Is chat GPT a danger to humanity?
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Mussels
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Re: Is chat GPT a danger to humanity?
This takes us back to what is the definition of AI, I suspect spy agencies have been doing this for many years before AI became a thing. It's machine learning and all the intelligence is human.
- DefTrap
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Re: Is chat GPT a danger to humanity?
And how do they know if it's a qwerty or azerty or any of the numerous variants? Plus laptop and tablet keyboards are pretty much silent.Slenver wrote: Sat Aug 12, 2023 10:15 amNo, they haven't.Screwdriver wrote: Sat Aug 12, 2023 1:19 am Hackers have developed an AI tool that can work out your password by listening to the sound of your keystrokes.
Researchers have built a model in a lab by extensively training an AI with a specific keyboard so that it can recognise which individual key is being pressed 93% of the time in a test.
It wouldn't necessarily work with several keys being typed quickly, it wouldn't necessarily know if the shift key was being held down, it wouldn't necessarily work without the extensive training on a particular keyboard, it obviously wouldn't work unless you happen to record the keys being typed and researchers aren't hackers. Plus of course, 93% accuracy sounds amazing, but this is per key. So for a 10-character password it's less than 50%.
So yes, it's impressive, and yes, potentially a real threat at some point. But it's not a current threat in any way yet, no.
Cyberdyne systems must be crying in their sleep.
Re: Is chat GPT a danger to humanity?
It wouldn't know anything until you train it which keys are which. As above, this is a lab test rather than anything real world.DefTrap wrote: Sat Aug 12, 2023 11:14 amAnd how do they know if it's a qwerty or azerty or any of the numerous variants?
It said it was done on a laptop. It's pretty impressive and supposedly is based on how close to the microphone the keys are.
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Mr. Dazzle
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Re: Is chat GPT a danger to humanity?
If bet there's someone somewhere who can do this by ear
I saw a guy on TV once who could identify LPs just by looking at them*.
*I mean technically anyone can do this, if said LP has a label on.
*I mean technically anyone can do this, if said LP has a label on.
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Mr. Dazzle
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Re: Is chat GPT a danger to humanity?
Working out how to break into computers is how you make em more secure innit?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_hat ... prov=sfla1
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_hat ... prov=sfla1
- Yorick
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Re: Is chat GPT a danger to humanity?
Some folk are way behind the times. I was working in the virus lab at McAfee 18 years ago. Some scary stuff

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Mr. Dazzle
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Re: Is chat GPT a danger to humanity?
My answer here is to be poor enough not to steal from, it's working well so far 
- wheelnut
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Re: Is chat GPT a danger to humanity?
It already is to a large extent.Screwdriver wrote: Sat Aug 12, 2023 12:17 pm The entire concept of a password is doomed to failure in the long term anyway …..
Something you know
Something you have
Something you are
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Mr. Dazzle
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Re: Is chat GPT a danger to humanity?
To be fair I can't think of a single important online thing I do which requires only a password...
Cept this place of course
Cept this place of course
- Yorick
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Re: Is chat GPT a danger to humanity?
I remember when I worked for Travele0x as DBA and was sent over to a big bank in Amsterdam called Rababank to do a complete install of Ingres.
To do it properly I'd need the root password for the whole weekend.
They only agreed to let me have the Ingres database password.
The bank CEO agreed to come in for a bit on the Saturday and give me 15 mins access with the root password.
Me being a Unix Sysadmin in previous life was able to capture the password for later after he logged that session out
To do it properly I'd need the root password for the whole weekend.
They only agreed to let me have the Ingres database password.
The bank CEO agreed to come in for a bit on the Saturday and give me 15 mins access with the root password.
Me being a Unix Sysadmin in previous life was able to capture the password for later after he logged that session out
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Greenman
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Re: Is chat GPT a danger to humanity?
They will get there soon! For what reason scares me i have to admit!Screwdriver wrote: Sun Aug 13, 2023 6:03 pm Apparently some geek managed to get hold of GPT4 and stick it on the internet! Bit of an issue due to the eye watering costs for training that thing. Some of these numbers, scratch that, ALL of these numbers are mindboggling:
- The total GPT-4 model has around 1.8 trillion parameters with 120 layers
- It's made of 16 different models, each with ~110b parameters and trained for a specific task/field (a technique known as MoE or Mixture of Experts)
- ~55b parameters are used solely for 'attention', i.e. guiding the model to stay on the topic at hand
- They believe GPT-4 was trained on ~13 trillion tokens (~10 trillion words)
- Some of these tokens were re-used (twice, or four times if it was code-based), so the actual size of the dataset is unknown but probably several trillion tokens
- They fine-tuned the model using more specific data from OpenAI and ScaleAI
- It took ~2e25 FLOPS of compute to train, using ~25k A100 processors for around 3 months
- GPT-4 is about 3x as computationally expensive to run than GPT-3.5
- It's thought a faster/cheaper model takes over after the first few words of a response, which could explain the complaints that ChatGPT got worse over time
Copied and pasted off a link from SemiAnalysis or Yam Peleg (for anyone wanting sources.
That means they used twenty five thousand high end Nvidia GPUs each costing about $25k (!) to do the training and while I think these companies rent resources rather than buy those GPUs, that's still tens of millions $$$ which got nicked and shared!
The page for the data source is deleted but once it's out there, it's out there...
...and I remember back in ye olden days when millions of parameters was still a thing. Right back in the distant past not long after I started this thread. Yeah. That's exponential growth for you. Forget Mores law, these things are accelerating like a dragster on methanol.
So in the past few months (say!) while GPT or AI generally became a billion times "smarter", how much smarter did humans get?
Looks like by the end of this year we'll be talking about Petaflops and YoctoBytes like anyone really comprehends the scale of such vast numbers. While I don't know what this really means, for a scale approximation, the human brain has about 100 billion neurons.
Those 1.8 trillion "parameters" are organised into "layers" and the layers are stacked in a "Multi Layer Perceptron"
...and that diagram effectively represents a neuron in a software neural net. So the numbers can't be compared like for like and in a way, a neural net is not a brain. It is being structured like one though...
I just hope they have already got there elsewhere that we don't know about though so what they produce won't wipe us out!
- Noggin
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Re: Is chat GPT a danger to humanity?
Life is for living. Buy the shoes. Eat the cake. Ride the bikes. Just, ride the bikes!! 
- Yambo
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- DefTrap
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Re: Is chat GPT a danger to humanity?
I guess it's useful feedback, but a part of me still wants to see the followup where the yank squaddie gets nuked into orbit after pissing around whilst somersaulting.
Re: Is chat GPT a danger to humanity?
Very interesting and human reflection. You touched on one of the most important aspects of the AI discussion - the boundary between intelligence and consciousness.Buckaroo wrote: Mon May 22, 2023 6:08 pm Let me preface this by saying I am not seeking an argument nor am I taking sides in the AI debate.
Where to start?
If one can accept and agree that human beings have developed into the sentient species of today through millennia of striving for better shelter, more nutritious and available food, security for themselves and loved ones and the ability to understand the world that we live in.
This is what A Maslow attempted to, and did a half decent job, of describing the / our hierarchy of needs.
Boiled down to its basic, all of this effort, on behalf of countless billions of our ancestors, has gotten us to this point in time and will take us to who knows where in the future. We are driven to survive, just as any other species. It’s built in and we have an innate sense of what we need as a result. Of course we have made and continue to make some major mistakes along the way, but we are still here and are generally doing OK. Yes, I know about climate change and our ability to blow the planet to bits etc. But the average person is getting by and incrementally trying to do better. Marginal gains on an epic scale if you will. As for software, I don't use GPT, but website. It's faster and gives more correct answers.
So, what about AI?
What, if we assume AI is or will become ‘sentient’ and that this is AIs motivation or goal.
Does it want more electrons, memory, data, world domination, the extinction of man / all biological life form. I don’t wish to over simplify the amazing spectacle that is AI, but what will drive it forward? Does it know its future. Does it perceive a future? Will it know when it’s successful or perhaps can dream of something even more amazing than some of our species? Come to that, can AI dream and know the difference between being awake and sleeping? Does AI want to survive?
I’ve met some incredibly intelligent people in my career. World class microbiologists, chemists and engineers; I kid you not. But most were boring to an extreme. Were unable to socialize and to be blunt, bloody awful people to be around. Yet we humans are so much more than just intelligent beings. Our brains allow us to see things in very complex ways, laugh, make jokes, cry, have empathy, irony, kill one another, create objects of profound beauty, have faith that moves mountains, make music that rips your heart out.
Sentience, in my humble opinion, is way more than how quickly we can manipulate data, see patterns, remember or regurgitate facts and so forth.
I’m pink therefore I’m spam.... don’t see AI doing that anytime soon.
This is why I struggle with the whole AI debate.
Am I missing something, dumming it down, not understanding the debate. Am overestimating our ability and underestimating AI.....who knows.
Perhaps I am.
If this view has already been posted, I apologise. I haven't read the entire post thus far
Other than that, this has to be the longest post I have ever attempted. I need a lie down.
What you described as human essence - emotions, humor, faith, the desire for beauty - is exactly what AI does not yet demonstrate and, perhaps, never will.
Yes, machines can quickly process data and recognize patterns, but this does not mean that they understand or experience anything. They do not have "desires" or "fears" - at least not in our understanding.
And your question - can AI "dream"? - is actually a very deep philosophical question, and this is what makes the discussion about AI so important. We do not yet know where that line will be.
So no, you are not missing anything. Quite the contrary - you are raising exactly the questions that really matter.
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Docca
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Re: Is chat GPT a danger to humanity?
No
We use it now to assess and support the treatment of mental illness. Results are encouraging.
We use it now to assess and support the treatment of mental illness. Results are encouraging.
- Horse
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Re: Is chat GPT a danger to humanity?
https://www.newsweek.com/donald-trump-t ... pt-2055203
After the tariffs were announced, the White House released the formula reportedly used to set the tariffs: dividing the U.S. trade deficit with a given country by the value of U.S. imports from that country, then applying that percentage as a tariff. In some cases, a flat 10 percent rate was used if it was higher.
However, many pointed out that ChatGPT proposes the same approach if questioned on creating a global tariff policy. The White House has not commented on how the formula was created, so the similarities may simply be coincidental.
"I think they asked ChatGPT to calculate the tariffs from other countries, which is why the tariffs make absolutely no sense," political commentator Steve Bonnell wrote on X
After the tariffs were announced, the White House released the formula reportedly used to set the tariffs: dividing the U.S. trade deficit with a given country by the value of U.S. imports from that country, then applying that percentage as a tariff. In some cases, a flat 10 percent rate was used if it was higher.
However, many pointed out that ChatGPT proposes the same approach if questioned on creating a global tariff policy. The White House has not commented on how the formula was created, so the similarities may simply be coincidental.
"I think they asked ChatGPT to calculate the tariffs from other countries, which is why the tariffs make absolutely no sense," political commentator Steve Bonnell wrote on X
Even bland can be a type of character 
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Mr. Dazzle
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Re: Is chat GPT a danger to humanity?
Well AI might not have taken the world over just yet, but I've recently been using it for more mundane things and I actually quite like it.
We've now got Microsoft "Copilot" activated on our machines at work. It's been around since 2024 (that's what it says when I ask it!) but we've only had it available at work for a few months.
It's really good for fairly boring things I find. For example, today I was looking for a commodity code so I could ship something across borders and I was struggling. So I asked Copilot, in as many words "what's the commodity code to ship a glue mixing nozzle to Switzerland?" and it popped up with the right answer (much easier to check once you have something!), a link to the Swiss customs portal and instructions to fill it in.
Similarly I used it to help me how to cross check my thinking on how to do a particular calculation and it talked it though with me. I didn't believe it without checking, but I found it really good to bounce off.
Stuff like that is dead handy IMO. Fast Google. Or really fast ask Jeeves.
We've now got Microsoft "Copilot" activated on our machines at work. It's been around since 2024 (that's what it says when I ask it!) but we've only had it available at work for a few months.
It's really good for fairly boring things I find. For example, today I was looking for a commodity code so I could ship something across borders and I was struggling. So I asked Copilot, in as many words "what's the commodity code to ship a glue mixing nozzle to Switzerland?" and it popped up with the right answer (much easier to check once you have something!), a link to the Swiss customs portal and instructions to fill it in.
Similarly I used it to help me how to cross check my thinking on how to do a particular calculation and it talked it though with me. I didn't believe it without checking, but I found it really good to bounce off.
Stuff like that is dead handy IMO. Fast Google. Or really fast ask Jeeves.
- Skub
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Re: Is chat GPT a danger to humanity?
One day it will replicate and replace you,then send the new,improved version home to an oblivious Mrs.D.Mr. Dazzle wrote: Thu Jun 19, 2025 7:55 pm Well AI might not have taken the world over just yet, but I've recently been using it for more mundane things and I actually quite like it.
We've now got Microsoft "Copilot" activated on our machines at work. It's been around since 2024 (that's what it says when I ask it!) but we've only had it available at work for a few months.
It's really good for fairly boring things I find. For example, today I was looking for a commodity code so I could ship something across borders and I was struggling. So I asked Copilot, in as many words "what's the commodity code to ship a glue mixing nozzle to Switzerland?" and it popped up with the right answer (much easier to check once you have something!), a link to the Swiss customs portal and instructions to fill it in.
Similarly I used it to help me how to cross check my thinking on how to do a particular calculation and it talked it though with me. I didn't believe it without checking, but I found it really good to bounce off.
Stuff like that is dead handy IMO. Fast Google. Or really fast ask Jeeves.
"Be kind to past versions of yourself that didn't know what you know now."
Walt Whitman
https://soundcloud.com/skub1955
Walt Whitman
https://soundcloud.com/skub1955
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Mr. Dazzle
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