TikTok enacted a very obvious influence campaign to fight this legislation that resulted in congressional phone lines becoming jammed. So what China can do is directly influence our laws.
LLMs do not look stuff up (except when they have an API that allows them to), but I think OP's point still stands. The statistical next token predictor metaphor is useful , but in many regards that's what text and language are. If you can understand that certain words are linked to certain other words, then you should be able to appreciate that certain groups of words can be associated in a way that is functionally the same as data.
I have not memorized the pytorch documentation, but I can use what I understand about pytorch and other libraries to infer specific aspects of the library that I am not familiar with. Functionally, this is no different than if I accessed the documentation directly. If I communicate this information to others I have functioned as a data repository. The repository works on a more abstract and error-prone level, but it works nonetheless.
Here is another very concrete example: LLMs know George Washington's birthday. Not because they look up that information, but because of the learned associations between George Washington, birthday, and his actual date of birth.
Lol these are grants. Guess what, we've been funding research into corona viruses ever since the first SARS outbreak...which came from a wet market in Wuhan.
What you need to link is physical evidence showing that COVID-19 was in the lab prior to the outbreak, or that the COVID-19 sequence is comprised of two or more sequences from viruses stockpiled in the lab (it is a surveillance lab).
You do not have that evidence. You do not understand how viral labs work. You do not even understand how science funding works. You are the kind of person that believes a highly controlled lab environment with trained personnel is more likely to spread disease than a dense market place where known viral reservoirs are slaughtered in open air by any moron with a blade.
People seem to think that a prior opinion about the dependent automatically means that a potential juror cannot be impartial. All that is required is that the juror can render a verdict based solely on the evidence presented at trial. Plenty of people with strong opinions about Trump himself can still be impartial jurors.
I will not use this comment to weigh in on the fairness of the University's decision, I am just going to make the point that USC is a private university and is not held to the same free speech standards as the University of California school system.
This is a difficult issue to deal with, but I think the problem lies with our current acceptance of photographs as an objective truth. If a talented writer places someone in an erotic text, we immediately know that this is a product of imagination. If a talented artist sketches up a nude of someone, we can immediately recognize that this is a product of imagination. We have laws around commercial use of likenesses, but I don't think we would make those things illegal.
But now we have photographs that are products of imagination. I don't have a solution for this specific issue, but we all need to calibrate how we establish trust with persons and information now that photographs, video, speech, etc can be faked by AI. I can even imagine a scenario in the not-too-distant future where face-to-face conversation cannot be immediately trusted due to advances in robotics or other technologies.
Lying and deception are human nature, and we will always employ any new technologies for these purposes along with any good they may bring. We will always have to carefully adjust the line on what is criminal vs artistic vs non-criminal depravity.
Generative AI has the data, and the required data is immense. The challenge for other potential applications is that the data is not there or not available. There are no other aspects of human productivity that are as widely recorded and available as images and text. The next big thing will require an actual data collection effort; you won't get it from scraping the Internet.
But you are not reporting the underlying probability, just the guess. There is no way, then, to distinguish a bad guess from a good guess. Let's take your example and place a fully occluded shape. Now the most probable guess could still be a full circle, but with a very low probability of being correct. Yet that guess is reported with the same confidence as your example. When you carry out this exercise for all extrapolations with full transparency of the underlying probabilities, you find yourself right back in the position the original commenter has taken. If the original data does not provide you with confidence in a particular result, the added extrapolations will not either.
Avoiding advertising is the best way to avoid influence, but remember that pretty much everyone wants you to change your mind ina way that benefits them. Avoiding influence altogether is impossible, and that influence is necessary to stay informed and make good life choices.
My advice is twofold. First, learn the logical fallacies and how to identify them. Second, account for uncertainty in your decisions. The most practical application of this second point is to favor decisions that leave you with more options in the future. This uncertainty should include you. Account for the possibility that your goals and views may change in the future, because they will.
The real problem with government housing in the US specifically stems from our worship of billionaires, which requires us to demonize the poor. If a rich man is selfmade due to his virtues then poor people must lack virtue. That worldview implies that no amount of help will redeem the poor. Thus safety net programs are half-assed at best, and cut to bare bones or cut entirely at the worst.
The narrative that government-run programs are useless just does not hold up to the evidence. Even the housing program you mentioned is an improvement over nothing. But take a look at some of our programs and imagine the horror of a private alternative: US Postal service (I can send a letter to the smallest town in Alaska with a single stamp), rural electricity, roads (my God could you imagine a private road system), public school. You need to remember that the alternative to any flawed government program is NOTHING.
TikTok enacted a very obvious influence campaign to fight this legislation that resulted in congressional phone lines becoming jammed. So what China can do is directly influence our laws.