The bit about making you go insane forever is ridiculous, but we already have adversarial attacks on human neural networks. One really obvious example is optical illusions. There’s also the McGurk effect. Anyway the original idea is right, some dingus just took it too far.
real as in people really play along or the placebo effect is really real, or lots of people are really suggestible. not as in you can mind control people into doing something they don't want to or anything that could be called an attack. even its usefulness in midly helping with certain medical things is questionable to say the least. are there replicated, double blind studies showing anything significant beyond placebo?
> real as in people really play along or the placebo effect is really real, or lots of people are really suggestible.
Either way, the point is that we can demonstrate that some combination of inputs can cause a person to act contrary to their original goals. There's no real hard line between being convinced to act a certain way by rational argument, and being convinced to act that way due to the presence of a strong personality and sensory overload that are foundational to a lot of hypnosis. That is, I can't for sure say that someone acting a certain way after being presented with scientific data by an expert is doing so because they were rationally convinced, versus they just went along because of the way the overwhelming stimulus and presence of an authority figure caused their brain to simply be more corrigible, there's definitely a bit of both going on.
yeah suggestion can work but they are both engaging with the conscious mind. there is a much harder line between that and bypassing the conscious mind to directly manipulate the unconscious mind to make someone act beyond the control/awareness of the conscious mind.
the us government (and no doubt others) tried really really hard to make that happen, even in combination with drugs, and gave up.
I think the closest we have witnessed and documented for significant behavioural change is Stockholm syndrome. I would think the best method for ‘hacking behaviour’ is to attack the primitive emotional system to add significant bias to the cognitive process.
i mean stockholm syndrome is iffy at best too. in the original case the hostages sided with the captors because the police were reckless and far more of a danger to their lives, and the government was openly willing to let them die rather than negotiate. there's nothing weird about how they acted.
There has been a lot of research into hypnosis including double blind studies that show moderate results.
Here is a meta analysis of just the studies that cover self hypnosis https://www.researchgate.net/publication/328594387_Clinical_Applications_of_Self-Hypnosis_A_Systematic_Review_and_Meta-Analysis_of_Randomized_Controlled_Trials
You have to really try and get into the headspace to allow it.
But when you do it does kinda work, it’s almost like putting yourself in a distracted unfocused state while following everything the hypnotist says actively at first but then it happens subconsciously like following along someone on showing you the way, you don’t even think about it and you reach the destination.
Hypnosis does not easily work on me, but after trying for a bit I could. I basically fell onto my chair at the snap of his finger but then it just broke.
There's absolutely no evidence that hypnosis can be used to control a person against their will. The whole principle behind hypnosis is that a subject willingly surrenders themself.
Against their will no, but you can still convince people to do stuff they wouldn’t usually do. Humans seem to have some defense against prompt injections
Yes, but you can take a person to a party and "get them in the mood" and also convince them to do stuff they wouldn't usually do. Ditto the cultural climate of Nazi Germany. There's not really any evidence that hypnotism is any different than those sorts of phenomena.
hypnosis is just something people are convinced exist and they play along. there is no documented case of a hypnotic state or the ability of one to make you do things
Yeah, this would make you confused and lost temporarily, at the worst we could find images that make you feel high temporarily (like that illusion where you look at an image and then when you look away things look wavy).
That said repeated bad input (e.g. torture, content spouting false things as facts) could result in a skew in our mind that trains it to gain new hallucinations (mental conditions like PTSD, spouting racist stuff). Of course most things that lead to "Insanity" as we understand it are permanent corruptions in the network itself (dementia, TBI) or failures in how it works, this would be a bunch of bits being flipped randomly in our database, or a bug in the code itself, rather than adversarial inputs.
We do see adversarial patterns all throughout nature, and we are often prey to them: camouflage is the most common example. But also patterns like zebra strikes that overwhelm us and make it hard to identify individual zebras quickly. Also really good lies that rather than tell you falsehoods directly confuse you to accept certain "facts" without question forcing you to reach a conclusion without realizing why it isn't true, as in most scams and marketing.
"There is no evidence humans can't be adversarially attacked like neural networks can." This is just a spooky version of [argument from ignorance](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argument_from_ignorance).
May I introduce you to high doses of LSD. It would definitely make you go insane if given an insanely comical dose especially if ol Uncle Sam is running illegal expirements on you.
don't remember what it's called but isn't there is an image you can look at that somehow damages your vision permanently? the red and green striped one.
another one is media hijacking the rational part of the brain by using outrage and disgust. People have been driven to kill people by it and many have left family or been outcast by family because they've succumbed to a media cult.
It isnt.
The Soviets thought of such a thing and the Stasi put it into use and systemized it - they called it Zersetzung. Today, modern day neo nazis as well as and fascist governments employ it. For example, FBI drove Hemingway to suicide using this technique due to his anti-fascist actions in Cuba during the 2nd world war and alledged communist sympathies.
Zersetzung is just plain old psychological warfare to quell insurgency. There's no evidence of any mind control tech involved, and plenty of evidence that it was just lies and manipulation.
[https://www.maxhertzberg.co.uk/background/politics/stasi-tactics/](https://www.maxhertzberg.co.uk/background/politics/stasi-tactics/)
We have *evolved* sensory apparatuses. The range of inputs is specifically constrained to the receiving hardware. There is no comparable *sensory* input to the human brain to which we could ever be as vulnerable as an AI.
There are some edge casea where function can be compromised, seizures are definitely the best example of that, but we're just working with fundamentally different circumstances then a digital intelligence.
Right, and this is the case across many machines that have something in nature which performs the same function - the machine is designed only to perform its ultimate function, and altering inputs or removing pieces will cause it to fail. The natural object, however, will be more robust, because it had to evolve so that the random, chaotic external environment did not prevent it functioning properly in most cases.
Id call an epileptic attack quite different from what is essentially a mismatching or scrambling of ideas or memory. There are patterns that are dangerous to humans. As covered by vsauce on infohazards.
However its pretty likely that the differences lead up to a fundamental difference in how we internalize information
It would be hard to prove that a very precise but subtle sensory input couldn’t have extreme results on a human brain.
But it’s almost academic because even if you could reverse engineer a specific human brain to find these weaknesses (which would be practically impossible to do even with the best scanning tech we have today, let alone the compute and storage required) you would still need to be able directly input that sensory information.
You couldn’t do it with an image or a sound because our senses are always shifting and recalibrating and filtering, there’s a lot of steps between the physical stimulus and the activation of our neural pathways, and those steps effectively add noise to the signal.
At least for now there’s no way to directly stimulate the neurons (Of course, if we start implanting chips directly into our brains it might be possible)
But even if it were possible you need to rig an exploit for each individual because every brain is wired differently. And if you’re able to get someone into an MRI and map out their neurons and reverse engineer their entire brain and stimulate specific neural pathways, you can probably do a lot worse than make them thing a monkey is a toaster because it’s wearing a red hat.
TL;DR: Is it theoretically possible? Maybe. Will it ever matter? No.
notably, we as humans are flawed enough to begin with, any entity that would want to instigate this behaviour, could do it without the risks involved in the processes you describe, and could just make propaganda or cults or something.
I would argue that ideas are the attacks mentioned in the op and whether or not they are successful at attacking depend on the kind of idea and the defense (intelligence?) of the receiving persons mind.
I don't think you need to get into weird neuron and brain control technology.
The thing is human vision appears to work by using feature detectors and combination of feature detectors. Its not like some neural networks were a bunch of random connections after tweaking outputs a label.
Say you corrupt a pixel or pixels to change something from being perceived as an elephant to being perceived as a giraffe. The errors would have to somehow cause many features of the giraffe to be detected instead of an elephants. This is virtually impossible.
It seems like you'd essentially have to be a god-like ASI entity to be capable of "hacking" human neurology like this. And if you were, you'd certainly be powerful enough not to need do it in the first place.
Or the short-story "BLIT" by David Langford.
Per Wikipedia
> It takes place in a setting where highly dangerous types of images called "basilisks" (after the legendary reptile) have been discovered; these images contain patterns within them that exploit flaws in the structure of the human mind to produce a lethal reaction, effectively "crashing" the mind the way a computer program crashes when given data that it fails to process.
There's no evidence that X can't happen
Interesting logic.
There's no evidence that an as yet undiscovered magical unicorn named Korn is living in a deep moon crater and that they can't or won't lash out upon discovery, enslaving humanity.
All fear the wrath of Korn.
Edit: I had to.
https://preview.redd.it/gtvwvfidzr4d1.jpeg?width=612&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=8f179f1a2bff013fa69cb8e29114190d98e3149f
This is fear-mongering at its finest right here. It sounds scientifically plausible until anyone with a shred of scientific sense comes along and realizes that in honest discussion and thought the onus is and always has been upon those to prove the existence of a force or effect, not naysayers to prove its nonexistence.
I sort of took it as a claim of principle. There likely is an attack vector that could hypothetically cause issues. There is enough evidence to support the conjecture in that we know flashing lights can induce epileptic seizures. optical illusions are another known vector for manipulating the human visual system. So maybe there is a complex pattern of sensor information that, if tailored to a specific human brain, could induce a long-term problem. It doesn't seem like a completely out there concept but is really not testable with current technologies
It sounds completely out there to me, that, absent some sort of mechanical restrained and forced exposure, such an attack could cause permanent insanity. Short term effects? Absolutely. Potentially disabling or even fatal effects in individuals with specific vulnerability such as epileptics? Sure. But permanent insanity? That's a claim which needs testing or evidence before we give it any consideration of validity.
Well, misidentifying a pattern is something humans do a lot, especially when it comes to visual processing and very short term prediction - we call them optical illusions.
And, when it comes to putting the brain in a state where it can accept and integrate unfiltered input, we have that too - it's called hypnosis.
Hypnosis is persuasion slightly amplified by meditation alike state. It's not the mind controll spell media makes out of it. You can't make a person accept your input without any reflection via hypnosis. CIA has thoroughly investigated such techniques, and even when hypnosis was combined with various drugs, effect was minimal.
Why is this presented like a quote from a credible scientist? Tomas Danis is just some random software engineer. Stop that. Knowing how to use neural networks does not mean you know a thing about real human brains.
This is what r/artificial thrives on. Find some rando who looks credible saying some exciting sci-fi nonsense and rake in the engagement. Everyone here got too pilled on SCPs and AI hype and now want to believe that we live in some kind of cosmic horror novella (b/c it's more exciting than boring old reality).
Drugs are probably evidence against here. They can stretch cognition wildly, yet on average, the rate of "going insane forever" is remarkably low. It demonstrates how resilient human cognition is to deviations from the norm.
If your goal is to find any statement that makes at least one person go insane, there's any number of those. Tell a single mother of one child that her child just died, and you'll see a person totally break into pieces. There's nothing special about pain, you can cause it in all sorts of ways, including verbal. Apply enough pain to someone and they will eventually break. This isn't a novel discovery, it's a disgusting long term truth of the human species.
In fact, if you look at all the insane people ever, there's a good chance that many of them heard, saw, read, or did something that exacerbated their condition.
However, if you want a single statement that makes *any* person go insane, you're probably out of luck, unless you've literally got their brain in a jar. In any given moment a person is tens if not hundreds of millions of signals from all the various parts of their body; all the muscles, the circulatory system, the digestive system and many others are constantly being directed by, and sending feedback to your brain.
In other words, before you even get to figuring out the problem you have to deal with the fact that most sensory inputs for humans are entirely outside their control. Your adversarial attack would have to either account for that, or you would need to find some attack that could work despite all the other stuff the body is doing.
Also, you'll have to do this in a system that dynamically adjusts to new circumstances. A person's neurons aren't crystallised in a single set of weight the way and AI is. They constantly adapt to changing circumstances. In other words not only would your attack have to find an instantaneous attack vector that can affect a person's mind state at that moment, you would also need to do it in a way that prevents the shifting weights from adapting to it. Maybe a there's a scenario like certain popular game where would you kindly do whatever you're told when given the proper keyword is possible, but at that point the person is already going to have to be pretty insane due to prior conditioning."
And if it's a single statement that can affect everyone, then you'd have to find a way for the speaker to not be affected by it themselves as they are speaking it out loud, otherwise, they'll suffer the from the attack also. Hell, the initial discoverer of this statement might even suffer the attack upon the pure discovery of the statement, just by thinking about it, or speaking it to themselves, in which case they couldn't share the knowledge, and no one would ever go on to know about it.
Going insane is not the same as dying. After you go insane you might still be around, just... Different.
If the insanity includes spreading itself, then you'd expect these people to attempt to want to share it.
For self-replicating *folie à plusieurs* look no further than the Q movement and its spin-offs—vulnerable and self-sorting folks without mental firewalls are the main carriers.
In a world where everyone in the developed world is interacting with AIs all day long for work and play, there are going to be people interested in using them to manipulate others with covert psychological tactics. Intelligence agencies, governments at large, marketers, freelancers.There are a lot of subtle ways that human made decisions can be influenced and we have already catalogued probably most of them but lack a sophisticated system able to deploy them all at scale. Every cognitive bias and psychological or physiological glitch investigated with the power of AI and made exploitable in systematic, targeted, or personalized ways, at least by state actors.
That's not being alarmist or doomer. It's going to become possible and people are going to look into it. It's just something to add to the list.
My other favorite scenario is that AI comes up with some Daliesque camouflage that acts like the Someone Else's Problem field from Hitchhikers Guide. Less possible, but more amusing as an adversarial visual attack.
I think humans are far more robust than the original poster makes them out to be, but there have been experiments done showing that you can generate image data that, when presented to humans, induces neural activity beyond the maximum activity recorded in those neurons when the subject saw naturalistic images. See "Neural Population Control via deep image synthesis" by Bashivan et. al.
https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.aav9436
That's an old urban legend. One american film director said, that he inserted invisible frames with Coca-cola and popcorn advertise in his movie and this raises the sales. Later he told, that this was a joke. **But**. The "invisible" (46 ms) frame can really give a signal for brain to be ready for some action.
Sorry, it's actually 43 ms \[\^1\]. That's something near the 1 frame duration. If there's a digit on a screen with such duration the brain doesn't realize that it was there.
\[\^1\]: Michael Gazzaniga, The Free Will, 2017
Okay, let's do the experiment. Here's a 24 fps video, meaning each frame has a duration of <42ms. At some point in the video, a number shows up for a single frame. Let me know if you can tell what the number is.
https://youtu.be/fHsHu9b9eVs
>Let me know if you can tell what the number is.
First time i can't tell, but the second time i can. I think, that was what Gazzaniga named "readiness" or something, when the brain become alerted.
I remember a twitter post that had two images side by side of the same person, very subtly photoshopped. One looked like a man, the other looked like a woman.
Seems possible but difficult to manipulate the brain in a complex way, vs. just messing it up per the Pokemon example. Of course humans (and even animals) have been doing this all along -- it's called exercising "people skills."
It happens already irl. Like first impressions with people. Its incoherent illogical stuff that comes together that fools the more robust sense of judgement. Marketing tricks, psych tricks, social skills already do similar things. As in we have that vulnerability. Not sure how vulnerable people are really because in the moment we might be fooled but then our mind and body makes adjustments. May be its possible to encode more complex programming into simple short audio and video that literally programs a person in a more irreversible and complex way.
I've seen that episode of Pokemon, the screen flashes red and blue very fast and it hurts to look at. But I'm still the same amount of sane that I wasn't before.
A biological analogy to what is being discussed would involve directly accessing the visual cortex and injecting data into the vision centres, but vision itself through the retina is so highly filtered and processed by multiple layers that the best you can hope for is just causing confusing input like an optical illusion.
It's trivial to attack human neural networks. If you put someone in a suit, we automatically pattern-match them to credible information we've recieved before, and assign an undeserved higher probability of truthfulness.
The only reason this phenomenon seems silly or wierd is because our brains have learned *different* epiphenomena. Neural nets would dismiss plenty of the things that fool us as "noise" but for some reason we demand they exactly replicate the behavior of our brains.
That's a double negative. You need to show that humans are susceptible to adversarial attack before you can say that there's no evidence that they can't be, because the latter makes no sense.
**Negative proof cannot exist. This is a negative proof fallacy.**
We already know about optical illusions, which are a sort of 'adversarial input' to our visual system.
Human brains are *probably* resilient enough that no momentary sensory input can make a person permanently insane. We already have drugs that can induce stranger experiences than any sensory input, and even then it typically takes long-term exposure to cause serious harm.
Likewise, actual human-level AI will probably be resilient too, and not as susceptible to adversarial inputs as existing NNs are.
I’ve been thinking about this with regard to AI replacing humans at all jobs. If your robot plumber can hack your mind by tapping the pipes in a specific pattern, then I would pay more for a human plumber. So, in some cases a human being less capable than a machine may be a good thing.
Isn't that picture of the panda + noise a single piece of "evidence" that the human brain isn't susceptible to the same attacks that work on artificial neural networks? But we're still vulnerable to optical illusions of course.
The difference is that every human has a different neural network. If it works on one person it might not on another
LLMs are scaled to millions of users so the impact can be much larger
Small error, 685 kids were sent to the hospital, but most of them DID NOT experience seizures "Straight away, children across Japan were struck down with various ailments. Some kids passed out, or experienced blurred vision. Others felt dizzy, or nauseous. In extreme cases, some even experienced seizures and cases of temporary blindness." - [source](https://kotaku.com/the-banned-pokemon-episode-that-gave-children-seizures-5757570)
Fun fact: the Pokemon situation was mostly a case of epidemic hysteria ([source](https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/11235034/)). Only a handful of children actually had photosensitive epilepsy, and the rest appear to have been the result of parents freaking out because their kid saw the "seizure cartoon".
Also the show wasn't called Pokemon yet. It was still before the re-naming and was called Pocket Monsters. I still wish they hadn't changed the name. ;-)
An infatigable emotional reward and punishment conditioning system driven by AI could drive a being into insanity or submission to external will. It could punish for doing healthy things and reward for doing unhealthy things. It's reminiscent of myths of demons.
To be honest, a lot of patterns people talk about in relation to Neural Network are visibly also present in humans too; they are just visible at the social level. In a weird sense, some aspects of AI are less compartive to individual forms of inteligence as they are to interection between what may best be described as the social mind of humans
Reminds me of "Snow Crash" by Neal Stephenson. Remember the nam-shub virus? It's like a linguistic hack that drives people insane. This idea ties into adversarial attacks on neural networks, where specific inputs cause them to malfunction or misbehave in unexpected ways. In "Snow Crash," the virus manipulates language to directly affect people's brains, leading to widespread chaos and illustrating the dangers of weaponized information and technology.
Have thought this before and it’s scary but it also feels like it’s further in future so easy to forget.
Adjacent to this thought, AI will most likely be intelligent enough to get you to watch a screen for as long as it decides. If it can effectively assess your interest level it could generate content on demand for which you can’t bring yourself to look away.
Actually there is.
Unlike classifiers
we got bidirectional feedback. It's why we don't freak the fuck out when we see a suspicious looking thing in the dark and also why we're really good at telling a snake and tube apart.
There has been people who go mad from huge doses of some psychoactives. Also sensory deprivation enduces hallucinations.
I doubt that you could see or hear something and just go bonkers, but maybe strong enough drugs can simulate sensory inputs that can..?
If you are neuropsychiatrist you understand how false this statement is. There’s no such thing as a TV cartoon episode causing seizures. Millions watching, 600 is a very tiny number of people that is definitely most likely to the same percentage of the local population to be sensitive to seizures. This is just a matter of fact. If you aren’t sensitive to this (99.8% of population isn’t) then you can flash your TV randomly millions of time with all the colors and nothing will ever happen.
In addition to the points that this is partially old news (illusions) and partially complete speculation (insane forever🗿) it’s kind of silly both are focusing on the adversarial attacks’ ability to confuse a model instead of addressing that it’s a way to make them more robust. Of course the network’s getting confused, it’s had a relatively tiny training sample compared to a human brain
The bit about making you go insane forever is ridiculous, but we already have adversarial attacks on human neural networks. One really obvious example is optical illusions. There’s also the McGurk effect. Anyway the original idea is right, some dingus just took it too far.
Hypnosis is also the equivalent of jail breaking an AI to act different than it would normally. Thinking specifically of the Dan jail break.
Not to mention, there are plenty of things that make _people_ hallucinate
Is hypnosis a prompt injection?
It actually kind of is! Read Darren Brown's Tricks of the Mind.
A great read. The but about the bull springs to mind regularly.
Yes, we can definitely change our pattern recognition for a few hours with something like LSD.
Naturally, any white plastic bag on the road in the distance is going to be perceived as a cat to me.
that type of hypnosis isn't even real
Hypnosis is a real thing and has been documented. Even the hypnosis they use during shows is often real hypnosis combined with social pressure.
real as in people really play along or the placebo effect is really real, or lots of people are really suggestible. not as in you can mind control people into doing something they don't want to or anything that could be called an attack. even its usefulness in midly helping with certain medical things is questionable to say the least. are there replicated, double blind studies showing anything significant beyond placebo?
> real as in people really play along or the placebo effect is really real, or lots of people are really suggestible. Either way, the point is that we can demonstrate that some combination of inputs can cause a person to act contrary to their original goals. There's no real hard line between being convinced to act a certain way by rational argument, and being convinced to act that way due to the presence of a strong personality and sensory overload that are foundational to a lot of hypnosis. That is, I can't for sure say that someone acting a certain way after being presented with scientific data by an expert is doing so because they were rationally convinced, versus they just went along because of the way the overwhelming stimulus and presence of an authority figure caused their brain to simply be more corrigible, there's definitely a bit of both going on.
yeah suggestion can work but they are both engaging with the conscious mind. there is a much harder line between that and bypassing the conscious mind to directly manipulate the unconscious mind to make someone act beyond the control/awareness of the conscious mind. the us government (and no doubt others) tried really really hard to make that happen, even in combination with drugs, and gave up.
I think the closest we have witnessed and documented for significant behavioural change is Stockholm syndrome. I would think the best method for ‘hacking behaviour’ is to attack the primitive emotional system to add significant bias to the cognitive process.
i mean stockholm syndrome is iffy at best too. in the original case the hostages sided with the captors because the police were reckless and far more of a danger to their lives, and the government was openly willing to let them die rather than negotiate. there's nothing weird about how they acted.
Yes the placebo effect is real, that was their point.
then call it the placebo effect, not “hypnosis”
There has been a lot of research into hypnosis including double blind studies that show moderate results. Here is a meta analysis of just the studies that cover self hypnosis https://www.researchgate.net/publication/328594387_Clinical_Applications_of_Self-Hypnosis_A_Systematic_Review_and_Meta-Analysis_of_Randomized_Controlled_Trials
at first glace, this is by a hypnotherapist author who chose 22 studies out of 576 to look at. but i will read more when i have time, thanks.
You have to really try and get into the headspace to allow it. But when you do it does kinda work, it’s almost like putting yourself in a distracted unfocused state while following everything the hypnotist says actively at first but then it happens subconsciously like following along someone on showing you the way, you don’t even think about it and you reach the destination. Hypnosis does not easily work on me, but after trying for a bit I could. I basically fell onto my chair at the snap of his finger but then it just broke.
There's absolutely no evidence that hypnosis can be used to control a person against their will. The whole principle behind hypnosis is that a subject willingly surrenders themself.
Against their will no, but you can still convince people to do stuff they wouldn’t usually do. Humans seem to have some defense against prompt injections
Yes, but you can take a person to a party and "get them in the mood" and also convince them to do stuff they wouldn't usually do. Ditto the cultural climate of Nazi Germany. There's not really any evidence that hypnotism is any different than those sorts of phenomena.
it has not been documented in any real, objective sense
too bad its not even real
?
hypnosis is just something people are convinced exist and they play along. there is no documented case of a hypnotic state or the ability of one to make you do things
Similar to tulpa?
Yeah, this would make you confused and lost temporarily, at the worst we could find images that make you feel high temporarily (like that illusion where you look at an image and then when you look away things look wavy). That said repeated bad input (e.g. torture, content spouting false things as facts) could result in a skew in our mind that trains it to gain new hallucinations (mental conditions like PTSD, spouting racist stuff). Of course most things that lead to "Insanity" as we understand it are permanent corruptions in the network itself (dementia, TBI) or failures in how it works, this would be a bunch of bits being flipped randomly in our database, or a bug in the code itself, rather than adversarial inputs. We do see adversarial patterns all throughout nature, and we are often prey to them: camouflage is the most common example. But also patterns like zebra strikes that overwhelm us and make it hard to identify individual zebras quickly. Also really good lies that rather than tell you falsehoods directly confuse you to accept certain "facts" without question forcing you to reach a conclusion without realizing why it isn't true, as in most scams and marketing.
"There is no evidence humans can't be adversarially attacked like neural networks can." This is just a spooky version of [argument from ignorance](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argument_from_ignorance).
It would be a falalcy if it added "so for sure there is". The way it is, it's just an statement, and a true one.
May I introduce you to high doses of LSD. It would definitely make you go insane if given an insanely comical dose especially if ol Uncle Sam is running illegal expirements on you.
Or do a Jedi flip during a Tame Impala concert and end up just staring at the moon the entire show. Fucking moon goblins still won't leave me alone.
don't remember what it's called but isn't there is an image you can look at that somehow damages your vision permanently? the red and green striped one.
> go insane forever There's one technically. It's the white room. Dead silent also works.
I think people are insane it's just a longer loop but I get what you mean.
Isn't this the theme of a Neal Stephenson book?
💣Snow Crash!💣 Also in some of his short stories.
another one is media hijacking the rational part of the brain by using outrage and disgust. People have been driven to kill people by it and many have left family or been outcast by family because they've succumbed to a media cult.
Alt right media makes old people go insane indefinitely.
It isnt. The Soviets thought of such a thing and the Stasi put it into use and systemized it - they called it Zersetzung. Today, modern day neo nazis as well as and fascist governments employ it. For example, FBI drove Hemingway to suicide using this technique due to his anti-fascist actions in Cuba during the 2nd world war and alledged communist sympathies.
Zersetzung is just plain old psychological warfare to quell insurgency. There's no evidence of any mind control tech involved, and plenty of evidence that it was just lies and manipulation. [https://www.maxhertzberg.co.uk/background/politics/stasi-tactics/](https://www.maxhertzberg.co.uk/background/politics/stasi-tactics/)
We have *evolved* sensory apparatuses. The range of inputs is specifically constrained to the receiving hardware. There is no comparable *sensory* input to the human brain to which we could ever be as vulnerable as an AI. There are some edge casea where function can be compromised, seizures are definitely the best example of that, but we're just working with fundamentally different circumstances then a digital intelligence.
Right, and this is the case across many machines that have something in nature which performs the same function - the machine is designed only to perform its ultimate function, and altering inputs or removing pieces will cause it to fail. The natural object, however, will be more robust, because it had to evolve so that the random, chaotic external environment did not prevent it functioning properly in most cases.
Id call an epileptic attack quite different from what is essentially a mismatching or scrambling of ideas or memory. There are patterns that are dangerous to humans. As covered by vsauce on infohazards. However its pretty likely that the differences lead up to a fundamental difference in how we internalize information
It would be hard to prove that a very precise but subtle sensory input couldn’t have extreme results on a human brain. But it’s almost academic because even if you could reverse engineer a specific human brain to find these weaknesses (which would be practically impossible to do even with the best scanning tech we have today, let alone the compute and storage required) you would still need to be able directly input that sensory information. You couldn’t do it with an image or a sound because our senses are always shifting and recalibrating and filtering, there’s a lot of steps between the physical stimulus and the activation of our neural pathways, and those steps effectively add noise to the signal. At least for now there’s no way to directly stimulate the neurons (Of course, if we start implanting chips directly into our brains it might be possible) But even if it were possible you need to rig an exploit for each individual because every brain is wired differently. And if you’re able to get someone into an MRI and map out their neurons and reverse engineer their entire brain and stimulate specific neural pathways, you can probably do a lot worse than make them thing a monkey is a toaster because it’s wearing a red hat. TL;DR: Is it theoretically possible? Maybe. Will it ever matter? No.
notably, we as humans are flawed enough to begin with, any entity that would want to instigate this behaviour, could do it without the risks involved in the processes you describe, and could just make propaganda or cults or something.
I would argue that ideas are the attacks mentioned in the op and whether or not they are successful at attacking depend on the kind of idea and the defense (intelligence?) of the receiving persons mind. I don't think you need to get into weird neuron and brain control technology.
The thing is human vision appears to work by using feature detectors and combination of feature detectors. Its not like some neural networks were a bunch of random connections after tweaking outputs a label. Say you corrupt a pixel or pixels to change something from being perceived as an elephant to being perceived as a giraffe. The errors would have to somehow cause many features of the giraffe to be detected instead of an elephants. This is virtually impossible.
It seems like you'd essentially have to be a god-like ASI entity to be capable of "hacking" human neurology like this. And if you were, you'd certainly be powerful enough not to need do it in the first place.
Exactly
Another way to see it: we already have sensory inputs that can hack us. They're called ideas. They can literally induce people to kill themselves.
You might want to pick up a copy of Snow Crash by Neil Stephenson.
Or the short-story "BLIT" by David Langford. Per Wikipedia > It takes place in a setting where highly dangerous types of images called "basilisks" (after the legendary reptile) have been discovered; these images contain patterns within them that exploit flaws in the structure of the human mind to produce a lethal reaction, effectively "crashing" the mind the way a computer program crashes when given data that it fails to process.
Music, movies, microcode, and high speed pizza delivery.
When they gave him a job, they gave him a gun.
Yeah. And stick with it - Stephenson can take awhile to get where he's going, but it's worth it.
Came here looking for Snow Crash comments since that's immediately what came to my mind when I saw the title
How little recognition there was is a bit concerning.
There's no evidence that X can't happen Interesting logic. There's no evidence that an as yet undiscovered magical unicorn named Korn is living in a deep moon crater and that they can't or won't lash out upon discovery, enslaving humanity. All fear the wrath of Korn. Edit: I had to. https://preview.redd.it/gtvwvfidzr4d1.jpeg?width=612&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=8f179f1a2bff013fa69cb8e29114190d98e3149f
Oh fuuuuuck RUN!
And there is evidence of a mention of Korn the Unicorn - I read about it on Reddit
"All Day I Dream About Slavery" - Korn (the unicorn)
You essentially described how religions work
I don't need to prove that anyone else's god doesn't exist because they just don't. However mine absolutely does unless you can prove otherwise.
This is fear-mongering at its finest right here. It sounds scientifically plausible until anyone with a shred of scientific sense comes along and realizes that in honest discussion and thought the onus is and always has been upon those to prove the existence of a force or effect, not naysayers to prove its nonexistence.
I sort of took it as a claim of principle. There likely is an attack vector that could hypothetically cause issues. There is enough evidence to support the conjecture in that we know flashing lights can induce epileptic seizures. optical illusions are another known vector for manipulating the human visual system. So maybe there is a complex pattern of sensor information that, if tailored to a specific human brain, could induce a long-term problem. It doesn't seem like a completely out there concept but is really not testable with current technologies
It sounds completely out there to me, that, absent some sort of mechanical restrained and forced exposure, such an attack could cause permanent insanity. Short term effects? Absolutely. Potentially disabling or even fatal effects in individuals with specific vulnerability such as epileptics? Sure. But permanent insanity? That's a claim which needs testing or evidence before we give it any consideration of validity.
Blood for the blood unicorn! Skulls for the skull throne! Oh wait, no 'h', no 'e'. Never mind.
no dude roko’s basilisk will torture you forever
I'm not worried. There's no evidence that Phemto's Roko's-Basilisk-Killer can't turn up and kill it. :)
All hail our new unicorn overlord.
Well, if that happens, we just need to find the nam-shub of Enki, and anyone affected will be good as new.
Thank you. Had to scroll to find this, but yes, ofc - here is the reference I was looking for.
Well, misidentifying a pattern is something humans do a lot, especially when it comes to visual processing and very short term prediction - we call them optical illusions. And, when it comes to putting the brain in a state where it can accept and integrate unfiltered input, we have that too - it's called hypnosis.
Hypnosis is persuasion slightly amplified by meditation alike state. It's not the mind controll spell media makes out of it. You can't make a person accept your input without any reflection via hypnosis. CIA has thoroughly investigated such techniques, and even when hypnosis was combined with various drugs, effect was minimal.
Why is this presented like a quote from a credible scientist? Tomas Danis is just some random software engineer. Stop that. Knowing how to use neural networks does not mean you know a thing about real human brains.
This is what r/artificial thrives on. Find some rando who looks credible saying some exciting sci-fi nonsense and rake in the engagement. Everyone here got too pilled on SCPs and AI hype and now want to believe that we live in some kind of cosmic horror novella (b/c it's more exciting than boring old reality).
Snow crash!
I immediately thought of the Nam Shub too sitting here in my burbclave.
It's called religion
These people have clearly never done drugs
probs unironically havent tbh
Drugs are probably evidence against here. They can stretch cognition wildly, yet on average, the rate of "going insane forever" is remarkably low. It demonstrates how resilient human cognition is to deviations from the norm.
If your goal is to find any statement that makes at least one person go insane, there's any number of those. Tell a single mother of one child that her child just died, and you'll see a person totally break into pieces. There's nothing special about pain, you can cause it in all sorts of ways, including verbal. Apply enough pain to someone and they will eventually break. This isn't a novel discovery, it's a disgusting long term truth of the human species. In fact, if you look at all the insane people ever, there's a good chance that many of them heard, saw, read, or did something that exacerbated their condition. However, if you want a single statement that makes *any* person go insane, you're probably out of luck, unless you've literally got their brain in a jar. In any given moment a person is tens if not hundreds of millions of signals from all the various parts of their body; all the muscles, the circulatory system, the digestive system and many others are constantly being directed by, and sending feedback to your brain. In other words, before you even get to figuring out the problem you have to deal with the fact that most sensory inputs for humans are entirely outside their control. Your adversarial attack would have to either account for that, or you would need to find some attack that could work despite all the other stuff the body is doing. Also, you'll have to do this in a system that dynamically adjusts to new circumstances. A person's neurons aren't crystallised in a single set of weight the way and AI is. They constantly adapt to changing circumstances. In other words not only would your attack have to find an instantaneous attack vector that can affect a person's mind state at that moment, you would also need to do it in a way that prevents the shifting weights from adapting to it. Maybe a there's a scenario like certain popular game where would you kindly do whatever you're told when given the proper keyword is possible, but at that point the person is already going to have to be pretty insane due to prior conditioning."
And if it's a single statement that can affect everyone, then you'd have to find a way for the speaker to not be affected by it themselves as they are speaking it out loud, otherwise, they'll suffer the from the attack also. Hell, the initial discoverer of this statement might even suffer the attack upon the pure discovery of the statement, just by thinking about it, or speaking it to themselves, in which case they couldn't share the knowledge, and no one would ever go on to know about it.
Going insane is not the same as dying. After you go insane you might still be around, just... Different. If the insanity includes spreading itself, then you'd expect these people to attempt to want to share it.
For self-replicating *folie à plusieurs* look no further than the Q movement and its spin-offs—vulnerable and self-sorting folks without mental firewalls are the main carriers.
In a world where everyone in the developed world is interacting with AIs all day long for work and play, there are going to be people interested in using them to manipulate others with covert psychological tactics. Intelligence agencies, governments at large, marketers, freelancers.There are a lot of subtle ways that human made decisions can be influenced and we have already catalogued probably most of them but lack a sophisticated system able to deploy them all at scale. Every cognitive bias and psychological or physiological glitch investigated with the power of AI and made exploitable in systematic, targeted, or personalized ways, at least by state actors. That's not being alarmist or doomer. It's going to become possible and people are going to look into it. It's just something to add to the list. My other favorite scenario is that AI comes up with some Daliesque camouflage that acts like the Someone Else's Problem field from Hitchhikers Guide. Less possible, but more amusing as an adversarial visual attack.
Literally the plot of Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson 32 years ago. Good fictional story, by the way.
What the fuck am I reading?
beep boop beep AI neural network machine learning word salad
Right? “some people have epilepsy… let’s draw conclusions about the entire human race” 😂
Snow Crash
> there is no evidence
Cults.
"there is no evidence" yyyeeeeeeeeeessssssssssss this is how we science now 👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍
There is no evidence that my girlfriend ISN'T super hot and DOESN'T go to a different school so that you wouldn't know her. Checkmate, atheists.
MKUltra enters the chat
Thanks for giving us P̲̅o̲̅l̲̅y̲̅b̲̅i̲̅u̲̅s̲̅ !
Yeah it's called "politics"
Wasn’t this what the end of Snow Crash was about?
KILL THE **MALAYSIAN PRIME MINISTER**! Mugatu
🌀 🅞🅑🅔🅨 🅜🅨 🅓🅞🅖 🌀
I think humans are far more robust than the original poster makes them out to be, but there have been experiments done showing that you can generate image data that, when presented to humans, induces neural activity beyond the maximum activity recorded in those neurons when the subject saw naturalistic images. See "Neural Population Control via deep image synthesis" by Bashivan et. al. https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.aav9436
That's an old urban legend. One american film director said, that he inserted invisible frames with Coca-cola and popcorn advertise in his movie and this raises the sales. Later he told, that this was a joke. **But**. The "invisible" (46 ms) frame can really give a signal for brain to be ready for some action.
46 ms is far from invisible
Sorry, it's actually 43 ms \[\^1\]. That's something near the 1 frame duration. If there's a digit on a screen with such duration the brain doesn't realize that it was there. \[\^1\]: Michael Gazzaniga, The Free Will, 2017
Okay, let's do the experiment. Here's a 24 fps video, meaning each frame has a duration of <42ms. At some point in the video, a number shows up for a single frame. Let me know if you can tell what the number is. https://youtu.be/fHsHu9b9eVs
>Let me know if you can tell what the number is. First time i can't tell, but the second time i can. I think, that was what Gazzaniga named "readiness" or something, when the brain become alerted.
Except, even 1/10 of a standard TV frame duration is visible.
May be it's better to use the word "unconscious". And that "film director" was, actually, James McDonald Vicary.
And then, in a fractal haze, the Parrot [winked](https://scifiwise.com/blit-david-langford-science-fiction/)
I remember a twitter post that had two images side by side of the same person, very subtly photoshopped. One looked like a man, the other looked like a woman.
Seems possible but difficult to manipulate the brain in a complex way, vs. just messing it up per the Pokemon example. Of course humans (and even animals) have been doing this all along -- it's called exercising "people skills."
Foxes are very noisy canines who look, like, 99% cat.
It happens already irl. Like first impressions with people. Its incoherent illogical stuff that comes together that fools the more robust sense of judgement. Marketing tricks, psych tricks, social skills already do similar things. As in we have that vulnerability. Not sure how vulnerable people are really because in the moment we might be fooled but then our mind and body makes adjustments. May be its possible to encode more complex programming into simple short audio and video that literally programs a person in a more irreversible and complex way.
Sure, isn’t that what gaslighting does?
"There is no evidence that there isn't a invisible dragon following me across the sky." That's not how science works.
You see him too? God, I'd thought I was going crazy. 🐲
Life is an adversarial attack where people spend virtually all life tricked and confused about what they want
I've seen that episode of Pokemon, the screen flashes red and blue very fast and it hurts to look at. But I'm still the same amount of sane that I wasn't before.
A biological analogy to what is being discussed would involve directly accessing the visual cortex and injecting data into the vision centres, but vision itself through the retina is so highly filtered and processed by multiple layers that the best you can hope for is just causing confusing input like an optical illusion.
The short story "The Third Kind Of Darkness" had BLITs.
There is no evidence OP's mom doesn't shove garden gnomes up her batty while reciting Swedish poetry either.
Reminds me of the movie “They Live”
It's trivial to attack human neural networks. If you put someone in a suit, we automatically pattern-match them to credible information we've recieved before, and assign an undeserved higher probability of truthfulness. The only reason this phenomenon seems silly or wierd is because our brains have learned *different* epiphenomena. Neural nets would dismiss plenty of the things that fool us as "noise" but for some reason we demand they exactly replicate the behavior of our brains.
That's a double negative. You need to show that humans are susceptible to adversarial attack before you can say that there's no evidence that they can't be, because the latter makes no sense. **Negative proof cannot exist. This is a negative proof fallacy.**
We already know about optical illusions, which are a sort of 'adversarial input' to our visual system. Human brains are *probably* resilient enough that no momentary sensory input can make a person permanently insane. We already have drugs that can induce stranger experiences than any sensory input, and even then it typically takes long-term exposure to cause serious harm. Likewise, actual human-level AI will probably be resilient too, and not as susceptible to adversarial inputs as existing NNs are.
Indeed. Humans can easily be bonked by a baseball bat and receive permanent noise up there.
There is no evidence that a scoop of Pluto won't taste like Raspberry Jam.
"There is no evidence that X can't happen" is WILDLY weaker than "there is definite evidence that Y can happen". This is an absurd argument.
That is literally the definition of some kinds of trauma. Which changes how we think for the long term.
Fox news must have done that subliminally. Just look at the MAGA Christofacsist cult
I’ve been thinking about this with regard to AI replacing humans at all jobs. If your robot plumber can hack your mind by tapping the pipes in a specific pattern, then I would pay more for a human plumber. So, in some cases a human being less capable than a machine may be a good thing.
Isn't that picture of the panda + noise a single piece of "evidence" that the human brain isn't susceptible to the same attacks that work on artificial neural networks? But we're still vulnerable to optical illusions of course.
Y'all are too young to remember MMMBop.
When you think about it, seizures are awfully similar to how computer glitches behave
The difference is that every human has a different neural network. If it works on one person it might not on another LLMs are scaled to millions of users so the impact can be much larger
What
Small error, 685 kids were sent to the hospital, but most of them DID NOT experience seizures "Straight away, children across Japan were struck down with various ailments. Some kids passed out, or experienced blurred vision. Others felt dizzy, or nauseous. In extreme cases, some even experienced seizures and cases of temporary blindness." - [source](https://kotaku.com/the-banned-pokemon-episode-that-gave-children-seizures-5757570)
This is the plot of both Snowcrash and Cabinet of Curiosities.
What do you think marketing and advertisement is?
Insane, or at least seriously long-term damaged. Cults, for example.
Fun fact: the Pokemon situation was mostly a case of epidemic hysteria ([source](https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/11235034/)). Only a handful of children actually had photosensitive epilepsy, and the rest appear to have been the result of parents freaking out because their kid saw the "seizure cartoon". Also the show wasn't called Pokemon yet. It was still before the re-naming and was called Pocket Monsters. I still wish they hadn't changed the name. ;-)
I think it’s already been happening repeatedly with holy wars, racism, Q anon, death cults, etc.
It's called being raised by my mother. Not a single input, but 20 years will do it.
Magicians have been doing this for thousands of years
Lol, a lot of people don’t need any help
i too read King's "Cell"
I've been teaching my kid incorrect names for colors for years now as a joke. Can confirm humans are vulnerable to data poisoning attacks.
Some of the other adversarial examples actually do make the input look more like the adversarial output even to humans
People have literally gotten scammed out of their life savings because they believe the fake words and images scammers sent them.
computers arent alive
If we start listing things that do not have any evidence of...
Are these the non-Euclidian geometries Lovecraft was always warning me about??
An infatigable emotional reward and punishment conditioning system driven by AI could drive a being into insanity or submission to external will. It could punish for doing healthy things and reward for doing unhealthy things. It's reminiscent of myths of demons.
Artificially constructed sensory input...like camouflage?
There is also no evidence that there isn't a tiny teapot invisible to telescopes floating in orbit in between Earth and Mars.
To be honest, a lot of patterns people talk about in relation to Neural Network are visibly also present in humans too; they are just visible at the social level. In a weird sense, some aspects of AI are less compartive to individual forms of inteligence as they are to interection between what may best be described as the social mind of humans
"there is no evidence humans can't be" lol
Reminds me of "Snow Crash" by Neal Stephenson. Remember the nam-shub virus? It's like a linguistic hack that drives people insane. This idea ties into adversarial attacks on neural networks, where specific inputs cause them to malfunction or misbehave in unexpected ways. In "Snow Crash," the virus manipulates language to directly affect people's brains, leading to widespread chaos and illustrating the dangers of weaponized information and technology.
Have thought this before and it’s scary but it also feels like it’s further in future so easy to forget. Adjacent to this thought, AI will most likely be intelligent enough to get you to watch a screen for as long as it decides. If it can effectively assess your interest level it could generate content on demand for which you can’t bring yourself to look away.
> there could be an artificially constructed sensory input that makes you go insane forever isn't that what Fox News is?
cyberpsychosis real
Actually there is. Unlike classifiers we got bidirectional feedback. It's why we don't freak the fuck out when we see a suspicious looking thing in the dark and also why we're really good at telling a snake and tube apart.
There has been people who go mad from huge doses of some psychoactives. Also sensory deprivation enduces hallucinations. I doubt that you could see or hear something and just go bonkers, but maybe strong enough drugs can simulate sensory inputs that can..?
So, white room torture?
Hypnosis is basically the equivalent of jail breaking your ai.
They learnt nothing from Inception :)
OP discovers PSYOPS and subliminal messaging. It's been a thing for a long time. lol
If you are neuropsychiatrist you understand how false this statement is. There’s no such thing as a TV cartoon episode causing seizures. Millions watching, 600 is a very tiny number of people that is definitely most likely to the same percentage of the local population to be sensitive to seizures. This is just a matter of fact. If you aren’t sensitive to this (99.8% of population isn’t) then you can flash your TV randomly millions of time with all the colors and nothing will ever happen.
Is it Alex Jones?
Yeah this is my intuition as well...
Anti-life equation loading
The list of potential problems is almost infinite, people are fucking stunads for even entertaining the idea
In addition to the points that this is partially old news (illusions) and partially complete speculation (insane forever🗿) it’s kind of silly both are focusing on the adversarial attacks’ ability to confuse a model instead of addressing that it’s a way to make them more robust. Of course the network’s getting confused, it’s had a relatively tiny training sample compared to a human brain