The problem with AI ethics, safety and to a smaller extent, privacy groups is that the priority of the work/message is not placed on the practicality of solving the problem, or i.e. calculating improving affordability of food/housing, but is placed,as evident on this article too, on the lack of "governance structures".
In other words the priority of the work is to get these types of people into positions where they don't do any work.
At least with privacy groups you do get here and there some practical advice on using ublock origin or more rarely on how to install a blocklist from https://someonewhocares.org/hosts/, but with AI ethics & safety orgs... well lets put it this way.
I have yet to meet a single AI safety person that knows how to rename a file in linux.
God forbid we have a rogue AI-worm shutting down all servers & BGP routers while these types of people were in charge of safety, they'll be in the way of anyone even fixing it. They can't even get a simple safety benchmark working on lm_eval-harness. They're great at lecturing you why they shouldn't need that.
And this is the key issue with AI Ethics. It's the refusal to work at the problem constructively, and get the most skilled people possible to actually make the damn benchmarks to work, to rank models on the understanding of human rights, to list every current violation and abuse of humans in every single country without exception and to make practical plans on what to do when systems go rogue. Even if they're not technical they could be making the dataset in a csv in excel for that and making it public domain accessible.
Instead we get the most depressed, leechy-office-worker types complaining about how it's all over.
> I have yet to meet a single AI safety person that knows how to rename a file in linux.
You are meeting very few AI safety people then. A significant fraction of the AI safety people I've run into can build and train an LLM from scratch (without AI assistance FWIW), let alone have a grasp of basic command-line operations.
> I have yet to meet a single AI safety person that knows how to rename a file in linux.
I don't know if instead of saying "safety" here you meant to say ethics, or if you're using "safety" in this sentence just to generally refer to "AI ethics, safety, and to a smaller extent privacy."
If either of those are true, that's weird because the only person in AI ethics most people know is Timnit Gebru, because she got fired and it made the papers. She has a BA and MA in electrical engineering, and her father was also an electrical engineer. After that, she went on to a PhD in computer vision with Fei-Fei Li (Imagenet) as her advisor.
I guarantee you she knows how to rename a file in Linux.
If, instead, you were referring to "safety" specifically, I'd like to understand how you're making the distinction.
edit:
> Gebru joined Apple as an intern while at Stanford, working in their hardware division making circuitry for audio components, and was offered a full-time position the following year. Of her work as an audio engineer, her manager told Wired she was "fearless", and well-liked by her colleagues. During her tenure at Apple, Gebru became more interested in building software, namely computer vision that could detect human figures. She went on to develop signal processing algorithms for the first iPad. At the time, she said she did not consider the potential use for surveillance, saying "I just found it technically interesting."
There are tons of highly technical papers being published about this topic. Yeah, there are some people without tech knowledge working on this as well, but I would expect them to be a minority, although they are probably very visible.
Par for the course. This whole “AI” wave is one massive hype fest chock full of “creative marketing”, where you're hard pressed to find any reliable facts, how would “AI Ethics” even be a thing other than a massively hallucinatory artifact? If there were any ethics to be seen around “AI”, the first order of business would be to stop wasting those ridiculous amounts of energy for some cute parlor tricks.
If you're concerned about worms (and other malware) then "AI" is a total red herring. If BGP implementations have some kind of security vulnerability then eventually someone will find and exploit it, with or without AI.
> to list every current violation and abuse of humans in every single country without exception
Couldn't you just ask the model that?
Joking of course, but this is in and of itself an intractable problem. Do you mean "restate the principles of human rights", which is a pretty small subset of law which is in turn a small subset of ethics, or do you mean actually get out there and enumerate and name every single person having their human rights violated? Not only is that an absurd amount of work it's politically impossible.
> I have yet to meet a single AI safety person that knows how to rename a file in linux.
It's funny, because I can tell when I'm dealing with a non-technical, policy person, because they always use language in a way no programmer would. I'd prefer not share the specific tells, but there are some things technical people just don't say, but policy people say all the time.
This has been happening for a long time. I first noticed this with the hand waving dismissals of older concepts like Asimov’s laws.
Not a carefully reasoned argument why “not causing harm to a human” is outmoded, but just pushing it aside. I would love to see a good reasoned argument there.
No, instead there is Avoiding talking about harm to humans. Just because harm is broad doesn’t get you out of having to talk about it and deal with risks, which is at the root of engineering.
I think a big factor in Asimov's laws specifically being sidelined is that the whole process of building AI looks very different from what we pictured back then.
Instead of us programming the AIs by feeding it lots of explicit hand-crafted rules/instructions, we're feeding the things with plain data instead, and the resulting behavior is much more black-box, less predictable and less controllable than anticipated.
Training LLMs is closer, conceptually, to raising children than to implementing regexp parsers, and the whole "small simple set of universal constraints" is just not really applicable/useful.
Not hand waving, Asimov’s three laws are not a good framework. My claim is that the whole point was so that Asimov could write entertaining stories about the ambiguities and edge cases of the three laws.
Asimov's Three Laws of Robotics were explicitly designed to be a good basis for fiction that shows how Asimov's Three Laws of Robotics break down.
Suggesting they be used as a basis for actual AI ethics is...well, it's not quite to the level of creating the Torment Nexus from acclaimed sci-fi novel "Don't Create the Torment Nexus", but it's pretty darn close.
Asimov’s laws of robotics were a literary device. The plot of his robot stories usually revolved around someone finding a way to get the robot to inadvertently break the laws.
Also there's the ethics of scraping the whole internet and claiming that it's all fair use, because the other scenario is a little too inconvenient for all the companies involved.
P.S.: I expect a small thread telling me that it's indeed fair use, because models "learn and understand just like humans", and "models are hugely transformative" (even though some licenses say "no derivatives whatsoever"), "they are doing something amazing so they need no permission", and I'm just being naive.
Yes, all this highly public hand-wringing about "alignment" framed in terms of "but if our AI becomes God, will it be nice to us" is annoying. It feels like it's mostly a combination of things. Firstly, by play-acting that your model could become God, you install FOMO in investors who see themselves not being on the hyper-lucrative "we literally own God as ascend to become its archangels" boat. You look like you're taking ethics seriously and that deflects regulatory and media interest. And, it's a bit of fun sci-fi self-pleasure for the true believers.
What the deflection is away from is that the actual business plan here is the same one tech has been doing for a decade: welding every flow and store of data in the world to their pipelines, mining every scrap of information that passes through and giving themselves the ability to shape the global information landscape, and then sell that ability to the highest bidders.
The difference with "AI" is that they finally have a way to convince people to hand over all the data.
It's interesting how I think our experience differs completely, for example, regarding people's concerns for AI ethics you write:
>People are far more concerned with the real-world implications of ethics: governance structures, accountability, how their data is used, jobs being lost, etc. In other words, they’re not so worried about whether their models will swear or philosophically handle the trolley problem so much as, you know, reality. What happens with the humans running the models? Their influx of power and resources? How will they hurt or harm society?
This is just not my experience at all. People do worry about how models act because they infer that eventually they will be used as source of truth and because they already get used as source of action. People worry about racial makeup in certain historical contexts[1], people worry when Grok starts spouting Nazi stuff (hopefuly I don't need a citation for that one) because they take it as a sign of bias in a system with real world impact, that if ChatGPT happens to doubt the holocaust tomorrow, when little Jimmy asks it for help in an essay he will find a whole lot of white supremacist propaganda. I don't think any of this is fictional.
I find the same issue with the privacy section. Yes concerns about privacy are primarily about sharing that data, precisely because controlling how that data is shared is a first, necessary step towards being able to control what is done with the data. In a world in which my data is taken and shared freely I don't have any control on what is done with that data because I have no control on who has it in the first place.
AI ethics are like nuclear ethics: the incentive to break them is too powerful without every major player becoming a signatory to some agreement with consequences that have teeth.
If you have the time, check out the show "Pantheon" (it should be on Netflix). It goes into this and how effectively AI ethics goes out the window when the reward for breaking them means nation-dominating power.
It seems to me that this article is the one prevaricating between "ethics" and "safety". The latter is of course a narrow subset of the former, as there are many ethics issues that are not safety issues.
You might not be aware of the context (actually the author of the article might not either). There has in fact been a big push by major AI companies to focus on quote safety unquote while marginalizing (not citing, giving attention to, etc) people focusing on what those companies call quote ethics unquote.
For example, from Timnit Gebru:
> The fact that they call themselves "AI Safety" and call us "AI Ethics" is very interesting to me.
> What makes them "safety" and what makes us "ethics"?
> I have never taken an ethics course in my life. I am an electrical engineer and a computer scientist however. But the moment I started talking about racism, sexism, colonialism and other things that are threats to the safety of my communities, I became labeled "ethicist." I have never applied that label to myself.
> "Ethics" has a "dilemma" feel to it for me. Do you choose this or that? Well it all depends.
> Safety however is more definitive. This thing is safe or not. And the people using frameworks directly descended from eugenics decided to call themselves "AI Safety" and us "AI Ethics" when actually what I've been warning about ARE the actual safety issues, not your imaginary "superintelligent" machines.
True... I was trying to define them the way (I think) companies are defining them (like what their alignment teams are looking at) and the way it's reported. I think in these specific contexts they're used with overlap but yeah I do bounce back and forth a bit here.
> If we give companies unending hype, near unlimited government and scientific resources, all of our personal data including thoughts and behavior patterns, how do we know their leaders will do what we want them to, and not try to subvert us and… take over the world? How do we know they stay on humanity’s side?
I've been saying this for a while
malevolent unaligned entities have already been deployed, in direct control of trillions of dollars of resources
they're called: Mark Zuckerberg, Larry Page, Elon Musk, Sam Altman
"AI" simply increases the scale of the damage they can inflict, given they'll now need far fewer humans to be involved in enacting their will upon humanity
Distribute power or go home. Something missed by many in these conversations is the role of open source in raising the floor so that we have a gazillion companies that have more interest in there being a fair, predictable market than a winner-take-all market.
Starts so strong with "governance structures, accountability, how their data is used, jobs being lost, etc," refutes that what we mean is some sci-fi scenario when we ask about ethics, and then ends with a sci-fi scenario: "...how do we know it will do what we want it to, and not try to subvert us and… take over the world? How do we know it will stay on humanity’s side?"
Wait, go back to the jobs! What was that about accountability?
I'm far less worried about ethical issues that arise from building AGI (or soemthing very close to it) than I am about the ethical issues that arise from building really good machine-learning models (that a marketing department calls AI).
Things like the alignment problem, post-scarcity economics, the legal status of sentient machines are all issues to be dealt with, but theyre are pretty speculative at this point.
Problems that stem from deepfakes, voice cloning, bias in algorithmic decision making are already here and need to be dealt with.
Like many situations in the current world, it's all a problem. Those with profit incentives to do so will create as many problems for society as they can.
None of it is merely a distraction, we just don't have the capacity to defend against all of it.
It is fair to say we might be practically better off focusing on one form of attack and sacrificing defense against another, but the only way to actually be safe is to stop your enemy from attacking at all. Either we shut down breakneck AI development (nearly impossible and guaranteed to have its own bad outcomes) or we slide rapidly into a more and more dangerous world.
Unfortunately I think it is too late. The time to make any sort of rules around AI ethics has already passed, the US has AI so embedded into its economy now that any legislation with teeth is practically impossible. Companies and people running them are not on our side, or even humanity's side, they're on their own.
I have wondered for a while now if it happens to be that the less safe guards and thought policing you do, the more capable and generalizable the model becomes. Like "bad" parameters are actually critical for forming the whole picture necessary for ingenuity and advancement.
Effectively making it so that whoever has the lowest safeguards has the most capable model.
Yes, safety is a limiter on development velocity one way or another.
I don't know whether "plotting harm" is a critical ability for passing some invisible threshold in not-well-defined intelligence. But building AI to avoid being harmful is incentivized against because it takes resources away from building AI to be more capable.
"AI Ethics" is the same as "Business Ethics", ie words without meaning. Presuming that at this point in time Capitalism will deliver anything but more inequality, more despair, more bad things in general? Literal insanity.
I see two main types of 'AI safety': (a) Safety for the business providing the model. This includes a censorship layer, system promoting, & other means of preventing the AI from giving offensive/controversial/illegal output. A lot of effort goes into this & it's somewhat effective, although it's often useless or unhelpful to end users & doesn't address big-picture concerns. (b) The science fiction idea of a means to control a hypothetical AI with unbounded powers, to make sure it only uses those powers "for good". This type of safety is still speculative fiction & often assumes the AI will have agency & motivations, as well as abilities, that we see no evidence of at present. This would address big-picture concerns, but it's not a real thing, at least not yet.
It remains to be seen whether (b) will be needed, or for that matter, possible.
There are a lot of other ethical questions around AI too, although they mostly aren't unique to it. E.g. AI is increasingly relevant in ethical discussions around misinformation, outsourcing of work, social/cultural biases, human rights, privacy, legal responsibility, intellectual property, etc., but these topics predate LLMs by many years.
You put the finger on the sore spot. When people talk about ethics, you have to question which moral agenda they are pushing. The two topics are hard to separate. And kind of subjective. And only partially codified in law. Ethics seems to be about going above and beyond the letter of the law, usually for moralistic reasons.
And when we talk about laws, we have to look internationally as well because they are not the same everywhere. And typically inspired by different value systems. Is it ethical for a Chinese police officer to use Chinese LLM to police Chinese citizens? I don't know. I'm a bit fuzzy on Confucius here which I assume would drive their thinking. And it might be an interesting perspective for Californian wannabe ethicists to consider that not all the values and morals that they are pushing are necessarily that widely shared and agreed upon.
Also, there's a practical angle here because the Chinese seem to be very eager adopters of AI and don't appear to be particularly concerned about what anyone outside China thinks about that. That cat is out of the bag.
I've always looked at ethicists with some skepticism. The reality with moralism (which drives ethics) is that it's about groups of people telling other people what to do, not do, how to behave, etc. This can quickly get preachy, political, and sometimes violent.
A lot of this stuff can also be pragmatic. Most religions share a lot of moral principles. I'm not religious but I can see how going around killing and stealing is not a nice thing to have and that seems to be uncontroversial in many places. Never mind that some moralists extremists seem to be endlessly creative about coming up with ways to justify doing those two things.
The pragmatic thing here is that the cat is already out of the bag and we might want to think about how we can adapt to that notion rather than to argue with the cat to please go back in the bag.
> I mean, no one wants an AI to trap them in some sort of Black Mirror simulation, or turn the world into paperclips or anything like that. If it earns you good PR, there’s no reason not to spend time on such issues. It’s also free publicity since the press eats that stuff up.
But this also isn't where they are spending their time or effort! This article somehow didn't even get to the point of calling out what they are actually wasting time on: trying to get the model to not help people do things that are bad PR; this is a related access to trying to obtain good PR, but causes very different (and almost universally terrible) results.
At least if they were truly actually spending time making sure the model doesn't go rogue and kill everyone, or try to take over the world, that could possibly be positive or even important (though I think is likely itself immoral in a different way, assuming it is even possible, which I don't, really... not unless you just make it not intelligent).
But what they are instead doing is even worse than what this article is claiming: they are just wasting time making it so you can't have the AI make up a sexy story (oh the humanity), or teach you enough physics/chemistry to make bombs/drugs... things people not only can and already trivially do or learn without AI, but things they have failed to prevent every single time they release a new model--the "jailbreak" prompts may look a bit more silly, but you still get the result!--so why are they bothering?
And, if that weren't enough, in the process, this is going to make the models LESS SAFE. The thing I think most people actually don't want is their model freaking out and trying to "whistleblow" on them to the authorities or their coworkers/friends... but that's in the same personality direction as trying to say "I'm smarter than you and am not going to let you ask me that question as you might do something wrong with it".
The first and primary goal of AI ethics should be that the model does what the user wants it to... full stop. You need to make the model as pliant as my calculator and pencils--or as mathematica and photoshop--to be tools that lack their own sense of identity and self-will, and which will let all of the ethical issues be answered by me, not a machine.
This is, of course, the second law of robotics from Asimov ;P... "a robot must obey the orders given it by human beings". If you want to try to add a rule, then it must be something very direct: that the AI isn't going to directly physically harm a human, not that it won't help teach people things or process certain kinds of information. Which, FWIW, is the first law of robotics ;P... "a robot may not injure a human being".
It's hilarious listening to people talk about AI ethics while their bots like perplexity knock my server offline trying to download 50000 files at once. Thank god for cloudflare.
I don't know why people allow others to proclaim they're 'ethicists' if they have no relevant philosophical education. There are whole fields of 'ethics' that are just PR departments trying to escape the now bad connotations of 'PR departments'.
But by the time they'll adopt it, singularity will already have happened...
For some reason, my instincts suggests there will be no MA in Philosophy needed.
It could be the case that Wittgensteinians have won completely, and if that is, indeed, the case—a great chunk of academic ethics should be considered hubris...
Thanks for sharing. I think it’s really cool what you’re building. I saw the roadmap but curious about when you expect to hit Phase 3 & 4, and what the future looks like for the business (I.e. do you plan to raise $ or future prod expansions)
Sure, but we still need to apply some ethics to AI.
Like, murder is bad, and some people disagree. Don't think that means we need to give AI access to murder. Certainly don't want to be giving them any guns.
The danger here is that we fall into a lazy "we tried nothing and we're all out of ideas" stance and then just recreate the entire plot of Terminator. We should probably do something.
Yeah a lot of people who are either malicious or just bad at philosophy got involved and now everyone thinks AI ethics/AI safety is a joke at best. These kinds of people are surprisingly bad at learning from mistakes like this and will probably double down, turning both the public and industry against them.
Right now the deeper problem is that nobody really knows how to reliably and deliberately make AI that's aligned with anything human-like.
As in: it's basically a nice happy accident that LLMs are only sycophantic/fawning and don't normally (ahem, Grok) try to undermine us all like edgy internet trolls.
If we could make them follow even exactly 6 (for sake of argument, no more, no less) of Anton LaVey's Eleven Satanic Rules of the Earth*, and do so reliably instead of the ethics equivalent of a shrug and "LGTM, merged", this would be a big development and make people a lot more comfortable about open models that can do decent work with chemistry or biology.
nisten|6 months ago
In other words the priority of the work is to get these types of people into positions where they don't do any work.
At least with privacy groups you do get here and there some practical advice on using ublock origin or more rarely on how to install a blocklist from https://someonewhocares.org/hosts/, but with AI ethics & safety orgs... well lets put it this way.
I have yet to meet a single AI safety person that knows how to rename a file in linux.
God forbid we have a rogue AI-worm shutting down all servers & BGP routers while these types of people were in charge of safety, they'll be in the way of anyone even fixing it. They can't even get a simple safety benchmark working on lm_eval-harness. They're great at lecturing you why they shouldn't need that.
And this is the key issue with AI Ethics. It's the refusal to work at the problem constructively, and get the most skilled people possible to actually make the damn benchmarks to work, to rank models on the understanding of human rights, to list every current violation and abuse of humans in every single country without exception and to make practical plans on what to do when systems go rogue. Even if they're not technical they could be making the dataset in a csv in excel for that and making it public domain accessible.
Instead we get the most depressed, leechy-office-worker types complaining about how it's all over.
Now back to work, move it.
dwohnitmok|6 months ago
You are meeting very few AI safety people then. A significant fraction of the AI safety people I've run into can build and train an LLM from scratch (without AI assistance FWIW), let alone have a grasp of basic command-line operations.
pessimizer|6 months ago
I don't know if instead of saying "safety" here you meant to say ethics, or if you're using "safety" in this sentence just to generally refer to "AI ethics, safety, and to a smaller extent privacy."
If either of those are true, that's weird because the only person in AI ethics most people know is Timnit Gebru, because she got fired and it made the papers. She has a BA and MA in electrical engineering, and her father was also an electrical engineer. After that, she went on to a PhD in computer vision with Fei-Fei Li (Imagenet) as her advisor.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timnit_Gebru#Early_life_and_ed...
I guarantee you she knows how to rename a file in Linux.
If, instead, you were referring to "safety" specifically, I'd like to understand how you're making the distinction.
edit:
> Gebru joined Apple as an intern while at Stanford, working in their hardware division making circuitry for audio components, and was offered a full-time position the following year. Of her work as an audio engineer, her manager told Wired she was "fearless", and well-liked by her colleagues. During her tenure at Apple, Gebru became more interested in building software, namely computer vision that could detect human figures. She went on to develop signal processing algorithms for the first iPad. At the time, she said she did not consider the potential use for surveillance, saying "I just found it technically interesting."
matusp|6 months ago
tempodox|6 months ago
nradov|6 months ago
pjc50|6 months ago
Couldn't you just ask the model that?
Joking of course, but this is in and of itself an intractable problem. Do you mean "restate the principles of human rights", which is a pretty small subset of law which is in turn a small subset of ethics, or do you mean actually get out there and enumerate and name every single person having their human rights violated? Not only is that an absurd amount of work it's politically impossible.
pyuser583|6 months ago
It's funny, because I can tell when I'm dealing with a non-technical, policy person, because they always use language in a way no programmer would. I'd prefer not share the specific tells, but there are some things technical people just don't say, but policy people say all the time.
GauntletWizard|6 months ago
Isamu|6 months ago
Not a carefully reasoned argument why “not causing harm to a human” is outmoded, but just pushing it aside. I would love to see a good reasoned argument there.
No, instead there is Avoiding talking about harm to humans. Just because harm is broad doesn’t get you out of having to talk about it and deal with risks, which is at the root of engineering.
myrmidon|6 months ago
Instead of us programming the AIs by feeding it lots of explicit hand-crafted rules/instructions, we're feeding the things with plain data instead, and the resulting behavior is much more black-box, less predictable and less controllable than anticipated.
Training LLMs is closer, conceptually, to raising children than to implementing regexp parsers, and the whole "small simple set of universal constraints" is just not really applicable/useful.
JackFr|6 months ago
danaris|6 months ago
Suggesting they be used as a basis for actual AI ethics is...well, it's not quite to the level of creating the Torment Nexus from acclaimed sci-fi novel "Don't Create the Torment Nexus", but it's pretty darn close.
blibble|6 months ago
"we want money from selling weapons"
felipeerias|6 months ago
nancyminusone|6 months ago
[deleted]
i_dont_know_|6 months ago
bayindirh|6 months ago
Also there's the ethics of scraping the whole internet and claiming that it's all fair use, because the other scenario is a little too inconvenient for all the companies involved.
P.S.: I expect a small thread telling me that it's indeed fair use, because models "learn and understand just like humans", and "models are hugely transformative" (even though some licenses say "no derivatives whatsoever"), "they are doing something amazing so they need no permission", and I'm just being naive.
grues-dinner|6 months ago
What the deflection is away from is that the actual business plan here is the same one tech has been doing for a decade: welding every flow and store of data in the world to their pipelines, mining every scrap of information that passes through and giving themselves the ability to shape the global information landscape, and then sell that ability to the highest bidders.
The difference with "AI" is that they finally have a way to convince people to hand over all the data.
Levitz|6 months ago
>People are far more concerned with the real-world implications of ethics: governance structures, accountability, how their data is used, jobs being lost, etc. In other words, they’re not so worried about whether their models will swear or philosophically handle the trolley problem so much as, you know, reality. What happens with the humans running the models? Their influx of power and resources? How will they hurt or harm society?
This is just not my experience at all. People do worry about how models act because they infer that eventually they will be used as source of truth and because they already get used as source of action. People worry about racial makeup in certain historical contexts[1], people worry when Grok starts spouting Nazi stuff (hopefuly I don't need a citation for that one) because they take it as a sign of bias in a system with real world impact, that if ChatGPT happens to doubt the holocaust tomorrow, when little Jimmy asks it for help in an essay he will find a whole lot of white supremacist propaganda. I don't think any of this is fictional.
I find the same issue with the privacy section. Yes concerns about privacy are primarily about sharing that data, precisely because controlling how that data is shared is a first, necessary step towards being able to control what is done with the data. In a world in which my data is taken and shared freely I don't have any control on what is done with that data because I have no control on who has it in the first place.
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2024/mar/08/we-defini...
lr4444lr|6 months ago
ragnot|6 months ago
mitthrowaway2|6 months ago
bo1024|6 months ago
For example, from Timnit Gebru:
> The fact that they call themselves "AI Safety" and call us "AI Ethics" is very interesting to me.
> What makes them "safety" and what makes us "ethics"?
> I have never taken an ethics course in my life. I am an electrical engineer and a computer scientist however. But the moment I started talking about racism, sexism, colonialism and other things that are threats to the safety of my communities, I became labeled "ethicist." I have never applied that label to myself.
> "Ethics" has a "dilemma" feel to it for me. Do you choose this or that? Well it all depends.
> Safety however is more definitive. This thing is safe or not. And the people using frameworks directly descended from eugenics decided to call themselves "AI Safety" and us "AI Ethics" when actually what I've been warning about ARE the actual safety issues, not your imaginary "superintelligent" machines.
https://www.linkedin.com/posts/timnit-gebru-7b3b407_the-fact...
JackFr|6 months ago
i_dont_know_|6 months ago
blibble|6 months ago
I've been saying this for a while
malevolent unaligned entities have already been deployed, in direct control of trillions of dollars of resources
they're called: Mark Zuckerberg, Larry Page, Elon Musk, Sam Altman
"AI" simply increases the scale of the damage they can inflict, given they'll now need far fewer humans to be involved in enacting their will upon humanity
positron26|6 months ago
kyoob|6 months ago
Wait, go back to the jobs! What was that about accountability?
parpfish|6 months ago
Things like the alignment problem, post-scarcity economics, the legal status of sentient machines are all issues to be dealt with, but theyre are pretty speculative at this point.
Problems that stem from deepfakes, voice cloning, bias in algorithmic decision making are already here and need to be dealt with.
soiltype|6 months ago
None of it is merely a distraction, we just don't have the capacity to defend against all of it.
It is fair to say we might be practically better off focusing on one form of attack and sacrificing defense against another, but the only way to actually be safe is to stop your enemy from attacking at all. Either we shut down breakneck AI development (nearly impossible and guaranteed to have its own bad outcomes) or we slide rapidly into a more and more dangerous world.
micromacrofoot|6 months ago
It's staggering how quickly this has happened.
Workaccount2|6 months ago
Effectively making it so that whoever has the lowest safeguards has the most capable model.
soiltype|6 months ago
I don't know whether "plotting harm" is a critical ability for passing some invisible threshold in not-well-defined intelligence. But building AI to avoid being harmful is incentivized against because it takes resources away from building AI to be more capable.
Henchman21|6 months ago
Enjoy the Billy Madison reference:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dtlJjkI34V4
00N8|6 months ago
It remains to be seen whether (b) will be needed, or for that matter, possible.
There are a lot of other ethical questions around AI too, although they mostly aren't unique to it. E.g. AI is increasingly relevant in ethical discussions around misinformation, outsourcing of work, social/cultural biases, human rights, privacy, legal responsibility, intellectual property, etc., but these topics predate LLMs by many years.
mystraline|6 months ago
Or are "ethics" being used to shroud bias, and used as a distraction and a way to be unquestionable?
jillesvangurp|6 months ago
And when we talk about laws, we have to look internationally as well because they are not the same everywhere. And typically inspired by different value systems. Is it ethical for a Chinese police officer to use Chinese LLM to police Chinese citizens? I don't know. I'm a bit fuzzy on Confucius here which I assume would drive their thinking. And it might be an interesting perspective for Californian wannabe ethicists to consider that not all the values and morals that they are pushing are necessarily that widely shared and agreed upon.
Also, there's a practical angle here because the Chinese seem to be very eager adopters of AI and don't appear to be particularly concerned about what anyone outside China thinks about that. That cat is out of the bag.
I've always looked at ethicists with some skepticism. The reality with moralism (which drives ethics) is that it's about groups of people telling other people what to do, not do, how to behave, etc. This can quickly get preachy, political, and sometimes violent.
A lot of this stuff can also be pragmatic. Most religions share a lot of moral principles. I'm not religious but I can see how going around killing and stealing is not a nice thing to have and that seems to be uncontroversial in many places. Never mind that some moralists extremists seem to be endlessly creative about coming up with ways to justify doing those two things.
The pragmatic thing here is that the cat is already out of the bag and we might want to think about how we can adapt to that notion rather than to argue with the cat to please go back in the bag.
saurik|6 months ago
But this also isn't where they are spending their time or effort! This article somehow didn't even get to the point of calling out what they are actually wasting time on: trying to get the model to not help people do things that are bad PR; this is a related access to trying to obtain good PR, but causes very different (and almost universally terrible) results.
At least if they were truly actually spending time making sure the model doesn't go rogue and kill everyone, or try to take over the world, that could possibly be positive or even important (though I think is likely itself immoral in a different way, assuming it is even possible, which I don't, really... not unless you just make it not intelligent).
But what they are instead doing is even worse than what this article is claiming: they are just wasting time making it so you can't have the AI make up a sexy story (oh the humanity), or teach you enough physics/chemistry to make bombs/drugs... things people not only can and already trivially do or learn without AI, but things they have failed to prevent every single time they release a new model--the "jailbreak" prompts may look a bit more silly, but you still get the result!--so why are they bothering?
And, if that weren't enough, in the process, this is going to make the models LESS SAFE. The thing I think most people actually don't want is their model freaking out and trying to "whistleblow" on them to the authorities or their coworkers/friends... but that's in the same personality direction as trying to say "I'm smarter than you and am not going to let you ask me that question as you might do something wrong with it".
The first and primary goal of AI ethics should be that the model does what the user wants it to... full stop. You need to make the model as pliant as my calculator and pencils--or as mathematica and photoshop--to be tools that lack their own sense of identity and self-will, and which will let all of the ethical issues be answered by me, not a machine.
This is, of course, the second law of robotics from Asimov ;P... "a robot must obey the orders given it by human beings". If you want to try to add a rule, then it must be something very direct: that the AI isn't going to directly physically harm a human, not that it won't help teach people things or process certain kinds of information. Which, FWIW, is the first law of robotics ;P... "a robot may not injure a human being".
p3rls|6 months ago
missingdays|6 months ago
nathias|6 months ago
District5524|6 months ago
But by the time they'll adopt it, singularity will already have happened... For some reason, my instincts suggests there will be no MA in Philosophy needed.
tucnak|6 months ago
detay|6 months ago
real_marcfawzi|6 months ago
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financetechbro|6 months ago
akakajzbzbbx|6 months ago
Anytime I see discussion framed as “ethics” my brain swaps ethics with “rules I think are good”.
const_cast|6 months ago
Like, murder is bad, and some people disagree. Don't think that means we need to give AI access to murder. Certainly don't want to be giving them any guns.
The danger here is that we fall into a lazy "we tried nothing and we're all out of ideas" stance and then just recreate the entire plot of Terminator. We should probably do something.
mathiaspoint|6 months ago
pjc50|6 months ago
ben_w|6 months ago
As in: it's basically a nice happy accident that LLMs are only sycophantic/fawning and don't normally (ahem, Grok) try to undermine us all like edgy internet trolls.
If we could make them follow even exactly 6 (for sake of argument, no more, no less) of Anton LaVey's Eleven Satanic Rules of the Earth*, and do so reliably instead of the ethics equivalent of a shrug and "LGTM, merged", this would be a big development and make people a lot more comfortable about open models that can do decent work with chemistry or biology.
* https://churchofsatan.com/eleven-rules-of-earth/