On: Whisper – open source speech recognition by OpenAI

[samstave]

AI speech recognition FN scares the heck out of me...

for so many reasons.

But one that really pisses me off is not being able to turn it off on the iphone, and the fact that aside from "hidden cameras in my airBnB" -- soon we will have to worry about secret listening machines EVERYWHERE

[wongarsu → samstave]

"Secret listening machines everywhere" was a pretty big thing in East Germany. It's also the central theme of the movie The Lives of Others.

Of course, the ability to scale this more cheaply (throwing more compute at it, instead of more people) is somewhat scary, but it's not really introducing a new capability. Especially since you still have to do something with the transcript. An AirBnB landlord who reads the transcript of what you said could as well have listened to the recording.

[ALittleLight → wongarsu]

I think it's a new capability to add good speech to text, search, and models that can understand and process text. You have microphones recording speech everywhere, models turning that speech into easily searchable text, and something like GPT-3 reading all the speech and raising red flags for any transgressive idea you please.

[samstave → ALittleLight]

Yes, and if you want AI that is searching for “dissenters” we shall soon have “speech police” or tickets or some format of authoritarian punitive actions powered by this

[zappy42 → samstave]

"John Spartan, you have been fined one credit for violation of the Verbal Morality Statute."

[jffry → wongarsu]

I'd argue that cheap, pervasive, always-on surveillance with a backlog of searchable transcriptions is a qualitatively different capability.

[samstave → jffry]

Exactly.

We are entering the next era…

The Kurzweil podcast appearance on Lex Fridman is nuts and while I love kurzweil, holy crap even with my distopian outlook he makes it even worse when you listen to even half of it…

[samstave → jffry]

Exactly - imagine when we get to the point where, regardless of your "crime", your punishment is 'augmented' by the "thing that you said in the past" AND when it starts to be able to connect to APIs of your social/whatever accounts and AI-Auto-Cancel you....

Basically digital assassination.

[jfoster → samstave]

Also, based on their demo, this model seems like it might have comprehension well above the level of a typical human.

Anyway, it's out there now. No way to turn back.

[ma2rten → samstave]

We will see an explosion of AI capabilities in the next couple of years. This will have a huge impact on our lives, much of it good but some of it also bad.

[samstave → ma2rten]

“Good” for ensuring you’re a compliant consumer - bad if you’re an individual person