[HN Gopher] AI Everywhere, All at Once
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       AI Everywhere, All at Once
        
       Author : mfiguiere
       Score  : 37 points
       Date   : 2023-05-31 15:12 UTC (7 hours ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (spectrum.ieee.org)
 (TXT) w3m dump (spectrum.ieee.org)
        
       | 8jef wrote:
       | Cautious fear cultivation messages like these means nothing,
       | nothing at all, just fluff, just some irrational blind bits, just
       | the last conservationist go-to fad.
       | 
       | Fear has only one constructive purpose: be conquered. Will AI
       | potentially transform things? Probably. Will people suffer in the
       | process? Most probably. Should we stop the AI process? We can't.
       | We couldn't stop industrialization, or cars, or capitalism, or
       | electricity, or pollution, or climate changes, so we won't stop
       | AI.
       | 
       | What will happen? As usual, we will go all the way through the
       | process, we'll maybe loose ourselves in AI, or we'll find a way
       | to conquer, adapt and win, as we usually do. Or we won't. But no
       | matter how loud fearful voices are, in control and in the know
       | people never really listen, quite the opposite. In the meantime
       | you can invest in your fears and become a prepper, an AI prepper
       | that is (whatever that will be), an entirely new business
       | opportunity!
        
       | CyrsBel wrote:
       | I am skeptical that this is about regulating AI for safety rather
       | than regulating AI to try to be the gatekeepers of the value AI
       | brings to people who love drinking from the chalice of knowledge.
        
       | dr_dshiv wrote:
       | > Trustworthiness, we agreed, is probably the most pressing near-
       | term concern. Addressing the provenance of information and its
       | traceability is key. Otherwise people may be swamped by so much
       | bad information that the fragile consensus among humans about
       | what is and isn't real totally breaks down.
       | 
       | Wow, trustworthiness just isn't my concern when I use chatGPT. I
       | feel like we shouldn't "trust" it -- it is better as a source of
       | inspiration and perspective than a source of "truth."
        
       | zzzeek wrote:
       | it's so frustrating how there are really two conversations going
       | on about this.
       | 
       | one is, "AI will soon enough be AGI and then the extinction of
       | humanity is at stake"
       | 
       | the other is sort of paraphrased in this article: "These models
       | are being unleashed into the wild by corporations who offer no
       | transparency as to their corpus, their architecture, their
       | guardrails, or the policies for handling data from users. "
       | 
       | one refers to harm that would be caused by some hypothetical
       | intelligence that so far only exists in science fiction, the
       | other refers to harm being committed right now by humans who own
       | companies.
       | 
       | The various "letters" being signed seem to be firmly in the "AGI
       | human extinction" category and make no effort to suggest that
       | perhaps the training sets being used for LLM should be *opened up
       | right now and limited to those sources that provide consent
       | only*, that is, stop stealing art, music, writing, source code,
       | photographs, literature, and sticking it in your for-profit
       | product. Skynet is not doing that, Sam Altman is.
        
         | yyyk wrote:
         | Both camps have really weird blind spots that lead them to make
         | rather counterproductive suggestions. One camp thinks about
         | 'alignment' (which has serious risks if pursued naively). In
         | the other camp it's the obsession with 'transparency' - which
         | has its own risks.
         | 
         | Forget about Skynet. What happens when psycho militia takes the
         | transparent training sets and transparent architecture and uses
         | them to train its own AI for, say, creating some very
         | innovative chemical weapons? Many 'AI risk' things that the
         | doomers think about 'work' almost as well if we merely have a
         | non-AGI AI directed by known existing crazies. Maybe we should
         | think about how much we really want to expose to the public.
        
         | rhn_mk1 wrote:
         | It's understandable: opening the training sets would increase
         | the risk of the hypothetical happening, so it's difficult to
         | expect the first camp to advocate doing it.
         | 
         | As for "stealing", it's controversial if "stealing" is even
         | happening, given the plurality of laws and opinions, so it's an
         | even thornier subject to pick up if you have other things to
         | worry about.
         | 
         | Let those in either camp fight for what they consider
         | important.
        
           | saiya-jin wrote:
           | I wish there was no fight, just rational discussion lacking
           | most of emotions. We humans have enough fighting these days
           | already, in literal and every other sense.
           | 
           | This topic needs some quality discussion taking some time, so
           | ideas permeate general public and folks have time to form an
           | opinion. Not just be shock-pushed into an opinion by sudden
           | dramatic arrival of something completely unknown and its
           | sudden ubiquity, which can go very easily wrong even without
           | nefarious parties taking advantage of situation, like they
           | always do.
        
         | majormajor wrote:
         | One wonders if some of the parties are using the sci-fi risk as
         | a distraction from the more immediate one.
         | 
         | Personally, I think the creation of things like ChatGPT in a
         | way poisons the well for future models to be created in the
         | same way able to be up to date with future trends. I think
         | within a decade much original, quality stuff will be more
         | explicitly protected from free scraping and training. And at
         | the same time, freely available stuff will become flooded with
         | LLM-generated crap, so any "vaccuum up everything free" models
         | of tomorrow will be trained more on today's model's output than
         | on human output.
         | 
         | So whatever signifiers evolve to represent "this is real human-
         | created stuff, not just AI crap" in conversations or art will
         | be harder to adopt and copy without a lot of effort in your
         | prompting and all.
        
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