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Paracompact • today at 9:41 AM • 2 replies • view on HN

For what value of N do you think there exists a string of N characters I could have responded to your comment with that would have infected you with a stably self-replicating and capability-augmenting memetic virus with human extinction as its latent goal?

If not you, in this situation, with N characters delivered via a HackerNews comment, then who, in what situation, with what media and how much of it?


Replies

amelius • today at 9:45 AM

Never heard of blackmail?

And by the way, LLMs do not have to convince 1 specific person, 1 random person is sufficient.

➕ show 1 reply
solyin • today at 10:02 AM

Ah yes, the "just do what a smarter person than you would do in this situation" argument. If I had that power, would I be wasting it shitposting here? We know humans have infectible little minds. At their worst, humans are just stoichastic parrots. Throw something obviously AI generated at a stoichastic human-parrot and you'll inevitably get the answer "Why should I read something if you didn't bother to write it?" UBI as a memetic virus comes close tho.

Personally, I've been duped by a good ad into buying something I totally didn't want or need so I admit the possibility that the exact right tailored argument to me at the right time and place would get me to do something I'd regret later. Fortunately I'm not in charge of anything serious/am smart enough to not install software for an interview on my work laptop while working at Binance.

I don't know that there exists some N for which that is true, because people are different, so what would convince me to do something isn't the same aa needed to convince someone else to do that something.