I think of it as, we've had a hurdle where computers were too slow to organize the data humans produced, but have since crossed it. LLMs and CV also enable analysis of fuzzy data, which hasn't been possible before. This makes me uneasy, to say the least.
replyI asked Claude to analyze and datamine all of my eleven thousand HN comments, plus my reddit comments, lobsters comments, mailing list emails, stackexchange content, etc. With this database it managed to create an entire dossier about me. It could psychologically profile me, and it had a better and more complete view of me than my literal psychologist. We identified things like weaknesses, social engineering susceptibility, likely scenarios. It got to the point it started digging into open source projects I made when I was a teenager and started making eerily accurate inferences about my childhood.
replyI can't even imagine what the NSAs and CIAs of the world are capable of with their limitless black budgets. Anthropic only balked at domestic surveillance, it had zero objections towards allowing the US government to surveil foreign persons like me.
I completely agree. I've done a similar experiment on this rather young HN account and it was already able to deduce some things that I never explicitly stated. It probably doesn't require much more than a megabyte of someone's Slack messages or emails to build a profile on them, and there's much more data out there than that. People can be linked by their footprints in big tech products, or more crudely by techniques like stylometry, which is fully accessible to foreign governments. LLMs will likely enable even more aggressive techniques for linking people's public data, let alone to analyze it.
replyPrecisely, modern multimodal LLMs are a breakthrough in ultra high volume data processing, for all their flaws
replyAnd drones.
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