IDK. The implication that we already have laws that cover (80%?) of the use cases for new
tech we, as a society, want to discourage, is a good default. It resists the "there
ought to be a law" sensibility held by old people and curmudgeons everywhere. And it
keeps our legal system a little more adaptive than it would be were we to burden it with
even more persnickety case-by-case rulings.
I'm more interested in the deeper threats of new tech. E.g. "Altered Images":
https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10728-016-0327-1 and our tendency to "identify
as". Annoying story time. Maybe I've mentioned this before, but ...
I was at the pub with one of those people who describe themselves as left or liberal. But over the course of the conversation, it came out
that he was largely anti-trans ... basically a TERF ... but perhaps not so radical, maybe replace radical with reactionary. In an attempt
to constructively criticize his stance, I asked him whether he "identifies as a man". He quickly said "Yes." I
responded, "I don't." I also don't identify as Texan ... or Washingtonian ... or White (or Scotch-Irish, which is what the nuns
told my parents I was) ... or as a Ropella (which is easy being adopted). Etc. We didn't have the time to go into diachronic vs. episodic.
But by highlighting the fact that he identifies with various tribes (e.g. "men" and "American" - he's got ethnic
features, but doesn't identify with the ethnicities they're associated with), I'd hoped to demonstrate that "identifying as" is
problematic no matter what it is you identify with. So maybe I'm also anti-trans because *anyone* who identifies as a man is simply
confused ... including him.
The point being that behaviorism is insidious. You are not a shallow narrative comprising
Instagram "stories" in the same way ChatGPT is not an organism. But it's not merely
behaviorism. There's a similar problem with the concept of an integrated personality
<https://dictionary.apa.org/integration>. Faced with such severe and disastrous
delusional separation from one's environment, focusing on the suffering that can be caused by
particular instances of abuse (as in DeStefano) seems overly Utilitarian, flattening experience
into a 1-dimensional spectrum. It's a different symptom of the same disease.
On 6/16/23 16:07, Steve Smith wrote:
Extortion is illegal, no?
Apparently there are both federal and (all 50) state laws against
(im)personation (to achieve gain or cause harm). As far as I know this
doesn't keep Halloween stores from selling Richard Nixon and Donald Trump
masks, but *might* have something to say if they were realistic enough to pass
for *real* in casual contexts.
Extortion as in this case would be on the more extreme end of "intending harm" and "achieving
gain"? Does the (im)personation qualify as "aggravated"?
An early application of DeepFake photo/video was to generate mashup pornography and much of that
is pursued under "defamation" rules... the same was what applied to hand-work in a film
print lab and air-brush artistry. It has added an extra degree of freedom for generating
"revenge porn" as one might guess.
During Gulf War zero, LANL was developing simulation models of human vocal
tracts so as to allow for on-demand deepfake audio with Saddam Hussein as the
reference example (and likely prime target). Back then digital
radio/encryption were not ubiquitous. This work was declassified a decade
later... or maybe I just thought it was/should-be?
Presumably a studied voice-actor could have faked DeStefano's daughter's voice to a suitable degree
for the purpose, but the lowering of thresholds seems to be what might need attention? There are
lots of ways to cause dangerous explosions... the fact that a stick of dynamite with a fuse on one
end and a match make it "trivial" differentiates the need for regulations on that from
say "pressure cookers" ? I'm glad I can buy a pressure cooker without a background check
and (mostly) glad that to acquire dynamite (or most other highly convenient/concentrated
explosives) requires some scrutiny by my community (via the ATF, etc?).
Farmers who use both fuel oil and Ammonium Nitrate Fertilizer for their work (aka
ANFO when mixed and ignited properly) are often resentful of this oversight. I
don't know that Tim McVeigh had an easier time renting a big box truck to deliver a
load of same than the guy in Boston a few years ago
<https://www.boston25news.com/news/how-rental-rental-trucks-have-became-a-terrorist-weapon/636149105/>?
I *do* think airliners filled with jet fuel are more respected than they were
before 9/11 but then so are box-cutters...
I think most laws about "aggravated" assault/homicide/rape/??? specify "deadly weapon" of which we have a conventional
range of "usual suspects" (gun, knife, poison, bludgeon) and another range of unsurprising examples (moving vehicle, etc.) and
more esoteric ones ("frozen limp noodle or drinking straw fired at high speed from a pneumatic tube" or "falling
piano", or "exploding pressure cooker with failed pressure valve").
Maybe the much-feared <scare quote> _/!Nanny State!/ _</sq> will institute a new department of
"Women, Fire and Dangerous Things"
<https://bookshop.org/p/books/women-fire-and-dangerous-things-what-categories-reveal-about-the-mind-george-lakoff/6803422?ean=9780226468044>?
On Jun 16, 2023, at 1:32 PM, Merle Lefkoff <merlelefk...@gmail.com> wrote:
Here in the U.S., Jennifer DeStefano, an Arizona mother, testified at a Senate
hearing this week about her harrowing experience with a deepfake scam that
tricked her into thinking her daughter had been kidnapped. DeStefano says the
fake kidnappers demanded a $50,000 ransom before she got in touch with her
daughter, who was in fact safe and sound.
*Jennifer DeStefano*: “It was my daughter’s voice. It was her cries. It was her
sobs. It was the way she spoke. I will never be able to shake that voice and
the desperate cries for help out of my mind. It’s every parent’s worst
nightmare to hear your child pleading with fear and pain, knowing that they’re
being harmed and that you’re helpless. The longer this form of terror remains
unpunishable, the farther and more egregious it will become. There is no limit
to the depth of evil AI can enable.”
Is it already too late to design any kind of regulations?
--
ꙮ Mɥǝu ǝlǝdɥɐuʇs ɟᴉƃɥʇ' ʇɥǝ ƃɹɐss snɟɟǝɹs˙ ꙮ
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