Artificial intelligence, like any intelligence, has goals and priorities

No. Intelligence does not necessitate goals. You are able to understand math, letters, words, meaning of those without pursuing a specific goal.

Because it’s not AI, it’s sophisticated pattern separation, recognition, lossy compression and extrapolation systems.

And our brains work in a similar way.

I’m willing to debate the potentials of AI again once they manage to do that without those “benchmarks” getting special attention in the training data.

You sound like those guys who doomed AI, because a single neuron wasn’t able to solve the XOR problem. Guess what, build a network out of neurons and the problem is solved.

What potentials are you talking about? The potentials are tremendous. There are a plethora of algorithms, theoretic knowledge and practical applications where AI really shines and proves its potential. Just because LLMs currently still lack several capabilities, this doesn’t mean that some future developments can’t improve on that and this by maybe even not being a contemporary LLM. LLMs are just one thing in the wide field of AI. They can do really cool stuff. This points towards further potential in that area. And if it’s not LLMs, then possibly other types of AI architectures.

For example, it might record if people are browsing for baby products or other personal items.

Don’t mind baby products and dildos or whatever.

They could see bank activity and even login credentials when someone is temporarily displaying their own passwords.

This basically ignores all security measures regarding everything. Sensitive communication, company secrets and so on.

That’s fucking seriously huge. What the fuck?!

It was already ruled that they failed to sufficiently disclose which information was used and how.

https://www.reuters.com/technology/australia-court-fines-facebook-owner-meta-14-mln-undisclosed-data-collection-2023-07-26/

This is not evidence that they’re using your microphone, and you know it’s not.

I didn’t claim it to be evidence for that.

somehow bypassing Google and Apple’s mic usage notifications

Unless some form of hardware notification is hardwired into the device, which indicates cam or mic usage, I’m on the rather paranoid side regarding software notifications. Software is usually much easier to break. I’m leaning a lot out of the window now, as I don’t know how secure those notifications are implemented. However, even then there is reason for concern, given that facebook had / has questionable deals with device manufacturers. If they were willing to share personal data with device manufacturers, there is reason to suspect this went or can go the other way around as well.

I don’t know why you keep coming back to trust. […] That’s not the point.

It is mine. Even though there is no evidence for a surveillance using device microphones itself yet and it could be surprising if they were able to, given the history of facebook, they participated in a lot of rather surprising shit.

Aye. Facebook has been proven to be shady af over and over again.

it wasn’t in secret

Did I misread something? It even says in the title of the linked article, that it was a “secret project”.

The evidence is: among other things, facebook has repeatedly violated user’s privacy. It would be no surprise if they would also monitor conversations via the microphone. Sure, currently there seems to be no evidence for that. But I wouldn’t be so naive to just trust them on that.

Yes. Just another malicious thing facebook does. Surely, they are totally trustworthy in all other regards. /s

Security researchers can and probably have tested for this and found no clear, verifiable evidence, otherwise we would have known.

Facebook snooped on users’ Snapchat traffic in secret project, documents reveal