people from choosing so. But this was always wishful thinking.
GenAI has presented tangible proof of such risks and is forcing society to reevaluate the way we trust evidence. In my eyes, it serves as an opportunity to improve our foundations of trust to something that relies less on the good will of random authorities onto something more objective.
Also, I haven't really seem anyone celebrating the large corporations who control AI tech. Could be simply the people I'm involved with, but most AI enthusiasts I've seem are more about, at least, open-weights AI models.
IMO what's really wishful thinking is believing that society will necessarily adapt for the better in response to a deluge of AI spam/ads/propaganda.
You could have said the same about say, pre-AI deceptively edited/ragebait/made up content going viral on FB, "actually this is good because soon people will realize they are being tricked/lied to, they'll think extra-critically before sharing dubious content next time".
Which has not happened. I can only see AI videos/images making the problem worse as people are fed personalized, narrowly targeted content that seem to perfectly appeal to their own beliefs/biases/emotions/etc.
Also, if anything it seems like we will have to trust authoritative groups more thanks to GenAI. If I have to consider every video on the internet from e.g. Iran as fake, I'm going to turn to NYT or WSJ who can be relied on to (usually) share only original content, or highly vetted 3rd party content.
I agree that the solution we may find might not necessarily be for the better. In fact, there are a couple solutions I've seen that fall onto that category, like banning GenAI (does nothing to solve the underlying issue while control over economic production always requires increased authoritarianism).
I can't really provide a truly good solution, as this problem has large ramifications into philosophy and ethics, but I'd think it would involve solutions like attestation and certificates, and, primarily, thinking of shared media (text, images, videos, etc.) not as facts, but, strictly as allegations.
I didn't read the article, but it's likely they are faster than light is when traveling through that water. light can have different speeds through different media.
as to why in this case: it can be somewhat intuitive to think that photons would be forced to take a somewhat longer path when traveling through a medium they interact with a lot (water, anything with a charge) then something which is almost going at the speed of light and famously doesn't interact with almost anything!
No, Anthropic did not want Claude to be used for autonomous weapons and domestic surveillance, in response to which the Department of Defense banned them from every defense use
edit: Disregard the above, do I take my car or walk to a car wash 50m away
Since the other guy wasn't particularly helpful, i'll try to add some context (mostly through my knowledge of iDeal, the Dutch payment system which Wero is based on).
You're right that it's a bit confusing, as Wero's marketing is mostly focused on P2P transfer usecases, ie like US's Venmo/Cashapp, which as you note we can already do with SEPA transfers.
Wero does have a small benefit in that case, as it's slightly more secure (you don't need to share your bank account, and there's a dedicated app that most Western Europeans will soon be familiar with).
The bigger benefit I think is as a unified e-commerce solution. While Wero is not directly an EU initiative, it's still supported by the EU commission. In general a good thing to keep in mind when evaluating EU financial/economic news is that one of the main things the EU tries to do is strengthen and protect their "single market": they want to make the flow of commerce within EUs borders as seamless as possible.
Having a unified ecommerce payment solution, so that you can eg just as easily order goods from German webshops as a Frenchman as you can from a French one (barring shipping etc) is in the EUs interest. Of course it's also in the banks that put forward this initiative's interest.
But, speaking as a consumer: this rules! iDeal is really nice, much nicer to use than credit cards or PayPal imo. I think it's easy to see why you would prefer a dedicated payment system in ecommerce rather than plain SEPA transfers (which most shops don't support) or credit cards, but in case that's not clear:
- Faster checkouts
- Don't need to share bank account numbers/sensitive credit card info
- Fees are much lower than credit cards (at least for iDeal its fractions of a cent per transaction: https://ideal.nl/en/ideal-fees)
That was super helpful, thanks! Germany is just starting to accept credit cards. I hope that this enables digital payments for small transactions where cash is still king.
I hope it works well for visitors and recent immigrants. It can be surprisingly hard to open a bank account in your first few months in Germany, and I hope it won't leave people out of that new infrastructure.
reply