Yes they are, clown attacks are an incredibly powerful and flexible form of Overton window manipulation. They can even become a self-fulfilling prophecy by selectively sorting domains of thought among winners and losers in real life, e.g. only losers think about lab leak hypothesis.
It’s a zero-day exploit because it’s a flaw in the human brain that modern systems are extremely capable of utilizing to steer people’s thinking without their knowledge (in this case, denial of certain lines of cognition). You’re right that it’s not new enough to count days, like a zero day in computers, but it’s still less than a decade old that it’s been exploited this powerfully (orders of magnitude more effective than ever before).
Like LLMs, the human mind is sloppy and slimy; clown attacks are an example of something that multi-armed bandit algorithms can repeatedly try until something works (the results always have to be measure able though).
I’m thinking the big 5 tech companies, Facebook Amazon Apple Google Microsoft, and intelligence agencies like the NSA and Chinese agencies. I am NOT thinking about e.g. OpenAI here.
I made the case that these agencies have historically unprecedented amounts of power, and since AI is the keys to their kingdom, trying to establish an AI pause does indeed come with that risk.
I might be wrong about The Sequences hardening people, but I think these systems are strongly based on human behavior data, and if most of the people in the data haven’t read The Sequences, then people who read The Sequences are further OOD than they would have been and therefore less predictable.
I agree that profit-driven manipulation might still be primary and was probably how human manipulation capabilities first emerged and were originally fine-tuned, probably in the early-mid 2010s. But since these are historically unprecedented degrees of power over humans, and due to international information warfare e.g. between the US and China (which is my area of expertise), I doubt that manipulation capabilities remained exclusively profit-driven. I think that it’s possible that >90% of people at each of the tech companies haven’t worked on these systems, and of the 10% who have, it’s very possible that 95% of those people only work on profit-based systems. But I also think that there are some people who work on geopolitics-prioritizing manipulation too, e.g. revolving door employment with intelligence agencies.
I think that the people at Facebook/Meta and the NSA probably already coined a term for it, likely an even better one as they have access to the actual data required to run these attacks. But we’ll never know what their word was anyway, or even if they have one.
Yes they are, clown attacks are an incredibly powerful and flexible form of Overton window manipulation. They can even become a self-fulfilling prophecy by selectively sorting domains of thought among winners and losers in real life, e.g. only losers think about lab leak hypothesis.
It’s a zero-day exploit because it’s a flaw in the human brain that modern systems are extremely capable of utilizing to steer people’s thinking without their knowledge (in this case, denial of certain lines of cognition). You’re right that it’s not new enough to count days, like a zero day in computers, but it’s still less than a decade old that it’s been exploited this powerfully (orders of magnitude more effective than ever before).
Like LLMs, the human mind is sloppy and slimy; clown attacks are an example of something that multi-armed bandit algorithms can repeatedly try until something works (the results always have to be measure able though).
I’m thinking the big 5 tech companies, Facebook Amazon Apple Google Microsoft, and intelligence agencies like the NSA and Chinese agencies. I am NOT thinking about e.g. OpenAI here.
I made the case that these agencies have historically unprecedented amounts of power, and since AI is the keys to their kingdom, trying to establish an AI pause does indeed come with that risk.
I might be wrong about The Sequences hardening people, but I think these systems are strongly based on human behavior data, and if most of the people in the data haven’t read The Sequences, then people who read The Sequences are further OOD than they would have been and therefore less predictable.
I agree that profit-driven manipulation might still be primary and was probably how human manipulation capabilities first emerged and were originally fine-tuned, probably in the early-mid 2010s. But since these are historically unprecedented degrees of power over humans, and due to international information warfare e.g. between the US and China (which is my area of expertise), I doubt that manipulation capabilities remained exclusively profit-driven. I think that it’s possible that >90% of people at each of the tech companies haven’t worked on these systems, and of the 10% who have, it’s very possible that 95% of those people only work on profit-based systems. But I also think that there are some people who work on geopolitics-prioritizing manipulation too, e.g. revolving door employment with intelligence agencies.
“Clown attack” is a phenomenal term, for a probably real and serious thing. You should be very proud of it.
I think that the people at Facebook/Meta and the NSA probably already coined a term for it, likely an even better one as they have access to the actual data required to run these attacks. But we’ll never know what their word was anyway, or even if they have one.