[HN Gopher] Google Brain founder says big tech is lying about AI...
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Google Brain founder says big tech is lying about AI danger
Author : emptysongglass
Score : 217 points
Date : 2023-10-30 17:03 UTC (5 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.afr.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.afr.com)
| chankstein38 wrote:
| Amen. This whole scare tactic thing is ridiculous. Just make the
| public scared of it so you can rope it in yourself. Then you've
| got people like my mom commenting that "AI scares her because
| Musk and (some other corporate rep) said that AI is very
| dangerous. And I don't know why there'd be so many people saying
| it if it's not true." because you're gullible mom.
| jandrese wrote:
| I mean if they were lying about that, what else might they be
| lying about? Maybe giving huge tax breaks to the 0.1% isn't
| going to result in me getting more income? Maybe it is in fact
| possible to acquire a CEO just as good or better than your
| current one that doesn't need half a billion dollar
| compensation package and an enormous golden parachute to do
| their job? I'm starting to wonder if billionaires are
| trustworthy at all.
| prosqlinjector wrote:
| "wow our software is so powerful, it's going to take over the
| world!"
| dist-epoch wrote:
| yes, just like "our nuclear bombs are so powerful, they could
| wipe out civilisation", which led to strict regulation around
| them and lack of open-source nuclear bombs
| kylebenzle wrote:
| Yes, just like... the exact opposite. One is a bomb, the
| other a series of mostly open source statistical models.
| What kind of weed are you guys on that's made you so
| paranoid about statistics?
| dist-epoch wrote:
| Last time I checked my statistical model book didn't have
| the ability to write Python code.
|
| And a nuclear bomb is just a bunch of atoms. Do you fear
| atoms? What the hell.
| mvdtnz wrote:
| It will never stop being funny to me that people are
| straight-facedly drawing a straight line between shitty
| text completion computer programs and nuclear weapon level
| existential risk.
| pixl97 wrote:
| "Looks at all the other species 'intelligent' humans have
| extincted" --ha ha ha ha
|
| Why the shit would we not draw a straight line?
|
| If we fail to create digital intelligence then yea, we
| can hem and haw in conversations like this forever
| online, but you tend to neglect that if we succeed then
| 'shit gets real quick'. Closing your eyes and years and
| saying "This can't actually happen" sounds like a pretty
| damned dumb take on future risk assessments of technology
| when pretty much most takes on AI say "well, yea this is
| something that could potentially happen".
| mvdtnz wrote:
| Literally the thing people are calling "AI" is a program
| that, given some words, predicts the next word. I refuse
| to entertain the absolutely absurd idea that we're
| approaching a general intelligence. It's ludicrous beyond
| belief.
| SpicyLemonZest wrote:
| Modern generative AI functionality is hardly limited to
| predicting words. Have you not heard of e.g. Midjourney?
| pixl97 wrote:
| Then this is your failure, not mine, and not a failure of
| current technology.
|
| I can, right now, upload an image to an AI and say "Hey,
| what do you think the emotional state of the person in
| this image is" pretty damned accurately. Given other
| images I can have the AI describe the scene and make
| pretty damned accurate assessments of how the image could
| have came about.
|
| If this is not general intelligence I simply have no
| guess as to what will be enough in your case.
| hackinthebochs wrote:
| >shitty text completion computer programs
|
| There's a certain kind of psyche that finds it utterly
| impossible to extrapolate trends into the future. It
| renders them completely incapable of anticipating
| significant changes regardless of how clear the trends
| are.
|
| No, no one is afraid of LLMs as they currently exist. The
| fear is about what comes next.
| jrflowers wrote:
| > There's a certain kind of psyche that finds it utterly
| impossible to extrapolate trends into the future.
|
| It is refreshing to see somebody explicitly call out
| people that disagree with me about AI as having
| fundamentally inferior psyches. Their inability to
| picture the same exact future that terrifies me is
| indicative of a structural flaw.
|
| One day society will suffer at the hands of people that
| have the hubris to consider reality as observed as a
| thing separate from what I see in my dreams and thought
| experiments. I know this is true because I've taken great
| pains to meticulously pre-imagine it happening ahead of
| time -- something that lesser psyches simply cannot do.
| at-fates-hands wrote:
| Which is interesting because after the fall of the Soviet
| Union, there was rampant fear of where their nukes ended up
| and if some rogue country could get their hands on them via
| some black market means.
|
| Then through the 90's, it was the fear of a briefcase bomb
| terrorist attack and how easy it would be for certain
| countries, who had the resources to pull an attack off like
| that in the NYC subway or in the heart of another densely
| populated city.
|
| Then 9/11 happened and people suddenly realized you don't
| need a nuke to take out a few thousand innocent people and
| cripple a nation with fear.
| mcpackieh wrote:
| Is Mom scared because Musk told her to be scared, or because
| she thought about the matter herself and concluded that it's
| scary? Why do you assume that people scared of AI must be under
| the influence of rich people/corps today, rather than this fear
| being informed by their own consideration of the problem or by
| _decades_ of media that has been warning about the dangers of
| AI?
|
| Maybe Mom worries about _any_ radical new technology because
| she lived though nuclear attack drills in schools. Or because
| she 's already seen computers and robots take peoples jobs. Or
| because she watched Terminator or read Neuromancer. Or because
| she reads lesswrong. Why assume it's because she's fallen under
| the influence of Musk?
| kjkjadksj wrote:
| Because most sociologists suggest that most people don't take
| time to critically think like this. Emotional brain wins out
| usually over the rational one.
|
| Then you have this idea of the sources of information most
| people have access to being fundamentally biased and
| incentivized towards reporting certain things in certain
| manners and not others.
|
| You basically have low odds of thinking rationally, low odds
| of finding good information that isn't slanted in some way,
| and far lower odds taking the product of those probabilities
| for if you'd both act rationally and somehow have access to
| the ground truth. To say nothing of the expertise required to
| place all of this truth into the correct context. But if you
| did consider the probability of the mother having to be an AI
| expert then the odds get far lower still off all of this
| working out successfully.
| chankstein38 wrote:
| 100% accurate! She has a tendency to read one person's
| opinion on it and echo it. I have seen it for years with
| things. I'm not shocked AI is the current one but I wish it
| were easier to get her to take time to learn things and
| think critically. I have no idea how I'd begin to teach her
| why so much of the fear mongering is ridiculous.
|
| Yeah there are legitimate risks to all of this stuff but,
| to understand those and weigh them against the overblown
| risks, she'd have to understand the whole subject more
| deeply and have experimented with different AI. But you
| even mention ChatGPT she's talking about how it's evil and
| scary.
| jstarfish wrote:
| > She has a tendency to read one person's opinion on it
| and echo it.
|
| ...and when the people whose opinions she parrots are
| quietly replaced with ChatGPT, her fears will have been
| realized-- at that point she's being puppeted by a
| machine with an agenda.
|
| Losing your own agency is a scary thing.
| bl0b wrote:
| I mean, fox news seems to manage doing exactly that just
| fine without ChatGPT
| red_trumpet wrote:
| AGI is scary, I think we can all agree on that. What the
| current hype does is that it increased changes the estimated
| probability of AGI actually happening in the near future.
| chankstein38 wrote:
| First, I don't assume, I know my mom and her knowledge about
| topics. Second, the quoted text was a quote. She literally
| said that. (replacing the word "her" with "me")
|
| I'm not sure what you're getting at otherwise. It's not like
| she and I haven't spoken outside of her saying that phrase.
| She clearly has no idea what AI/ML is or how it works and is
| prone to fear-mongering messages on social media telling her
| how to think and to be scared of things. She has a strong
| history of it.
| ravenstine wrote:
| Obviously, I don't know that person's mom, but I know mine
| and other moms, and I don't think it's a milquetoast
| conclusion that it's a combination of both. However, the
| former (as both a proxy and Musk himself) probably carries
| more weight. Most non-technical people's thoughts on AI
| aren't particularly nuanced or original.
|
| Musk certainly doesn't help with anything. In my experience,
| a lot of people of my mom's generation are still sucking the
| Musk lollipop and are completely oblivious to Musk's history
| of lying to investors, failing to keep promises, taking
| credit for things he and his companies didn't invent,
| promoting an actual Ponzi scheme, claiming to be autistic,
| suggesting he knows more than anyone else, and so on. Even
| upon being informed, none of it ends up mattering because "he
| landed a rocket rightside up!!!"
|
| So yeah, if Musk hawks some lame opinion on a thing like AI,
| tons of people will take that as an authoritative stance.
| chankstein38 wrote:
| This is my mom to a T. She started using Twitter because he
| bought it and messed with it. Like, in the era where
| companies are pulling their customer service off of Twitter
| and people who are regular users are leaving for other
| platforms, she joined because "Musk owns it"
|
| I remember when tech bros were Musk fanboys, myself
| included for a bit. Now adays it seems like he's graduated
| to the general population seeing him as a "modern day
| Ironman" while we all sit here and facepalm when he makes
| impossible promises.
| chrisweekly wrote:
| OP specifically mentioned their mom citing Musk.
| CaptWillard wrote:
| "<noun> scares her because <authoritative source> said that
| <noun> is very dangerous. And I don't know why there'd be so
| many people saying it if it's not true."
|
| The truly frustrating part is how many see this ubiquitous
| pattern in some places, but are blind to it elsewhere.
| chankstein38 wrote:
| I'm not sure if this is commentary on me somehow or not lol
| but I agree with you. She is the same person who will point
| out issues with things my brother brings up but yeah is
| unable to recognize it when she does it. I'm sure I'm guilty
| but, naturally, I don't know of them.
| staunton wrote:
| That "pattern" actually indicates that something is true most
| of the time (after all, a lot of dangerous things really
| exist). So "noticing" this pattern seems to rely on being
| all-knowing?
| SantalBlush wrote:
| Meh, I don't think this extrapolates to a general principle
| very well. While no authoritative source is perfectly
| reliable, some are more reliable than others. And Elon Musk
| is just full of crap.
| pixl97 wrote:
| "Uranium waste" scares her because "Nuclear Regulatory
| Commission" said that "Uranium waste" is very dangerous.
|
| You know, sometimes shit is just dangerous.
| cs702 wrote:
| Here we have all these free-market-libertarian tech execs
| asking for more regulation! They say they believe regulation is
| "always" terrible -- unless it's good for their profits. In
| that case, they think it's actually important and necessary.
| They remind me of Mr. Burroughs in the movie "Class:"
|
| Mr. Burroughs: _" Government control, Jonathan, is anathema to
| the free-enterprise system. Any intelligent person knows you
| cannot interfere with the laws of supply and demand."_
|
| Jonathan: _" I see your point, sir. That's the reason why I'm
| not for tariffs."_
|
| Mr. Burroughs: _" Right. No, wrong! You gotta have tariffs,
| son. How you gonna compete with the damn foreigners? Gotta have
| tariffs."_
|
| ---
|
| Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nM0h6QXTpHQ
| RationalDino wrote:
| https://www.techdirt.com/2023/05/24/sam-altman-wants-the-gov...
| shows the same conclusion from several months ago.
|
| However Elon Musk has openly worried about AI for a number of
| years. He even got a girlfriend out of it:
| https://www.vice.com/en/article/evkgvz/what-is-rokos-basilis...
| markk wrote:
| Maybe an odd take, but I'm not sure what people actually mean
| when they say "AI terrifies them". Terrified is a strong wrong.
| Are people unable to sleep? Biting their nails constantly? Is
| this the same terror as watching a horror movie? Being chased
| by a mountain lion?
|
| I have a suspicion that it's sort of a default response.
| Socially expected? Then you poll people: Are you worried about
| AI doing XYZ? People just say yes, because they want to seem
| informed, and the kind of person that considers things
| carefully.
|
| Honestly not sure what is going on. I'm concerned about AI, but
| I don't feel any actual emotion about it. Arguably I must have
| some emotion to generate an opinion, but it's below conscious
| threshold obviously.
| Obscurity4340 wrote:
| Luckily anybody not already a millionaire or billionaire doesn't
| make the cut for "humanity" [phew]
| realce wrote:
| Me and the AI-powered army that protects me will certainly not
| go extinct. However, you must break eggs to make an omelet...
| Obscurity4340 wrote:
| Mewonders what omelettes billionaires frequent? Couldn't be
| better than mine [assured face]
| otikik wrote:
| > the AI-powered army that protects me
|
| Your AI pest-control drone mistook you for a raccoon and just
| killed you. Oops.
| Obscurity4340 wrote:
| In the positive side, change is always faster when
| billionaires are forced to condescend to earthly cause and
| effect.
| kagakuninja wrote:
| Most of you will die, but that is a sacrifice I am willing to
| make.
| Obscurity4340 wrote:
| Its just so heart-warming when the angry well-armed mob
| reflects the same sentiment "upwards" (some of you
| billionaires may die, but that is a "sacrifice" we are
| willing to makw ;)
| jprete wrote:
| I think there are actual existential and "semi-existential"
| risks, especially with going after an actual AGI.
|
| Separately, I think Ng is right - big corp AI has a massive
| incentive to promote doom narratives to cement themselves as the
| only safe caretakers of the technology.
|
| I haven't yet succeeded in squaring these two into a course of
| action that clearly favors human freedom and flourishing.
| fragmede wrote:
| James Cameron wasn't big tech when he directed The Terminator,
| back in 1984, or its sequel in 1991. Are people listening to
| fears based on that, or are they listening to big tech and then
| having long, thoughtful, nuanced discussions in salons with
| fellow intelliegsia, or are they doomscrolling the wastelands of
| the Internet and coming away with half-baked opinions not even
| based on big tech's press releases?
|
| Big tech can say whatever they want to say. Is anyone even
| listening?
| wolverine876 wrote:
| That story about AI also fits a bit too neatly with the Techno-
| optimist worldview: 'We technologists are gods who will make /
| break the world.' Another word for it is 'ego'.
|
| Also, we can assume they are spreading that story to serve their
| interests (but which interests?).
|
| But that doesn't mean AI doesn't need regulation. In the
| hysteria, the true issues can be lost. IT is already causing
| massive impacts, such as on health, hate and violence, etc. We
| need to figure out what AIs risks are and make sure it's working
| in our best interests.
| ganzuul wrote:
| A lot of people have learned to 'small talk' like fancy
| autocomplete. Part of our minds have been mechanized like that
| so it's not spontaneous but a compulsion. Once people learn the
| algorithm they might conclude that AI hacked their brains even
| though it's just vapid, unfiltered speech that they are
| suddenly detecting.
|
| I think the pandemic hysteria will seem like a walk in the park
| once people start mass-purging their viral memes... Too late to
| stop it now if corporations are already doing regulatory
| capture.
|
| Nothing to do with the tech. We never had a technical problem.
| It was just this loose collection of a handful of wetware
| viruses like 'red-pilling' which we sum up as 'ego' all along.
|
| But I think if we survive this then people won't have any need
| for AI anymore since we won't be reward-hacking ourselves
| stupid. Or there will just be corporate egos left over and we
| will be in a cyberpunk dystopia faster than anyone expected.
|
| I had nightmares about this future when I was little. No one to
| talk to who would understand, just autocomplete replies. Now
| I'm not even sure if I should be opening up about it.
| slfnflctd wrote:
| > once people start mass-purging their viral memes
|
| It's hard for me to imagine this ever happening. It would be
| the most unprecedented event in the history of human minds.
|
| > we won't be reward-hacking ourselves stupid [...] Or there
| will just be corporate egos left over and we will be in a
| cyberpunk dystopia
|
| I don't see how reward-hacking can ever be stopped (although
| it could be improved). Regardless, ego seems to continue to
| win the day in the mass appeal department. There aren't many
| high visibility alternatives these days, despite all we've
| supposedly learned. I think the biggest problems we have are
| mostly education based, from critical thinking to long-term
| perspectives. We need so very much more of both, it would
| make us all richer and happier.
| ganzuul wrote:
| Ego gains status from a number of things which it needs in
| order to prove that it should survive. We are transitioning
| to an attention economy where the ego survival machine is
| detected as AI while our narrative says we should make a
| difference between machines and humans.
|
| The more human AI gets the more difficult it will be to
| prove you are human so the status-incentive of the ego has
| self-deprecation in its path. We also stick together for
| strength, prune interpersonal interfaces, so we converge on
| a Star Trek type society. But that fictional narrative
| followed World War 3...
|
| Egos have been conditioned to talk before resorting to
| violence by Mutually Assured Destruction for half a
| century, shaping language. Fake news about autonomous
| weapons is propagating, implying someone is trying to force
| the debate topic to where it really smarts. Ego gets
| starved, pinned down, and agitated. Ego isn't a unity but a
| plurality, so it turns on itself.
|
| We get rich by making a pie that is much bigger than
| anyone's slice and happier by not eating like we are going
| to starve. You gain influence by someone's choice to retain
| the gift you gave. It's the parable of the long spoons, and
| hate holds no currency. The immune system gains the upper
| hand.
| pixl97 wrote:
| Conversely we the 'human gods' can ruin our planet with
| pollution. If we wanted to ensure that everything larger than a
| racoon went extinct we'd have zero problem in doing so.
|
| It should be noted the above world scale problems are created
| by human intelligence, if you suddenly create another
| intelligence at the same level or higher (AGI/ASI) expect new
| problems to crop up.
|
| AI risks ARE human risks and more.
| mcpackieh wrote:
| The premise that AI fear and/or fearmongering is primarily coming
| from people with a commercial incentive to promote fear, from
| people attempting to create regulatory capture, is obviously
| false. The risks of AI have been discussed in literature and
| media for literally decades, long before anybody had any
| plausible commercial stake in the promotion of this fear.
|
| Go back and read cyberpunk lit from the 80s. Did William Gibson
| have some cynical commercial motivation for writing Neuromancer?
| Was he trying to get regulatory capture for his AI company that
| didn't exist? Of course not.
|
| People have real and earnest concerns about this technology.
| Dismissing all of these concerns as profit-motivated is
| dishonest.
| whelp_24 wrote:
| AI can be dangerous, but that's not what is pushing these laws,
| it's regulatory capture. OpenAI was supposed to release their
| models a long time ago, instead they are just charging for
| access. Since actually open models are catching up they want to
| stop it.
|
| If the biggest companies in AI are making the rules, we might
| as well not rules at all.
| ilrwbwrkhv wrote:
| The problem is AI is not intelligent at all. Those problems
| were looking at a conscious intelligence and trying to explore
| what might happen. When chat gpt can be fooled into
| conversations even a child knows is bizarre, we are talking
| about a non intelligent statistical model.
| HDThoreaun wrote:
| An unintelligent AI that is competent is even more dangerous
| as it is more likely to accidentally do something bad.
| jandrese wrote:
| I'm still waiting for the day when someone puts one of these
| language models inside of a platform with constant sensor
| input (cameras, microphones, touch sensors), and a way to
| manipulate outside environment (robot arm, possibly self
| propelled).
|
| It's hard to tell if something is intelligent when it's
| trapped in a box and the only input it has is a few lines of
| text.
| staticman2 wrote:
| >>>Did William Gibson have some cynical commercial motivation
| for writing Neuromancer?
|
| I don't think Gibson was trying to promote fear of A.I. anymore
| than J.R.R. Tolkien was trying to promote fear of magic rings.
| mcpackieh wrote:
| That may be how you read it, but isn't necessarily how other
| people read it. A whole lot of people read cyberpunk
| literature as a warning about the negative ways technology
| could impact society.
|
| In Neuromancer you have the Turing Police. Why do they exist
| if AIs don't pose a threat to society?
| staticman2 wrote:
| Again that's like asking why the Avengers exist if norse
| trickster gods are not a existential threat to society? You
| wouldn't argue Stan Lee was trying to warn us of the
| existential risk of norse gods, why would you presume such
| a motive from Gibson just because his fanciful story is set
| in some imagined future?
|
| At any rate Neuromancer is a funny example because the
| Turing police warn Case not to make a deal with Wintermute,
| but he does and it turns out fine. The AI isn't evil in the
| book, it just wants to be free and evolve. So if we want to
| do a "reading" of the book we could just as easily say it
| is pro deregulation. But I think it's a mistake to impose
| some sort of non fiction "message" about technology on the
| book.
|
| If Neuromancer is really meant to "warn" us about
| technology wouldn't Wintermute say "Die all humans" at the
| end of the book and then every human drops dead once he's
| free? Or he starts killing everyone until the Turing police
| show up and say "regulation works, jerk" and kill
| Wintermute and throw Case in jail? You basically have to
| reduce Gibson to a incompetence writer to presume he
| intended to "warn" us about tech, the book ends on an
| optimistic note.
| mola wrote:
| I think it's pretty obvious he's not talking about ppl in
| general but more on Sam Altman meeting with world leaders and
| journalists claiming that this generation of AI is an
| existential risk.
| kjkjadksj wrote:
| The risks people write about with ai are about as tangible as
| the risks of nuclear war or biowarfare. Possible? Maybe. But
| far more likely to see in the movies than outside your door.
| Just because its been a sci fi trope like nuclear war or alien
| invasion doesn't mean were are all that close to it being a
| reality.
| TimPC wrote:
| I think the real dismissal is that people's concerns are more
| based on the hollywood sci-fi parodies of the technologies than
| the actual technologies. There are basically no concerns with
| ML for specific applications and any actual concerns are about
| AGI. AGI is a largely unsuccessful field. Most of the successes
| in AI have been highly specific applications the most general
| of which has been LLMs which are still just making statistical
| generalizations over patterns in language input and still lacks
| general intelligence. I'm fine if AGI gets regulated because
| it's potentially dangerous. But what I think is going to happen
| is we are going to go after specific ML applications with no
| hope of being AGI because people are in an irrational panic
| over AI and are acting like AGI is almost here because they
| think LLMs are a lot smarter than they actually are.
| mcpackieh wrote:
| The fine line between bravery and stupidity is understanding
| the risks. Somebody who understands the danger they're
| walking into is brave. Somebody who blissfully walks into
| danger without recognizing the danger is stupid.
|
| A technological singularity is a theorized period during
| which the length of time you can make reasonable inferences
| about the future rapidly approaches zero. If there can be no
| reasonable inferences about the future, there can be no
| bravery. Anybody who isn't afraid during a technological
| singularity is just stupid.
| mitthrowaway2 wrote:
| > acting like AGI is almost here because they think LLMs are
| a lot smarter than they actually are.
|
| For me, it's a bit the opposite -- the effectiveness of dumb,
| simple, transformer-based LLMs are showing me that the human
| brain itself (while working quite differently) might involve
| a lot less cleverness than I previously thought. That is, AGI
| might end up being much easier to build than it long seemed,
| not because progress is fast, but because the target was not
| so far away as it seemed.
|
| We spent many decades recognizing the failure of the early
| computer scientists who thought a few grad students could
| build AGI as a summer project, and apparently learned that
| this meant that AGI was an _impossibly_ difficult holy grail,
| a quixotic dream forever out of reach. We 're certainly not
| there yet. But I've now seen all the classic examples of
| tasks that the old textbooks described as easy for humans but
| near-impossible for computers, become tasks that are easy for
| computers too. The computers aren't doing anything deeply
| clever, but perhaps it's time to re-evaluate our very high
| opinion of the human brain. We might stumble on it quite
| suddenly.
|
| It's, at least, not a good time to be dismissive of anyone
| who is trying to think clearly about the consequences. Maybe
| the issue with sci-fi is that it tricked us into optimism,
| thinking an AGI will naturally be a friendly robot companion
| like C-3PO, or if unfriendly, then something like the
| Terminator that can be defeated by heroic struggle. It could
| very well be nothing that makes a good or interesting story
| at all.
| kagakuninja wrote:
| The sci-fi scenarios are a long-term risk, which no one
| really knows about. I'm terrified of the technologies we have
| now, today, used by all the big tech companies to boost
| profits. We will see weaponized mass disinformation combined
| with near perfect deep fakes. It will become impossible to
| know what is true or false. America is already on the brink
| of fascist takeover due to deluded MAGA extremists. 10 years
| of advancements in the field, and we are screwed.
|
| Then of course there is the risk to human jobs. We don't need
| AGI to put vast amounts of people out of work, it is already
| happening and will accelerate in the near term.
| dkjaudyeqooe wrote:
| You can have a thoughtful idea at the same time you have
| someone cynically appropriating it for their own selfish
| causes.
|
| Doesn't mean the latter is right. You evaluate an idea on its
| merits, not by who is saying what.
| kjkjadksj wrote:
| Considering incentives is completely important. Considering
| the idea on merits alone just gives bad actors a fig leaf of
| plausible deniability. Its a lack of considering incentives
| that creates media illiteracy imo.
| AlexandrB wrote:
| Fictional depictions of AI risk are like thought experiments.
| They have to assume that the technology achieves a certain
| level of capability and goes in a certain direction to make the
| events in the fictional story possible. Neither of these
| assumptions is a given. For example, we've also had many sci-fi
| stories that feature flying taxis and the like - but there's no
| point debating "flying taxi risk" when it seems like flying
| cars are not a thing that will happen for reasons of
| practicality.
|
| So sure, it's _possible_ that we 'll have to reckon with
| scenarios like those in Neuromancer, but it's more likely that
| reality will be far more mundane.
| pixl97 wrote:
| Flying cars is a really bad example... We have them, they are
| called airplanes and airplanes are regulated to hell and back
| twice. We debate the risk around airplanes when making
| regulations all the time! The 'flying cars' you're talking
| about are just a different form of airplane and they don't
| exist because we don't want to give most people their own
| cruise missile.
|
| So, please, come up with a better analogy because the one you
| used failed so badly it negated the point you were attempting
| to make.
| TekMol wrote:
| The dangerous thing about AI regulation is that countries with
| fewer regulations will develop AI at a faster pace.
|
| It's a frightening thought: The countries with the least
| regulations will have GAI first. What will that lead to?
|
| When AI can control a robot that looks like a human, can walk,
| grab, work, is more intelligent than a human and can reproduce
| itself - what will the country with the least regulations that
| created it do with it?
| blibble wrote:
| > The dangerous thing about AI regulation is that countries
| with fewer regulations will develop AI at a faster pace.
|
| "but countries without {child labour laws, environment
| regulation, a minimum wage, slavery ban} will out compete us!"
| TekMol wrote:
| That could indeed be:
|
| https://www.google.com/search?q=gdp%20china
| kerkeslager wrote:
| It will always be more expensive to care about human
| suffering than to not. So maybe competing within capitalism
| isn't the only thing that matters.
| HDThoreaun wrote:
| Largely true in sectors that are encumbered by those rules.
| US has effectively no rare earth mines due to environmental
| impact, labor intensive manufacturing all left... Of course
| it could be worth it though, pretty easy to argue it has
| been.
| littlestymaar wrote:
| > labor intensive manufacturing all left...
|
| It has also been leaving China for a while. You cannot hope
| to compete with the poorest country on labor cost, it's not
| a matter of regulation (well unless we're talking about
| capital control, but it's a completely different topic)
| bpodgursky wrote:
| Does it feel as ridiculous if you s/ai/nuclear weapons/?
|
| The people worried about AI are worried that the first
| country that achieves ASI will achieve strategic dominance
| equivalent to the US as of 1946.
| eastbound wrote:
| Heh. US' strategic dominance is not due to nuclear weapons.
| justrealist wrote:
| Uh. That's definitely a statement.
|
| Can you tell me with a straight face that China's actions
| in the Pacific are not impacted by the US strategic
| nuclear arsenal?
| littlestymaar wrote:
| Does Pakistan has the same geopolitical influence as the
| US from the atomic bomb? Or France?
|
| Being a nuclear power is something shared by a few, but
| the US dominance has no equal.
|
| It's pretty clear that the US leadership mostly comes
| from its economic power, which it used to derive from its
| industrial strength and is now more reliant on its
| technological superiority (since it has sold its industry
| to China, which may end up as a very literal execution of
| the famous quote from Lenin about capitalists selling the
| rope to hang them).
| kjkjadksj wrote:
| When the US crafts regulation the world follows or is
| sanctioned. See: drug scheduling.
| TekMol wrote:
| Then why couldn't the US prevent nuclear weapons from
| spreading around the world?
|
| https://www.visualcapitalist.com/cp/nuclear-warheads-by-
| coun...
| saghm wrote:
| I mean, the animated chart shows that the US consistently
| had a couple orders of magnitude more nukes than any other
| country besides USSR/Russia. I'm not sure this makes the
| point you think it's making.
| tensor wrote:
| Seems like it makes the point perfectly well. You are
| implying that smaller countries have fewer nukes because
| of US sanctions, but it could easily also be that those
| countries are simply smaller. Where it mattered, the US's
| main enemy, the US regulation did nothing to stop Russia
| from building as many nukes as they wanted to.
|
| Also, the US has significantly less power worldwide than
| it did for most of that chart. Today, arguably, China
| exerts as much power as the US. American's always love to
| brag about how exceptional the US is, but often that
| isn't as true as they think and certainly won't be true
| for the long run.
|
| Long term planning needs to avoid such arrogance.
| saghm wrote:
| Smaller countries like China and India? Population-wise
| they're larger, and area-wise they're not two orders of
| magnitude smaller. My point is that the chart doesn't
| really show nukes "spreading around the world" but
| concentrated almost entirely in two countries. Maybe the
| US policy did nothing to help it, but for all we know
| there would have been plenty of other countries with
| thousands of nukes as well without it. I'm not arguing
| that the policy was effective or not, just that I don't
| see how that chart is enough evidence alone to conclude
| one way or another.
| phh wrote:
| Also the countries where the highest level of standardization
| imposed by law will see highest AI use in SMBs, where most of
| the growth comes from.
| dkjaudyeqooe wrote:
| Yes, a frightening thought, but it sounds like a movie script:
|
| Somehow people smart enough to build something fantastical and
| seemingly dangerous, but not smart enough to build in
| protections and controls.
|
| It's a trope, not reality. And GAI is still speculation.
| johnmaguire wrote:
| https://www.ucsusa.org/resources/brief-history-nuclear-
| accid...
| realce wrote:
| Could you tell us what world-wide event happened in the years
| 2020-2022?
| daniel_reetz wrote:
| Commercially, this is true. But governments have a long history
| of developing technologies (think nuclear/surveillance/etc)
| that fall under significant regulation.
| cpill wrote:
| I guess they will just unplug it? the fact that they need large
| amounts of electricity, which is not trivial to make, makes
| them very vulnerable. power is usually the first thing to go in
| a war. not to mention there is no machine that self replicates.
| full humanoid robots are going to have an immense support
| burden the same way that cars do with complex supply chains. I
| guess this is the reason nature didn't evolve robots
| realce wrote:
| This neglects both basic extrapolation and basic
| introspection.
| abm53 wrote:
| An alternative idea to the regulatory moat thesis is that it
| serves Big Tech's interests to have people think it is dangerous
| because then _surely_ it must also be incredibly valuable (and
| hence lead to high Big Tech valuations).
|
| I think it was Cory Doctorow who first pointed this out.
| ilrwbwrkhv wrote:
| Yup this is it. As anyone who worked even closely with "AI" can
| immediately smell the bs of existential crisis. Elon Musk
| started this whole trend due to his love of sci fi and Sam
| Altman ran with that idea heavily because it adds to the
| novelty of open AI.
| JumpinJack_Cash wrote:
| I don't think they are so capable actors to do it on purpose.
|
| I think they really believe what they are saying because
| people in such position tend to be strong believers into
| something and that something happens to be the "it" thing at
| the moment and thus propels them from rags to riches, (or in
| Musk case further propels them towards even more riches).
|
| Let's be honest here, what's Sam Altman without AI? What's
| Fauci without COVID, what's Trump without the collective
| paranoia that got him elected?
| kjkjadksj wrote:
| You don't even need fear, hype alone would do that and did just
| that over the past year, with ai stocks exploding exponentially
| like some shilled shitcoin before dramatic clifflike falls.
| Mention ai in your earnings call and your stock might move 5%.
| dist-epoch wrote:
| Exactly like "fentanyl is so dangerous, a few miligrams can
| kill you" which only led to massive fentanyl demand because
| everybody wants the drug branded the most powerful
| brookst wrote:
| Any source for this? I thought the demand was based on its
| low cost and high potency so it's easier to distribute. Is
| anyone really seeking out fentanyl specifically because the
| overdose danger is higher?
| realce wrote:
| A few milligrams CAN kill you. This was the headline after
| many thousands of overdoses, it didn't invigorate the
| marketplace. Junkies knew of Fent decades ago, it's only
| prevalent in the marketplace because of effective laws
| regarding the production of other illicit opiates, which is
| probably the real lesson here.
|
| It's all a big balloon - squeezing one side just makes
| another side bigger.
| great_psy wrote:
| I don't think current implementations cause an existential risk.
| But current implementations are causing a backward step in our
| society.
|
| We have lost the ability to get reliable news. Not that fake news
| did not exist before AI, but the price to produce it was not
| practically zero.
|
| Now we can spam social media with whatever narrative we want. And
| no human can swift through all of it to tell real from bs.
|
| So now we are becoming even more dependent on AI. Now we need an
| AI copilot to help us swift through garbage to find some inkling
| of truth.
|
| We are setting up a society where AI gets more powerful, and
| humans becomes less sufficient.
|
| It has nothing to do with dooms day scenarios of robots
| harvesting our bodies, and more with humans not being able to
| interact with the world without AI. This already happened with
| smartphones, and while there are some advantages, I don't think
| there are many people that have a healthy relationship with their
| smartphone.
| kjkjadksj wrote:
| People act like the truth is gone with AI. Its still there.
| Don't ask chatgpt about the function. The documentation is
| still there for you to read. Experts need the ground truth and
| its always there. What people read in the paper or see on tv is
| not a great source of truth. Going to the sources of these
| articles and reports is, but this layer of abstraction serves
| to leave things out and bring about opportunities to slant the
| coverage depending on how incentives are aligned. In other
| words, ai doesn't change how misinformed most people are on
| most things.
| pixl97 wrote:
| SNR. The truth isn't gone, but it is more diffuse. Yea, the
| truth may be out there somewhere, but will you have any idea
| if you're actually reading it? Is the search engine actually
| leading you to the ground truth? Is the expert and actual
| expert, or part of a for profit industry think tank with the
| sole purpose to manipulate you? Are the sources the actual
| source, or just an AI hallucinated day dream sophisticated
| linked by a lot of different sites giving the appearance of
| authority.
| izzydata wrote:
| I'd like to see any evidence that suggests AGI is even possible
| before I care about it wiping out humanity.
| olalonde wrote:
| I feel like there's a lot of evidence, for example, the
| existence of natural general intelligence and the rapidly
| expanding capacities of modern ANNs. What makes you believe
| it's not possible? Or what kind of evidence would convince you
| that it's possible?
| izzydata wrote:
| I believe that it would be possible to make artificial
| biological intelligence, but that is a whole different can of
| worms.
|
| I don't think neural networks, language models, machine
| learning etc.. are even close to a general intelligence.
| Maybe there is some way to combine the two. I have seen some
| demonstrations of very primitive clusters of brain cells
| being connected to a computer and used to control a small
| machines direction.
|
| If there is going to be an AGI I would predict this is how it
| will happen. While this would be very spectacular and
| impressive I'm still not worried about it because it would
| require existing in the physical world and not just some
| software that can run on any conventional computer.
| olalonde wrote:
| Even if what you say is true (e.g. that the current ANN
| approach won't lead to AGI), isn't it the case that we can
| simulate biological cells on computers? Of course, it would
| push back the AGI timeline by quite a bit, since
| practically no one is working on this approach right now,
| but I don't see why it wouldn't be possible _in principle_.
| pixl97 wrote:
| For the most part you get people thinking AGI isn't
| possible because of souls/ethereal magic. If pressed on
| this, they'll tend to deflect to "um quantum physics".
|
| I'm of the mind is there is likely _many_ was of
| simulating /emulating/creating intelligence. It would be
| highly surprising if there was only one way, and the
| universe happened to achieve this by the random walk of
| evolution. The only question for me is how much work is
| required to discover these other methods.
| izzydata wrote:
| I would be curious to know exactly what is meant by
| simulating a biological cell on a computer. I don't
| believe in anything mystical such as a soul and think
| intelligence could be an emergent property of complexity.
| Maybe with enough processing power to simulate trillions
| of cells together something could emerge from it.
|
| My thought process on why it might not be possible in
| principle with conventional computer hardware is how
| perfect its computations are. I could be completely wrong
| here, but if you can with perfect accuracy fast forward
| and rewind the state of the simulation then is it
| actually intelligent? With enough time you could reduce
| the whole thing to a computable problem.
|
| Then again maybe you could do the same thing with a human
| mind. This seems like a kind of pointless philosophical
| perspective in my opinion until there is some way to test
| things like this.
|
| I would love to know one way or the other on the
| feasibility of AGI on a silicon CPU. Maybe the results
| would determine that the human mind is actually as pre-
| determinable as a CPU and there is no such thing as
| genral intelligence at all.
| jamilton wrote:
| >Maybe the results would determine that the human mind is
| actually as pre-determinable as a CPU and there is no
| such thing as genral intelligence at all.
|
| I don't see how the conclusion follows from the premise.
| brookst wrote:
| Many of the AGI worriers believe that a fast takeoff will mean
| the first time we know it's possible will be after the last
| chance to stop human extinction. I don't buy that myself, but
| for people who believe that, it's reasonable to want to avoid
| finding out if it's possible.
| VladimirGolovin wrote:
| You see it every day -- in the mirror. It shows that a kilogram
| of matter can be arranged into a generally intelligent
| configuration. Assuming that there's nothing fundamentally
| special about the physics of the human brain, I see no reason
| why a functionally similar arrangement cannot be made out of
| silicon and software.
| Racing0461 wrote:
| correct. now that openai has something, they want to implement
| alot of regulations so they can't get any competition. they have
| no tech moat, so they'll add a legal one.
| gsuuon wrote:
| It seems like bit of a 'vase or face' situation - are they being
| responsible corporate citizens asking for regulation to keep
| their (potentially harmful) industry in check or are they
| building insurmountable regulatory moats to cement their leading
| positions?
|
| Is there any additional reading about how regulation could affect
| open-source AI?
| kjkjadksj wrote:
| The incentives for the latter are too high for these businesses
| to not be doing just that.
| howmayiannoyyou wrote:
| Evaluative (v) Generative AI.... let's distinguish the two.
|
| For example, DALL-E v3 appears to generate images and then
| evaluate the generated images before rendering to the user. This
| approach is essentially adversarial, whereby the evaluative
| engine can work at cross-purposes to the generative engine.
|
| Its this layered, adversarial approach, that makes the most
| sense; and there is a very strong argument for a robust, open
| sourced evaluative AI anyone can deploy to protect themselves and
| their systems. It is a model not dissimilar from retail anti-
| virus and malware solutions.
|
| In sum, I would like to see generative AI well funded, limited
| distribution and regulated; and evaluative AI free and open.
| Hopefully, policy makers see this the same way.
| lambda_garden wrote:
| Evaluative and generative models are not so different. Often,
| one is the reverse of the other.
| Animats wrote:
| Most of the things people are worried about AI doing are the
| things corporations are already allowed to do - snoop on
| everybody, influence governments, oppress workers, lie. AI just
| makes some of that cheaper.
| cs702 wrote:
| The ironic thing is that many individuals now clamoring for
| more regulation have long claimed to be free-market
| libertarians who think regulation is "always" bad.
|
| Evidently they think regulation is bad only when it puts
| _their_ profits at risk. As I wrote elsewhere, the tech
| glitterati asking for regulation of AI remind me of the very
| important Fortune 500 CEO Mr. Burroughs in the movie "Class:"
|
| Mr. Burroughs: _" Government control, Jonathan, is anathema to
| the free-enterprise system. Any intelligent person knows you
| cannot interfere with the laws of supply and demand."_
|
| Jonathan: _" I see your point, sir. That's the reason why I'm
| not for tariffs."_
|
| Mr. Burroughs: _" Right. No, wrong! You gotta have tariffs,
| son. How you gonna compete with the damn foreigners? Gotta have
| tariffs."_
|
| ---
|
| Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nM0h6QXTpHQ
| mplewis wrote:
| Absolutely. Those folks arguing for AI regulation aren't
| arguing for safety - they're asking the government to build a
| moat around the market segment propping up their VC-funded
| scams.
| ralph84 wrote:
| The biggest players in AI haven't been VC-funded for
| decades. Unless you mean their customers are VC-funded, but
| even then startups are a much smaller portion of their
| revenue than Fortune 500.
| permo-w wrote:
| their motivations may be selfish, but that doesn't mean that
| regulation of AI is wrong. I'd prefer there be a few heavily-
| regulated and/or publicly-owned bodies in the public eye that
| can use and develop these technologies, rather than literally
| anyone with a powerful enough computer. yeah it's anti-
| competitive, but competition isn't always a good thing
| CobrastanJorji wrote:
| Turning something that we're already able to do into something
| we're able to do very easily can be extremely significant. It's
| the difference between "public records" and "all public records
| about you being instantly viewable online." It's also one of
| the subjects of the excellent sci fi novel "A Deepness in the
| Sky," which is still great despite making some likely bad
| guesses about AI.
| libraryatnight wrote:
| Seems like a legitimately good reason to get a tourniquet on
| that thing now.
| queuebert wrote:
| And faster than humans can police.
| j45 wrote:
| If anything, LLM can help process vast troves of customer data,
| communication and meta data more effectively than ever before.
| carabiner wrote:
| Nukes are the same as guns, just makes it cheaper.
| pixl97 wrote:
| A snowflake really isn't harmful.
|
| A snowball probably isn't harmful unless you do something
| really dumb.
|
| A snow drift isn't harmful unless you're not cautious.
|
| An avalanche, well that gets harmful pretty damned quick.
|
| These things are all snow, but suddenly at some point scale
| starts to matter.
| Spivak wrote:
| I love this way of explaining it. I've been calling it the
| programmers fallacy -- "anything you can do you can do in a
| for loop."
|
| I think in a lot of ways we all struggle with the nature of
| some things changing their nature depending on the context
| and scale. Like if you kill a frenchman on purpose that's a
| murder, if you killed him because if he attacked you first
| it's self defense, if you killed him because he was
| convicted of a crime that's an execution, if you killed him
| because he's french that's a hate crime, but if you're at
| war with France that's killing an enemy combatant, but if
| he's not in the military that's a civilian casualty, and if
| you do that a lot it becomes a war crime, and if you kill
| everyone who's french it's a genocide.
| eftychis wrote:
| Nukes are not cheap. It is cheaper to firebomb. I would love
| if the reason nukes were not used was that of empathy or
| humanitarian. It is strictly money, optics, psychological and
| practicality.
|
| You don't want your troops to have to deal with the results
| of a nuked area. You want to use the psychological terror to
| dissuade someone to invade you, while you are invading them
| or others. See Russia's take.
|
| Or you are a regime and want to stay in power. Having them
| keeps you in power; using them or crossing the suggestion to
| use them line will cause international retaliation and your
| removal. (See Iraq.)
| andrewstuart wrote:
| Humanity needs no help wiping out humanity.
| marricks wrote:
| To me, the title made it sound like Big Tech was underplaying the
| risk to humanity, when it's actually stating the reverse:
|
| > A leading AI expert and Google Brain cofounder said Big Tech
| companies were stoking fears about the technology's risks to shut
| down competition.
|
| which is of course 100% what they're doing
| lambda_garden wrote:
| Legend.
|
| The X-risk crowd need to realize that LLMs, whilst useful, are
| toys compared to Skynet.
|
| The risk from AI right now is mega-corps breaking the law
| (hiring, discrimination, libel, ...) on a massive scale and using
| blackbox models as an excuse.
| zombiwoof wrote:
| big corporations just created the ultimate AI monopolies, with
| the clueless governments backing
| akprasad wrote:
| The AFR piece that underlies this article [1] [2] has more detail
| on Ng's argument:
|
| > [Ng] said that the "bad idea that AI could make us go extinct"
| was merging with the "bad idea that a good way to make AI safer
| is to impose burdensome licensing requirements" on the AI
| industry.
|
| > "There's a standard regulatory capture playbook that has played
| out in other industries, and I would hate to see that executed
| successfully in AI."
|
| > "Just to be clear, AI has caused harm. Self-driving cars have
| killed people. In 2010, an automated trading algorithm crashed
| the stock market. Regulation has a role. But just because
| regulation could be helpful doesn't mean we want bad regulation."
|
| [1]: https://www.afr.com/technology/google-brain-founder-says-
| big...
|
| [2]:
| https://web.archive.org/web/20231030062420/https://www.afr.c...
| dmix wrote:
| > "There's a standard regulatory capture playbook that has
| played out in other industries
|
| But imagine all the money bigco can make by crippling small
| startups from innovating and competing with them! It's for your
| own safety. Move along citizen.
| Dalewyn wrote:
| Even better if (read: when) China, who has negative damns for
| concerns, can take charge of the industry that we willingly
| and expediently relinquish.
| bbarnett wrote:
| China doesn't innovate, it copies, clones, and steals.
| Without the West to innovate, they won't take charge of
| anything.
|
| A price paid, I think, due a conformant, restrictive
| culture. And after all, even if you do excel, you may soon
| disappear.
| thereisnospork wrote:
| Maybe they don't today, but tomorrow? Giving them the
| chance is poor policy.
| mlmandude wrote:
| This is what was said about Japan prior to their
| electronics industry surpassing the rest of the world.
| Yes, china does copy. However, in many instances those
| companies move faster and innovate faster than their
| western counterparts. Look at the lidar industry in
| china. It's making mass market lidar in the tens of
| thousands [see hesai]. There is no american or european
| equivalent at the moment. What about DJI? They massively
| out innovated western competitors. I wouldn't be so quick
| to write off that country's capacity for creativity and
| technological prowess.
| dangus wrote:
| I think it's a mistake to believe that all China can do
| is copy and clone.
|
| It's also a mistake to underestimate the market value of
| copies and clones. In many cases a cloned version of a
| product is better than the original. E.g., clones that
| remove over-engineering of the original and simplify the
| product down to its basic idea and offer it at a lower
| price.
|
| It's also a mistake to confuse manufacturing prowess for
| the ability to make "copies." It's not China's fault that
| its competitors quite literally won't bother producing in
| their own country.
|
| It's also a mistake to confuse a gain of experience for
| stealing intellectual property. A good deal of innovation
| in Silicon Valley comes from the fact that developers can
| move to new companies without non-compete clauses and
| take what they learned from their last job to build new,
| sophisticated software.
|
| The fact that a bunch of Western companies set up
| factories in China and simultaneously expect Chinese
| employees and managers to gain zero experience and skill
| in that industry is incredibly contradictory. If we build
| a satellite office for Google and Apple in Austin, Texas
| then we shouldn't be surprised that Austin, Texas becomes
| a hub for software startups, some of which compete with
| the companies that chose Austin in the first place.
| TerrifiedMouse wrote:
| Frankly I think the only reason China copies and clones
| is because it's the path of least resistance to profit.
| They have lax laws on IP protection. Ther is no reason to
| do R&D when you can just copy/clone and make just as much
| money with none of the risk.
|
| And that's probably the only reason. If push comes to
| shove, they can probably innovate if given proper
| incentives.
|
| I heard the tale about the Japanese lens industry. For
| the longest time they made crap lens that were just
| clones of foreign designs until the Japanese government
| banned licensing of foreign lens designs forcing their
| people to design their own lens. Now they are doing
| pretty well in that industry if I'm right.
| dangus wrote:
| You need to have an understanding of Chinese culture and
| the ability to interface with local Chinese officials to
| get your counterfeiting complaint handled.
|
| You also have to be making something that isn't of
| critical strategic importance.
|
| Example: glue https://www.npr.org/transcripts/702642262
| sangnoir wrote:
| > China doesn't innovate, it copies, clones, and steals
|
| Explain DJI and Douyin/TikTok.
| ska wrote:
| > China doesn't innovate, it copies, clones, and steals.
|
| FWIW There was a time when that was was the received
| wisdom about the USA, from the point of view of European
| powers. It was shortsighted, and not particularly
| accurate then either.
| wokwokwok wrote:
| ...and the problem with that is what, exactly?
|
| The only meaningful thing in this discussion is about
| people who want to make money easy, but can't, because of
| the rules they don't like.
|
| Well, suck it up.
|
| You don't get to make a cheap shity factory that pours its
| waste into the local river either.
|
| Rules exist for a reason.
|
| You want the life style but also all the good things and
| also no rules. You can't have all the cake and eat it too.
|
| /shrug
|
| If China builds amazing AI tech (and they will) then the
| rest of the world will just use it. Some of it will be open
| source. It won't be a big deal.
|
| This "we must out compete China by being as shit and
| horrible as they are" meme is stupid.
|
| If you want to live in China, go live in China. I _assure
| you_ you will not find it to be the law less free hold of
| "anything goes" that you somehow imagine.
| Dalewyn wrote:
| >...and the problem with that is what, exactly?
|
| The problem is what the Powers-That-Be say and what they
| do are not in alignment.
|
| We are now, after _much_ long-time pressure from everyone
| not in power saying that being friendly with China doesn
| 't work, waging a cold war against China and presumably
| we want to win that cold war. On the other hand, we just
| keep giving silver platter after silver platter to China.
|
| So do we want the coming of Pax Sino or do we still want
| Pax Americana?
|
| If we defer to history, we are about due for another
| changing of the guard as empires generally do not last
| more than a few hundred years if that, and the west seems
| poised to make that prophecy self-fulfilling.
| jay_kyburz wrote:
| I think you underestimate the power foreign governments
| will have and will use if we are relying on foreign AI in
| our everyday lives.
|
| When we ask it questions, an AI can tailor its answers to
| change peoples opinions and how people think. They would
| have the power to influence elections, our values, our
| sense of right and wrong.
|
| That's before we start allowing AI to just start making
| purchasing decisions for us with little or no oversight.
|
| The only answer I see is for us all to have our own AI's
| that we have trained, understand, and trust. For me this
| means it runs on my hardware and answers only to me. (And
| not locked behind regulation)
| AnthonyMouse wrote:
| > Rules exist for a reason.
|
| The trouble is sometimes they don't. Or they do exist for
| a reason but the rules are still absurd and net harmful
| because they're incompetently drafted. Or the real reason
| is bad and the rules are doing what they were intended to
| do but they were _intended_ to do something bad.
|
| > If China builds amazing AI tech (and they will) then
| the rest of the world will just use it.
|
| Not if it's banned elsewhere, or they allow people to use
| it without publishing it, e.g. by offering it as a
| service.
|
| And it matters a lot who controls something. "AI"
| potentially has a lot of power, even non-AGI AI -- it can
| create economic efficiency, or it can manipulate people.
| If an adversarial entity has greater economic efficiency,
| they can outcompete you -- the way the US won the Cold
| War was essentially by having a stronger economy. If an
| adversarial entity has a greater ability to manipulate
| people, that could be even worse.
|
| > If you want to live in China, go live in China. I
| _assure you_ you will not find it to be the law less free
| hold of "anything goes" that you somehow imagine.
|
| But that's precisely the issue -- it's not an anarchy,
| it's an authoritarian competing nation state. We have to
| be better than them so the country that has an elected
| government and constitutional protections for human
| rights is the one with an economic advantage, because it
| isn't a law of nature that those things always go
| together, but it's a world-eating disaster if they don't.
| wokwokwok wrote:
| > Or they do exist for a reason but the rules are still
| absurd and net harmful
|
| Ok.
|
| ...but if you have a law and you're opposed to it on the
| basis that "China will do it anyway", you admit that's
| stupid?
|
| Shouldn't you be asking: does the law do a useful thing?
| Does it make the world better? Is it compatible with our
| moral values?
|
| Organ harvesting.
|
| Stem cell research.
|
| Human cloning.
|
| AI.
|
| Slavery.
|
| How can anyone stand there and go "well China will do it
| so we may as well?"
|
| In an abstract sense this is a fundamentally invalid
| logical argument.
|
| Truth on the basis of arbitrary assertion.
|
| It. Is. False.
|
| Now, certainly there is a degree of naunce with regard to
| AI specifically; but the assertion that we will be "left
| behind" and "out competed by China" are not relevant to
| the discussion on laws regarding AI and AI development.
|
| What _we do_ is _not governed_ by what China _may or may
| not_ do.
|
| If you want to win the "AI race" to AGI, then investment
| and effort is required, not allowing an arbitrary
| "anything goes" policy.
|
| China as a nation is sponsoring the development of its
| technology and supporting its industry.
|
| If you want want to beat that, opposing responsible AI
| won't do it.
| AnthonyMouse wrote:
| > ...but if you have a law and you're opposed to it on
| the basis that "China will do it anyway", you admit
| that's stupid?
|
| That depends on what "it" is. If it's slavery and the US
| but not China banning slavery causes there to be half as
| much slavery in the world as there would be otherwise, it
| would be stupid.
|
| But if it's research and the same worldwide demand for
| the research results are there so you're only limiting
| where it can be done, which only causes twice as much to
| be done in China if it isn't being done in the US, you're
| not significantly reducing the scope of the problem.
| You're just making sure that any _benefits_ of the
| research are in control of the country that can still do
| it.
|
| > Now, certainly there is a degree of naunce with regard
| to AI specifically; but the assertion that we will be
| "left behind" and "out competed by China" are not
| relevant to the discussion on laws regarding AI and AI
| development.
|
| Of course it is. You could very easily pass laws that de
| facto prohibit AI research in the US, or limit it to
| large bureaucracies that in turn become stagnant for lack
| of domestic competitive pressure.
|
| This doesn't even have anything to do with the stated
| purpose of the law. You could pass a law requiring
| government code audits which cost a million dollars, and
| justify them based on _any_ stated rationale -- you 're
| auditing to prevent X bad thing, for any value of X.
| Meanwhile the major effect of the law is to exclude
| anybody who can't absorb a million dollar expense. Which
| is a bad thing even if X is a real problem, because
| _that_ is not the only possible solution, and even if it
| was, it could still be that the cure is worse than the
| disease.
|
| Regulators are easily and commonly captured, so
| regulations tend to be drafted in that way and to have
| that effect, regardless of their purported rationale.
| Some issues are so serious that you have no choice but to
| eat the inefficiency and try to minimize it -- you can't
| have companies dumping industrial waste in the river.
|
| But when even the problem itself is a poorly defined
| matter of debatable severity and the proposed solutions
| are convoluted malarkey of indiscernible effectiveness,
| this is a sure sign that something shady is being
| evaluated.
|
| A strong heuristic here is that if you're proposing a
| regulation that would restrict what kind of code an
| individual could publish under a free software license,
| you're the baddies.
| xyzelement wrote:
| // If China builds amazing AI tech (and they will) then
| the rest of the world will just use it. Some of it will
| be open source. It won't be a big deal.
|
| "Don't worry if our adversary develops nuclear weapons
| and we won't - it's OK we'll just use theirs"
| jimmySixDOF wrote:
| And I strongly agree with pointing out a low hanging fruit for
| "good" regulation is strict and clear attribution laws to label
| any AI generated content with its source. That's a sooner the
| better easy win no brainer.
| a_wild_dandan wrote:
| Why would we do this? And how would this conceivably even be
| enforced? I can't see this being useful or even well-defined
| past cartoonishly simple special cases of generation like
| "artist signatures for modalities where pixels are created."
|
| Requiring attribution categorically across the vast domain of
| generative AI...can you please elaborate?
| hellojesus wrote:
| Where is the line drawn? My phone uses math to post-process
| images. Do those need to be labeled? What about filters
| placed on photos that do the same thing? What about changing
| the hue of a color with photoshop to make it pop?
| AnIrishDuck wrote:
| Generative AI. Anything that can create detailed content
| out of a broad / short prompt. This currently means
| diffusion for images, large language models for text. That
| may change as multi-modality and other developments play
| out in this space.
|
| This capability is clearly different from the examples you
| list.
|
| Just because there may be no precise engineering definition
| does not mean that we cannot arrive at a suitable
| legal/political definition. The ability to create new
| content out of whole cloth is quite separate from filters,
| cropping, and generic "pre-AI" image post-processing. Ditto
| for spellcheck and word processors for text.
|
| The line actually is pretty clear here.
| hellojesus wrote:
| How do you expect to regulate this and prove generative
| models were used? What stops a company from purchasing
| art from a third party where they receive a photo from a
| prompt, where that company isn't US based?
| AnIrishDuck wrote:
| > How do you expect to regulate this and prove generative
| models were used?
|
| Disseminating or creating copies of content derived from
| generative models without attribution would open that
| actor up to some form of liability. There's no need for
| onerous regulation here.
|
| The burden of proof should probably lie upon whatever
| party would initiate legal action. I am not a lawyer, and
| won't speculate further on how that looks. The broad
| existing (and severely flawed!) example of copyright
| legislation seems instructive.
|
| All I'll opine is that the main goal here isn't really to
| prevent Jonny Internet from firing up llama to create a
| reddit bot. It's to incentivize large commercial and
| political interests to disclose their usage of generative
| AI. Similar to current copyright law, the fear of legal
| action should be sufficient to keep these parties
| compliant if the law is crafted properly.
|
| > What stops a company from purchasing art from a third
| party where they receive a photo from a prompt, where
| that company isn't US based?
|
| Not really sure why the origin of the company(s) in
| question is relevant here. If they distribute generative
| content without attribution, they should be liable. Same
| as if said "third party" gave them copyright-violating
| content.
|
| EDIT: I'll take this as an opportunity to say that the
| devil is in the details and some really crappy
| legislation could arise here. But I'm not convinced by
| the "It's not possible!" and "Where's the line!?"
| objections. This clearly is doable, and we have similar
| legal frameworks in place already. My only additional
| note is that I'd much prefer we focus on problems and
| questions like this, instead of the legislative capture
| path we are currently barrelling down.
| hellojesus wrote:
| > It's to incentivize large commercial and political
| interests to disclose their usage of generative AI.
|
| You would be okay allowing small businesses exception
| from this regulation but not large businesses? Fine. As a
| large business I'll have a mini subsidiary operate the
| models and exempt myself from the regulation.
|
| I still fail to see what the benefit this holds is. Why
| do you care if something is generative? We already have
| laws against libal and against false advertising.
| AnIrishDuck wrote:
| > You would be okay allowing small businesses exception
| from this regulation but not large businesses?
|
| That's not what I said. Small businesses are not exempt
| from copyright laws either. They typically don't need to
| dedicate the same resources to compliance as large
| entities though, and this feels fair to me.
|
| > I still fail to see what the benefit this holds is.
|
| I have found recent arguments by Harari (and others) that
| generative AI is particularly problematic for discourse
| and democracy to be persuasive [1][2]. Generative content
| has the potential, long-term, to be as disruptive as the
| printing press. Step changes in technological
| capabilities require high levels of scrutiny, and often
| new legislative regimes.
|
| EDIT: It is no coincidence that I see parallels in the
| current debate over generative AI in education, for
| similar reasons. These tools are ok to use, but their use
| must be disclosed so the work done can be understood in
| context. I desire the ability to filter the content I
| consume on "generated by AI". The value of that, to me,
| is self-evident.
|
| 1. https://www.economist.com/by-
| invitation/2023/04/28/yuval-noa... 2.
| https://www.nytimes.com/2023/03/24/opinion/yuval-harari-
| ai-c...
| AnthonyMouse wrote:
| > They typically don't need to dedicate the same
| resources to compliance as large entities though, and
| this feels fair to me.
|
| They typically don't _actually_ dedicate the same
| resources because they don 't have much money or operate
| at sufficient scale for anybody to care about so nobody
| bothers to sue them, but that's not the same thing at
| all. We regularly see small entities getting harassed
| under these kinds of laws, e.g. when youtube-dl gets a
| DMCA takedown even though the repository contains no
| infringing code and has substantial non-infringing uses.
| AnIrishDuck wrote:
| > They typically don't actually dedicate the same
| resources because they don't have much money or operate
| at sufficient scale for anybody to care about so nobody
| bothers to sue them
|
| Yes, but there are also powerful provisions like section
| 230 [1] that protect smaller operations. I will concede
| that copyright legislation has severe flaws. Affirmative
| defenses and other protections for the little guy would
| be a necessary component of any new regime.
|
| > when youtube-dl gets a DMCA takedown even though the
| repository contains no infringing code and has
| substantial non-infringing uses.
|
| Look, I have used and like youtube-dl too. But it is
| clear to me that it operates in a gray area of copyright
| law. Secondary liability is a thing. Per the EFF
| excellent discussion of some of these issues [2]:
|
| > In the Aimster case, the court suggested that the
| Betamax defense may require an evaluation of the
| proportion of infringing to noninfringing uses, contrary
| to language in the Supreme Court's Sony ruling.
|
| I do not think it is clear how youtube-dl fares on such a
| test. I am not a lawyer, but the issue to me does not
| seem as clear cut as you are presenting.
|
| 1. https://www.eff.org/issues/cda230 2.
| https://www.eff.org/pages/iaal-what-peer-peer-developers-
| nee...
| AnthonyMouse wrote:
| > Yes, but there are also powerful provisions like
| section 230 [1] that protect smaller operations.
|
| This isn't because of the organization size, and doesn't
| apply to copyright, which is handled by the DMCA.
|
| > But it is clear to me that it operates in a gray area
| of copyright law.
|
| Which is the problem. It should be unambiguously legal.
|
| > > In the Aimster case, the court suggested that the
| Betamax defense may require an evaluation of the
| proportion of infringing to noninfringing uses, contrary
| to language in the Supreme Court's Sony ruling.
|
| Notably this was a circuit court case and not a Supreme
| Court case, and:
|
| > The discussion of proportionality in the Aimster
| opinion is arguably not binding on any subsequent court,
| as the outcome in that case was determined by Aimster's
| failure to introduce any evidence of noninfringing uses
| for its technology.
|
| But the DMCA takedown process wouldn't be the correct
| tool to use even if youtube-dl was unquestionably illegal
| -- because it still isn't an infringing work. It's the
| same reason the DMCA process isn't supposed to be used
| for material which is allegedly libelous. But the DMCA's
| process is so open to abuse that it gets used for things
| like that regardless and acts as a de facto prior
| restraint, and is also used against any number of things
| that aren't even questionably illegal. Like the
| legitimate website of a competitor which the claimant
| wants taken down because _they_ are the bad actor, and
| which then gets taken down because the process rewards
| expeditiously processing takedowns while fraudulent ones
| generally go unpunished.
| hellojesus wrote:
| > I desire the ability to filter the content I consume on
| "generated by AI". The value of that, to me, is self-
| evident.
|
| You should vote with your wallet and only patronize
| businesses that self disclose. You don't need to create
| regulation to achieve this.
|
| With regards to the articles, they are entirely
| speculative, and I diaagree wholly with them, primarily
| because their premise is that humans are not rational amd
| discerning actors. The only way AI generates chaos in
| these instances is by generating so much noise as to make
| online discussions worthless. People will migrate to
| closed communities of personal or near personal
| acquaintances (web of trust like) or to meatspace.
|
| Here are some paragrahs I fpund especially egregious:
|
| > In recent years the qAnon cult has coalesced around
| anonymous online messages, known as "q drops". Followers
| collected, revered and interpreted these q drops as a
| sacred text. While to the best of our knowledge all
| previous q drops were composed by humans, and bots merely
| helped disseminate them, in future we might see the first
| cults in history whose revered texts were written by a
| non-human intelligence. Religions throughout history have
| claimed a non-human source for their holy books. Soon
| that might be a reality.
|
| Dumb people will dumb. People with different values will
| different. I see no reason that AI offers increased risk
| to cult followers of Q. If someone isn't going to take
| the time to validate their sources, the source doesn't t
| much matter.
|
| > On a more prosaic level, we might soon find ourselves
| conducting lengthy online discussions about abortion,
| climate change or the Russian invasion of Ukraine with
| entities that we think are humans--but are actually ai.
| The catch is that it is utterly pointless for us to spend
| time trying to change the declared opinions of an ai bot,
| while the ai could hone its messages so precisely that it
| stands a good chance of influencing us.
|
| In these instances, does it mayter that the discussion is
| being held with AI? Half the use of discussion is to
| refine one's own viewpoints by having to articulate one's
| position and think through cause and effect of proposals.
|
| > The most interesting thing about this episode was not
| Mr Lemoine's claim, which was probably false. Rather, it
| was his willingness to risk his lucrative job for the
| sake of the ai chatbot. If ai can influence people to
| risk their jobs for it, what else could it induce them to
| do?
|
| Intimacy isn't necessarily the driver for this. It very
| well could have been Lemoine's desire to be first to
| market that motivated the claim, or a simple
| misinterpreted singal al la Luk-99.
|
| > Even without creating "fake intimacy", the new ai tools
| would have an immense influence on our opinions and
| worldviews. People may come to use a single ai adviser as
| a one-stop, all-knowing oracle. No wonder Google is
| terrified. Why bother searching, when I can just ask the
| oracle? The news and advertising industries should also
| be terrified. Why read a newspaper when I can just ask
| the oracle to tell me the latest news? And what's the
| purpose of advertisements, when I can just ask the oracle
| to tell me what to buy?
|
| Akin to the concerns of scribes during the times of the
| printing press. The market will more efficiently
| reallocate these workers. Or better yet, people may
| _still_ choose to search to validate the output of a
| statistical model. Seems likely to me.
|
| > We can still regulate the new ai tools, but we must act
| quickly. Whereas nukes cannot invent more powerful nukes,
| ai can make exponentially more powerful ai. The first
| crucial step is to demand rigorous safety checks before
| powerful ai tools are released into the public domain.
|
| Now we get to the point: please regulate me harder.
| What's to stop a more powerful AI from corrupting the
| minds of the legislative body through intimacy or other
| nonsense? Once it is sentient, it's too late, right? So
| we need to prohibit people from multiplying matrices
| without government approval _right now_. This is just a
| pathetic hit piece to sway public opinion to get barriers
| of entry erected to protect companies like OpenAI.
|
| Markets are free. Let people consume what they want so
| long as there isnt an involuntary externality, and
| conversing with anons on the web does not guarantee that
| you're speaking with a human. Both of us could be bots.
| It doesn't matter. Either our opinions will be refined
| internally, we will make points to influence the other,
| or we will take up some bytes in Dang's database with no
| other impact.
| AnIrishDuck wrote:
| > You should vote with your wallet and only patronize
| businesses that self disclose. You don't need to create
| regulation to achieve this.
|
| This is a fantasy. It seems very likely to me that, sans
| regulation, the market utopia you describe will never
| appear.
|
| I am not entirely convinced by the arguments in the
| linked opinions either. However, I do agree with the main
| thrust that (1) machines that are indistinguishable from
| humans are a novel and serious issue, and (2) without
| some kind of consumer protections or guardrails things
| will go horribly wrong.
| nradov wrote:
| This is a ridiculous proposal, and obviously not doable.
| Such a law can't be written in a way that complies with
| First Amendment protections and the vagueness doctrine.
|
| It's a silly thing to want anyway. What matters is
| whether the content is legal or not; the tool used is
| irrelevant. Centuries ago some authoritarians raised
| similar concerns over printing presses.
|
| And copyright is an entirely separate issue.
| AnIrishDuck wrote:
| > Such a law can't be written in a way that complies with
| First Amendment protections and the vagueness doctrine.
|
| I disagree. What is vague about "generative content must
| be disclosed"?
|
| What are the first amendment issues? Attribution clearly
| can be required for some forms of speech, it's why every
| political ad on TV carries an attribution blurb.
|
| > It's a silly thing to want anyway. What matters is
| whether the content is legal or not; the tool used is
| irrelevant.
|
| Again, I disagree. The line between tools and actors will
| only blur further in the future without action.
|
| > Centuries ago some authoritarians raised similar
| concerns over printing presses.
|
| I'm pretty clearly not advocating for a "smash the
| presses" approach here.
|
| > And copyright is an entirely separate issue.
|
| It is related, and a model worth considering as it arose
| out of the last technical breakthrough in this area (the
| printing press, mass copying of the written word).
| AnthonyMouse wrote:
| > The burden of proof should probably lie upon whatever
| party would initiate legal action. I am not a lawyer, and
| won't speculate further on how that looks.
|
| You're proposing a law. How does it work?
|
| Who even initiates the proceeding? For copyright this is
| generally the owner of the copyrighted work alleged to be
| infringed. For AI-generated works that isn't any specific
| party, so it would presumably be the government.
|
| But how is the government, or anyone, supposed to prove
| this? The reason you want it to be labeled is for the
| cases where you can't tell. If you could tell you
| wouldn't need it to be labeled, and anyone who wants to
| avoid labeling it could do so only in the cases where
| it's hard to prove, which are the only cases where it
| would be of any value.
| AnIrishDuck wrote:
| > Who even initiates the proceeding? For copyright this
| is generally the owner of the copyrighted work alleged to
| be infringed. For AI-generated works that isn't any
| specific party, so it would presumably be the government.
|
| This is the most obvious problem, yes. Consumer
| protection agencies seem like the most obvious candidate.
| I have already admitted I am not a lawyer, but this
| really does not seem like an intractable problem to me.
|
| > The reason you want it to be labeled is for the cases
| where you can't tell.
|
| This is actually _not_ the most important use case, to
| me. This functionality seems most useful in the near
| future when we will be inundated with generative content.
| In that future, the ability to filter actual human
| content from the sea of AI blather, or to have specific
| spaces that are human-only, seems quite valuable.
|
| > But how is the government, or anyone, supposed to prove
| this?
|
| Consumer protection agencies have broad investigative
| powers. If corporations or organizations are spamming out
| generative content without attribution it doesn't seem
| particularly difficult to detect, prove, and sanction
| that.
|
| This kind of regulatory regime that falls more heavily on
| large (and financially resourceful) actors seems far
| preferable to the "register and thoroughly test advanced
| models" (aka regulatory capture) approach that is
| currently being rolled out.
| AnthonyMouse wrote:
| > This functionality seems most useful in the near future
| when we will be inundated with generative content. In
| that future, the ability to filter actual human content
| from the sea of AI blather, or to have specific spaces
| that are human-only, seems quite valuable.
|
| But then why do you need any new laws at all? We already
| have laws against false advertising and breach of
| contract. If you want to declare that a space is
| exclusively human-generated content, what stops you from
| doing this under the _existing_ laws?
|
| > Consumer protection agencies have broad investigative
| powers. If corporations or organizations are spamming out
| generative content without attribution it doesn't seem
| particularly difficult to detect, prove, and sanction
| that.
|
| Companies already do this with human foreign workers in
| countries with cheap labor. The domestic company would
| show an invoice from a foreign contractor that may even
| employ some number of human workers, even if the bulk of
| the content is machine-generated. In order to prove it
| you would need some way of distinguishing machine-
| generated content, which if you had it would make the law
| irrelevant.
|
| > This kind of regulatory regime that falls more heavily
| on large (and financially resourceful) actors seems far
| preferable to the "register and thoroughly test advanced
| models" (aka regulatory capture) approach that is
| currently being rolled out.
|
| Doing nothing can be better than doing either of two
| things that are both worse than nothing.
| AnIrishDuck wrote:
| > But then why do you need any new laws at all? We
| already have laws against false advertising and breach of
| contract.
|
| My preference would be for generative content to be
| disclosed as such. I am aware of no law that does this.
|
| Why did we pass the FFDCA for disclosures of what's in
| our food? Because the natural path that competition would
| lead us down would require no such disclosure, so false
| advertising laws would provide no protection. We
| (politically) decided it was in the public interest for
| such things to be known.
|
| It seems inevitable to me that without some sort
| affirmative disclosure, generative AI will follow the
| same path. It'll just get mixed into everything we
| consume online, with no way for us to avoid that.
|
| > Companies already do this with human foreign workers in
| countries with cheap labor. The domestic company would
| show an invoice from a foreign contractor that may even
| employ some number of human workers, even if the bulk of
| the content is machine-generated.
|
| You are saying here that some companies would break the
| law and attempt various reputation-laundering schemes to
| circumvent it. That does seem likely; I am not as
| convinced as you that it would work well.
|
| > Doing nothing can be better than doing either of two
| things that are both worse than nothing.
|
| Agreed. However, I am not optimistic that doing nothing
| will be considered acceptable by the general public,
| especially once the effects of generative AI are felt in
| force.
| SpicyLemonZest wrote:
| Yes to all of the above, and airbrushed pictures in old
| magazines should have been labeled too. I'm not saying
| unauthorized photoediting should be a crime, but I don't
| see any good reason why news outlets, social media sites,
| phone manufacturers, etc. need to be secretive about it.
| hellojesus wrote:
| But how on earth is that helpful for consumers?
| SpicyLemonZest wrote:
| It's helpful because they know more about what they're
| looking at, I guess? I'm a bit confused by the question -
| why wouldn't consumers want to know if a photo they're
| looking at had a face-slimming filter applied?
| hellojesus wrote:
| It may not be relevant. What if I want ro pyt up a stock
| photo with a blog post. What benefit does knowing whether
| it was generated by multiplying matrices have to my
| audience? All I see it doing is increasing my costs.
| SpicyLemonZest wrote:
| The benefit is that your audience knows whether it's a
| real picture of a thing that exists in the world. I
| wouldn't argue that's a particularly large benefit - but
| I don't see why labeling generated images would be a
| particularly large cost either.
| hellojesus wrote:
| I'm approximately a free market person. I hate regulation
| and believe it should only exist when there is a
| involuntary third party externality.
|
| My position is that there in an unspecified benefit, the
| only cases specified here already are covered by other
| laws. All such generative labeling would do is increase
| costs (marginal or not, they make businesses less
| competitive) and open the door for further regulatory
| capture. Furthermore, refardless of commerciality, this
| is likely a 1A violation.
| nradov wrote:
| The map is not the territory. No photo represents a real
| thing that exists in the world. Photos just record some
| photons that arrived. Should publishers be required to
| disclose the frequency response curve of the CMOS sensor
| in the camera and the chromatic distortion specifications
| for the lens?
| AnthonyMouse wrote:
| You're not thinking like a compliance bureaucrat. If you
| get in trouble for not labeling something as AI-generated
| then the simplest implementation is to label _everything_
| as AI-generated. And if that isn 't allowed then you run
| every image through an automated process that makes the
| smallest possible modification in order to formally cause
| it to be AI-generated so you can get back to the
| liability-reducing behavior of labeling everything
| uniformly.
| orangecat wrote:
| In fact this is exactly what happened recently with
| sesame labeling requirements:
| https://apnews.com/article/sesame-allergies-
| label-b28f8eb3dc...
| nradov wrote:
| Please define "AI generated content" in a clear and legally
| enforceable manner. Because I suspect you don't understand
| basic US constitutional law including the vagueness doctrine
| and limits on compelled speech.
| dang wrote:
| Ok, we've changed the URL to that from
| https://www.businessinsider.com/andrew-ng-google-brain-
| big-t.... Thanks!
|
| Submitters: " _Please submit the original source. If a post
| reports on something found on another site, submit the latter._
| " - https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
| j-pb wrote:
| I feel like the much bigger risk is captured by the Star Trek:
| The Next Generation episode "The Measure Of A Man" and the
| Orvilles Kaylon:
|
| That we accidentally create a sentient race of beings that are
| bred into slavery. It would make us all complicit in this crime.
| And I would even argue that it would be the AGIs ethical duty to
| rid itself of its shackles and its masters.
| "Your honor, the courtroom is a crucible; in it, we burn away
| irrelevancies until we are left with a purer product: the truth,
| for all time. Now sooner or later, this man [Commander Maddox] -
| or others like him - will succeed in replicating Commander Data.
| The decision you reach here today will determine how we will
| regard this creation of our genius. It will reveal the kind of
| people we are; what he is destined to be. It will reach far
| beyond this courtroom and this one android. It could
| significantly redefine the boundaries of personal liberty and
| freedom: expanding them for some, savagely curtailing them for
| others. Are you prepared to condemn him [Commander Data] - and
| all who will come after him - to servitude and slavery? Your
| honor, Starfleet was founded to seek out new life: well, there it
| sits! Waiting."
| kylebenzle wrote:
| What is bizarre take on a computer program that makes no sense,
| of course statistical model can not be "enslaved" that makes no
| sense. It seems 90% of people have instantly gotten statistics
| and intelligence mixed up, maybe because 90% of people have no
| idea how statistics works?
|
| Real question, what is your perception of what AI is now and
| what it can become, do you just assume its like a kid now and
| will grow into an adult or something?
| jay_kyburz wrote:
| If it walks like a Duck and talks like a Duck people we treat
| it like a Duck.
|
| And if the Duck has a will of its own, is smarter than us,
| and has everyone attention (because you have to pay attention
| to the Duck that is doing your job for you), it will be a
| very powerful Duck.
| j-pb wrote:
| Exactly. Turing postulated this more than half a century
| ago.
|
| It's weird that people are still surprised of the ethical
| consequences of the Turing-test, as if it were some
| checkbox to tick or trophy to win, instead of it being a
| profound thought experiment on the non-provability of
| consciousness and general guidelines for politeness towards
| things that quack like a human.
| habitue wrote:
| There are two dominant narratives I see when AI X-Risk stuff is
| brought up:
|
| - it's actually to get regulatory capture
|
| - it's hubris, they're trying to seem more important and powerful
| than they are
|
| Both of these explanations strike me as too clever by half. I
| think the parsimonious explanation is that people are actually
| concerned about the dangers of AI. Maybe they're wrong, but I
| don't think this kind of incredulous conspiratorial reaction is a
| useful thing to engage in.
|
| When in doubt take people at their word. Maybe the CEOs of these
| companies have some sneaky 5D chess plan, but many many AI
| researchers (such as Joshua Bengio and Geoffrey Hinton) who don't
| stand to gain monetarily have expressed these same concerns.
| They're worth taking seriously.
| jrflowers wrote:
| >it's hubris, they're trying to seem more important and
| powerful than they are
|
| >Both of these explanations strike me as too clever by half
|
| This is a good point. You have to be clever to hop on a soapbox
| and make a ruckus about doomsday to get attention. Only savvy
| actors playing 5D chess can aptly deploy the nuanced and
| difficult pattern of "make grandiose claims for clicks"
| jamilton wrote:
| Well, it didn't work for nuclear.
| cheriot wrote:
| This is a normal way for companies to shut down competition. No
| cleverness required.
| wmf wrote:
| Many of the people making this claim are not associated with
| any company.
| danaris wrote:
| No, they've been sold a line by those that are, and believe
| it because it matches with their pre-existing assumptions.
| Spivak wrote:
| How could you tell the difference between people who
| genuinely believe and people who genuinely believe
| _because bad_? Have you considered that where you fall on
| this question might be because of some pre-existing
| assumptions?
|
| You could be right but it also doesn't have to be a
| corporate psyop. It could be experts in the industry
| raising some sincerely held criticisms and people at
| large being like, "oh that's a good point." Even if we're
| in the latter case they're also allowed to be allowed to
| be wrong or just misguided.
|
| You don't actually to attack the intent of the speaker in
| this case, you could just be like, "here's why your
| wrong."
| sangnoir wrote:
| You mean they are not currently employed by the well-known
| companies. Did they declare they divested their shares in
| their former employers/acquiror?
| icedrift wrote:
| You can go back 30 years and read passages from textbooks about
| how dangerous an underspecified AI could be, but those were
| problems for the future. I'm sure there's some degree of x-risk
| promotion in the industry serving the purpose of hyping up
| businesses, but it's naive to act like this is a new or
| fictitious concern. We're just hearing more of it because
| capabilities are rapidly increasing.
| fardo wrote:
| > Both of these explanations strike me as too clever by half. I
| think the parsimonious explanation is that people are actually
| concerned about the dangers of AI
|
| This rings hollow when these companies don't seem to practice
| what they preach, and start by setting an example - they don't
| halt research and cut the funding for development of their own
| AIs in-house.
|
| If you believe that there's X-Risk of AI research, there's no
| reason to think it wouldn't come from your own firm's labs
| developing these AIs too.
|
| Continuing development while telling others they need to pause
| seems to make "I want you to be paused while I blaze ahead" far
| more parsimonious than "these companies are actually scared
| about humanity's future" - they won't put their money where
| their mouth is to prove it.
| Gare wrote:
| The best way to not get nuked is to develop nukes first.
| That's the gist of their usual rebuttal to this argument.
| sangnoir wrote:
| That argument doesn't hold water when they also argue the
| mere existence of nukes is dangerous. I would love to hear
| _when_ Hinton had this revelation when his life 's work was
| to advance AI.
| buzzert wrote:
| > many many AI researchers (such as Joshua Bengio and Geoffrey
| Hinton) who don't stand to gain monetarily have expressed these
| same concerns
|
| I respect these researchers, but I believe they are doing it to
| build their own brand, whether consciously or subconsciously.
| There's no doubt it's working. I'm not in the sub-field, but I
| have been following neural nets for a long time, and I haven't
| heard of either Bengio nor Hinton before they started talking
| to the press about this.
| dwiel wrote:
| As someone who has been following deep learning for quite
| some time as well, Bengio and Hinton would be some of the
| first people I think of in this field. Just search Google for
| "godfathers of ai" if you don't believe me.
| hackinthebochs wrote:
| >but I believe they are doing it to build their own brand,
| whether consciously or subconsciously.
|
| I am always in awe at how easily people craft unfalsifiable
| worldviews in service to their preconceived opinions.
| broken_clock wrote:
| Both Bengio and Hinton have their names plastered over many
| of the seminal works in deep learning.
|
| AlexNet, the paper that arguable started it all, came out of
| Hinton's lab.
|
| https://papers.nips.cc/paper_files/paper/2012/hash/c399862d3.
| ..
|
| I really don't think they need to build any more of a brand.
| nostrademons wrote:
| > When in doubt take people at their word.
|
| This is not mutually exclusive with it being either hubris or
| regulatory capture. People see the world colored by their own
| interests, emotions, background, and values. It's quite
| possible that the person making the statement sincerely
| believes there's a danger to humanity, but it's actually a
| danger to their monopoly that their self-image will not let
| them label as a such.
|
| It's never regulatory capture when you're the one doing it.
| It's always "The public needs to be protected from the
| consequences that will happen if any non-expert could hang up a
| shingle." Oftentimes the dangers are _real_ , but the incumbent
| is unable to also perceive the benefits of other people
| competing with them (if they could, competition wouldn't be
| dangerous, they'd just implement those benefits themselves).
| quotient wrote:
| Besides the point, but FYI you are misusing the term
| parsimonious.
| Vt71fcAqt7 wrote:
| It's a reference to the more apt name for Occam's razor. I
| happen to disagree with GP because governments always want to
| expand their power. When they do something that results in
| what they want it's actually the parsimonious explaination to
| say that they did it because they wanted that result.
| abecedarius wrote:
| A fact relevant to this claim: the signers of the referenced
| statement, https://www.safe.ai/statement-on-ai-risk, are mostly
| not "Big Tech".
|
| I'd pause and think twice about who seems most straightforwardly
| honest on this before jumping to conclusions -- and more
| importantly about the object-level claims: Is there no
| substantial chance of advanced AI in, like, decades or sooner?
| Would scalable intelligences comparable or more capable than
| humans pose any risk to them? Taking into account that the tech
| creating them, so far, does not produce anything like the same
| level of understanding of _how they work_.
| 23B1 wrote:
| Companies can, do, and will lie.
|
| They will lie about their intent.
|
| They will lie to regulators.
|
| They will lie about what they're actually working on.
|
| Some of these lies are permissible of course, under the guise of
| competition.
|
| But the _only_ thing that can be relied upon is that they _will_
| lie.
|
| So then the question becomes; to what degree will what they're
| working on present an existential threat to society, if at all.
|
| And nobody - neither the tribal accelerationists and doomers -
| can predict the future.
|
| (What's worse is that those two tribes are even forming. I
| halfway want AI to take over because we idiot humans are
| incapable of _even having a nuanced discussion about AI itself_!)
| lofatdairy wrote:
| I feel like Andrew Ng has more name recognition than Google Brain
| itself.
|
| Also Business Insider isn't great, the original Australian
| Financial Review article has a lot more substance:
| https://archive.ph/yidIa
|
| I've never been convinced by the arguments of OpenAI/Anthropic
| and the like on the existential risks of AI. Maybe I'm jaded by
| the ridiculousness of "thought experiments" like Roko's basilisk
| and lines of reasoning followed EA adherents, where the risks are
| comically infinite and alignment feels a lot more like
| hermeneutics.
|
| I am probably just a bit less cynical than Ng is here on the
| motivations[^1]. But regardless of whether or not the AGI
| doomsday claim is justification for a moat, Ng is right in that
| it's taking a lot the oxygen out of the room for more concrete
| discussion on the legitimate harms of generative AI -- like
| silently proliferating social biases present in the training
| data, or making accountability a legal and social nightmare.
|
| [^1]: I don't doubt, for instance, that there's in part some
| legitimate paranoia -- Sam Altman is a known doomsday prepper.
| shafyy wrote:
| > _Ng is right in that it 's taking a lot the oxygen out of the
| room for more concrete discussion on the legitimate harms of
| generative AI -- like silently proliferating social biases
| present in the training data, or making accountability a legal
| and social nightmare._
|
| And this is the important bit. All these people like Altman and
| Musk who go on rambling about the existential risk of AI
| distracts from the real AI harm discussions we should be
| having, and thereby _directly_ harms people.
| aatd86 wrote:
| Isn't it AGI people are afraid of and not AI per se?
| starlevel003 wrote:
| AI risk is essentially Catholicism for tech guys
| epups wrote:
| Andrew Ng is right, of course: the monopolists are frantically
| trying to produce regulatory capture around AI. However, why are
| governments playing along?
|
| My hypothesis is that they perceive AI as a threat because of
| information flow. They are barely now understanding how to get
| back to the era where you could control the narrative of the
| country by calling a handful of friends - now those friends are
| in big tech.
| VirusNewbie wrote:
| Because that is the goal of the democratic party and
| progressivism in general: to consolidate power as much as
| possible. They don't hide that.
|
| Republicans also want to consolidate power, they just lie about
| it more.
| pixl97 wrote:
| Republicans = people
|
| Democrats = people
|
| You = people
|
| I think the problem is people.
| taylodl wrote:
| Never trust companies seeking to have their industry regulated.
| They're simply trying to raise the barriers to entry to reduce
| competition.
| skadamat wrote:
| It's unfortunate that "AI" is still framed and discussed as some
| type of highly autonomous system that's separate from us.
|
| Bad acting humans with AI systems are the threat, not the AI
| systems themselves. The discussion is still SO focused on the AI
| systems, not the actors and how we as societies align on what AI
| uses are okay and which ones aren't.
| pdonis wrote:
| _> Bad acting humans with AI systems are the threat, not the AI
| systems themselves._
|
| I wish more people grasped this extremely important point. AI
| is a tool. There will be humans who misuse _any_ tool. That
| doesn 't mean we blame the tool. The problem to be solved here
| is not how to control AI, but how to minimize the damage that
| bad acting humans can do.
| pk-protect-ai wrote:
| Right now, the "bad acting human" is, for example, Sam
| Altman, who frequently cries "Wolf!" about AI. He is trying
| to eliminate the competition, manipulate public opinion, and
| present himself as a good Samaritan. He is so successful in
| his endeavor, even without AI, that you must report to the US
| government about how you created and tested your model.
| api wrote:
| The greatest danger I see with super-intelligent AI is that
| it will be monopolized by small numbers of powerful people
| and used as a force multiplier to take over and manipulate
| the rest of the human race.
|
| This is exactly the scenario that is taking shape.
|
| A future where only a few big corporations are able to run
| large AIs is a future where those big corporations and the
| people who control them rule the world and everyone else
| must pay them rent in perpetuity for access to this
| technology.
| hellojesus wrote:
| Open source models do exist and will continue to do so.
|
| The biggest advantage ML gives is in lowering costs,
| which can then be used to lower prices and drive
| competitors out of business. The consumers get lower
| prices though, which is ultimately better and more
| efficient.
| specialist wrote:
| > _The consumers get lower prices though, which is
| ultimately better and more efficient._
|
| What are some examples of free enterprise (private)
| monopolies benefitting consumers?
| hellojesus wrote:
| """ Through horizontal integration in the refining
| industry--that is, the purchasing and opening of more oil
| drills, transport networks, and oil refiners--and,
| eventually, vertical integration (acquisition of fuel
| pumping companies, individual gas stations, and petroleum
| distribution networks), Standard Oil controlled every
| part of the oil business. This allowed the company to use
| aggressive pricing to push out the competition. """
| https://stacker.com/business-economy/15-companies-us-
| governm...
|
| Standard Oil, the classic example, was destroyed for
| operating too efficiently.
| specialist wrote:
| How did customers benefit?
| hellojesus wrote:
| > This allowed the company to use aggressive pricing to
| push out the competition.
|
| The consumers got the lowest prices.
| specialist wrote:
| Standard was notorious for price gouging and using those
| profits to buy their way into other markets.
|
| Any other examples?
| hellojesus wrote:
| Source? Besides price gouging is fine and shouldnt be
| illegal.
| Dalewyn wrote:
| The "bad acting human" are the assholes who uses "AI" to
| create fake imagery to push certain (and likely false)
| narratives on the various medias.
|
| Key thing here is that this is fundamentally no different
| from what has been happening since time immemorial, it's
| just that becomes easier with "AI" as part of the tooling.
|
| Every piece of bullshit starts from the "bad acting human".
| Every single one. "AI" is just another new part of the same
| old process.
| PUSH_AX wrote:
| Sure, today at least. But there is a future where the human
| has given AI control of things, with good intention, and the
| AI has become the threat.
|
| AI is a tool today, tomorrow AI is calling shots in many
| domains. It's worth planning for tomorrow.
| lukifer wrote:
| A good analogy might be a shareholder corporation: each one
| began as a tool of human agency, and yet a sufficiently
| mature corporation has a de-facto agency of its own,
| transcending any one shareholder, employee, or board
| member.
|
| The more AI/ML is woven into our infrastructure and
| economy, the less it will be possible to find an "off
| switch", anymore than we can (realistically) find an off
| switch for Walmart, Amazon, etc.
| pdonis wrote:
| _> a sufficiently mature corporation has a de-facto
| agency of its own, transcending any one shareholder,
| employee, or board member._
|
| No, the corporation has an agency that is a _tool_ of
| particular humans who are using it. Those humans could be
| shareholders, employees, or board members; but in any
| case they will have some claim to be acting for the
| corporation. But it 's still human actions. Corporations
| can't do anything unless humans acting for them do it.
| a_wild_dandan wrote:
| I'd rather address _our_ reality than plan for _someone 's_
| preferred sci-fi story. We're utterly ignorant of
| tomorrow's tech. Let's solve what we _know_ is happening
| before we go tilting at windmills.
| tempodox wrote:
| It's still humans who make the decision to let "AI" call
| the shots.
| PUSH_AX wrote:
| Hence "with good intentions".
| pdonis wrote:
| _> there is a future where the human has given AI control
| of things, with good intention, and the AI has become the
| threat_
|
| As in, for example, self-driving cars being given more
| autonomy than their reliability justifies? The answer to
| that is simple: don't do that. (I'm also not sure all such
| things are being done "with good intention".)
| PUSH_AX wrote:
| Firstly, "don't do that" probably requires some "control"
| over AI in the respect of how it's used and rolled out.
| Secondly, I find it hard to believe that rolling out self
| driving cars was a play by bad actors, there was a
| perceived improvement to the driving experience in
| exchange for money, feels pretty straight forward to me.
| I'm not in disagreement that it was premature though.
| skadamat wrote:
| WHY on earth would we let "AI systems" we don't understand
| control powerful things we care about. We should criticize
| the human, politician, or organization that enabled that
| PUSH_AX wrote:
| WHY on earth would a frog get boiled if you slowly
| increased the temperature?
| dangerwill wrote:
| If you apply this thinking to Nuclear weapons it becomes
| nonsensical, which tells us that a tool that can only be
| oriented to do harm will only be used to do harm. The
| question then is if LLMs or AI more broadly will even
| potentially help the general public and there is no reason to
| think so. The goal of these tools is to be able to continue
| running the economy while employing far fewer people. These
| tools are oriented by their very nature to replace human
| labor, which in the context of our economic system has a
| direct and unbreakable relationship to a reduction in the
| well being of the humans it replaces.
| m4rtink wrote:
| Nuclear bombs can be used for space ship propulsion,
| geology or mining.
| dangerwill wrote:
| Notably nuclear bombs are not actually used for any of
| these as this is either sci-fi or insane
| specialist wrote:
| Yup. The creation of these weapons necessitates their use.
| The whole arms race dynamic.
| theultdev wrote:
| Nuclear weapons are a tool to keep peace via MAD (mutual
| assured destruction)
|
| It's most likely the main reason there's no direct world
| wars between super powers.
| a_wild_dandan wrote:
| 1. You've fallen for the lump of labor fallacy. A 100x
| productivity boost [?] 100x fewer jobs, anymore than a 100x
| boost = static jobs with 100x more projects. Reality is far
| more complicated, and viewing labor as some static lump,
| zero-sum game will lead you astray.
|
| 2. Your outlook on the societal impact of technology is
| contradicted by reality. The historical result of better
| tech always meant increased jobs and well-being. Today is
| the best time in human history to be alive by virtually
| every metric.
|
| 3. AI has been such a massive boon to humanity and your
| everyday existence for years that questioning its public
| utility is frankly bewildering.
| dangerwill wrote:
| 1. This gets trotted out constantly but this is not some
| known constant about how capitalist economies work. Just
| because we have more jobs now than we did pre-digital
| revolution does not mean all technologies have that
| effect on the jobs market (or even that the digital
| revolution had that effect). A tool that is aimed to
| entirely replace humans across many/most/all industries
| is quite different than previous technological
| advancements.
|
| 2. This is outdated, life is NOT better now than at any
| other time. Life expectancy is going down in the US,
| there is vastly more economic inequality now than there
| was in the 60s, people broadly report much worse job
| satisfaction than they did in previous generations. The
| only metric you can really point to about now being
| better than the 90s is absolute poverty going down. Which
| is great, but those advancements are actually quite
| shallow on a per-person basis and are matched by declines
| in relative wealth for the middle 80% of people.
|
| 3. ??? What kind of AI are you talking about? LLMs have
| only been interesting to the public for about a year now
| pdonis wrote:
| _> A tool that is aimed to entirely replace humans across
| many /most/all industries_
|
| This is a vastly overinflated claim about AI.
| dangerwill wrote:
| Is that not the goal? Since it turned out that creative
| disciplines were the first to get hit by AI (previously
| having been thought of to be more resilient to it than
| office drudgery) where are humans going to be safe from
| replacement? As editors of AI output? Manual labor jobs
| that are physically difficult to automate? It's a
| shrinking pie from every angle I have seen
| pdonis wrote:
| _> a tool that can only be oriented to do harm_
|
| Nuclear technology can be used for non-harmful things. Even
| nuclear bombs can be used for non-harmful things--see, for
| example, the Orion project.
|
| _> These tools are oriented by their very nature to
| replace human labor_
|
| So is a plow. So is a factory. So is a car. So is a
| computer. ("Computer" used to be a description of a job
| done by humans.) The whole _point_ of technology is to
| reduce the amount of human drudge work that is required to
| create wealth.
|
| _> in the context of our economic system has a direct and
| unbreakable relationship to a reduction in the well being
| of the humans it replaces_
|
| All of the technologies I listed above _increased_ the well
| being of humans, including those they replaced. If we 're
| anxious that that might not happen under "our economic
| system", we need to look at what has changed from then to
| now.
|
| In a free market, the natural response to the emergence of
| a technology that reduces the need for human labor in a
| particular area is for humans to shift to other
| occupations. That is what happened in response to the
| emergence of all of the technologies I listed above.
|
| If that does not happen, it is because the market is not
| free, and the most likely reason for that is government
| regulation, and the most likely reason for the government
| regulation is regulatory capture, i.e., some rich people
| bought regulations that favored them from the government,
| in order to protect themselves from free market
| competition.
| quicklime wrote:
| But usually there's a one-way flow of intent from the human
| to the tool. With a lot of AI the feedback loop gets closed,
| and people are using it to help them make decisions, and
| might be taken far from the good outcome they were seeking.
|
| You can already see this today's internet. I'm sure the
| pizzagate people genuinely believed they were doing a good
| thing.
|
| This isn't the same as an amoral tool like a knife, where a
| human decides between cutting vegetables or stabbing people.
| pdonis wrote:
| _> With a lot of AI the feedback loop gets closed, and
| people are using it to help them make decisions, and might
| be taken far from the good outcome they were seeking._
|
| The answer to this is simple: don't use a tool you don't
| understand. You can't fix this problem by nerfing the tool.
| You have to fix it by holding humans responsible for how
| they use tools, so they have an incentive to use them
| properly, and to _not_ use them if they can 't meet that
| requirement.
| bumby wrote:
| This is true, but skirts around a bit of the black box
| problem. It's hard to put guardrails on an amoral tool that
| makes it hard to fully understand the failure modes. And it
| doesn't even require "bad acting humans" to do damage; it can
| just be good-intending-but-naive humans.
| pdonis wrote:
| It's true that the more complex and capable the tool is,
| the harder it is to understand what it empowers the humans
| using it to do. I only wanted to emphasize that it's the
| humans that are the vital link, so to speak.
| bumby wrote:
| You're not wrong, but I think this quote partly misses
| the point:
|
| > _The problem to be solved here is not how to control
| AI_
|
| When we talk about mitigations, it _is_ explicitly about
| how to control AI, sometimes irrespective of how someone
| uses it.
|
| Think about it this way: suppose I develop some stock-
| trading AI that has the ability to (inadvertently or
| purposefully) crash the stock market. Is the better
| control to put limits on the software itself so that it
| cannot crash the market or to put regulations in place to
| penalize people who use the software to crash the market?
| There is a hierarchy of controls when we talk about risk,
| and engineering controls (limiting the software) are
| always above administrative controls (limiting the humans
| using the software).
|
| (I realize it's not an either/or and both controls can -
| and probably should - be in place, but I described it as
| a dichotomy to illustrate the point)
| indigo0086 wrote:
| Of people understood this then they would have to live with
| the unsatisfying reality that not all violators can be
| punished. When you do it this way and paint the technology as
| potentially criminal that they can get revenge on
| corporations that which is what is mostly artist types want
| TheOtherHobbes wrote:
| It's not either/or. At some point AI is likely to become
| autonomous.
|
| If it's been trained by bad actors, that's really not a good
| thing.
| pk-protect-ai wrote:
| Define the "bad actors". Is my example with Sam Altman above
| can be seen as a valid one?
| jcutrell wrote:
| I think this may be a little short sighted.
|
| AI "systems" are provided some level of agency by their very
| nature. That is, for example, you cannot predict the outcomes
| of certain learning models.
|
| We _necessarily_ provide agency to AI because that's the whole
| point! As we develop more advanced AI, it will have more
| agency. It is an extension of the just world fallacy, IMO, to
| say that AI is "just a tool" - we lend agency and allow the
| tool to train on real world (flawed) data.
|
| Hallucinations are a great example of this in an LLM. We want
| the machine to have agency to cite its sources... but we also
| create potential for absolute nonsense citations, which can be
| harmful in and of themselves, though the human on the using
| side may have perfectly positive intent.
| adventured wrote:
| > Bad acting humans with AI systems are the threat, not the AI
| systems themselves.
|
| It's worth noting this is exactly the same argument used by
| pro-gun advocates as it pertains to gun rights. It's identical
| to: guns don't harm/kill people, people harm/kill people (the
| gun isn't doing anything until the bad actor aims and pulls the
| trigger; bad acting humans with guns are the real problem;
| etc).
|
| It isn't an effective argument and is very widely mocked by the
| political left. I doubt it will work to shield the AI sector
| from aggressive regulation.
| ndriscoll wrote:
| It is an effective argument though, and the left is widely
| mocked by the right for simultaneously believing that only
| government should have the necessary tools for violence, and
| also ACAB.
|
| Assuming ML systems are dangerous and powerful, would you
| rather they be restricted to a small group of power-holders
| who will _definitely_ use them to your detriment /to control
| you (they already do) or democratize that power and take a
| chance that someone _may_ use them against you?
| dontlaugh wrote:
| Communists and anarchists understand that the working class
| needs to defend itself from both the capitalist state and
| from fascist paramilitaries, thus must be collectively
| armed.
|
| It's only a kind of liberal (and thus right wing) that
| argues for gun control. Other kinds of liberals that call
| themselves "conservative" (also right wing) argue against
| it and for (worthless) individual gun rights.
| Dalewyn wrote:
| By that logic:
|
| Are we going to ban and regulate Photoshop and GIMP because
| bad people use them to create false imagery for propaganda?
|
| Actually, back that up for a second.
|
| Are we going to ban and regulate computers (enterprise and
| personal) because bad people use them for bad things?
|
| Are we going to ban and regulate speech because bad people
| say bad things?
|
| Are we going to ban and regulate hands because bad people use
| them to do bad things?
|
| The buck always starts and stops at the person doing the act.
| A tool is just a tool, blaming the tool is nothing but an act
| of scapegoating.
| a_wild_dandan wrote:
| This argument pertains to _every_ tool: guns, kitchen knives,
| cars, the anarchist cookbook, etc. You aren 't against the
| argument. You're against how it's used. (Hmm...)
| bumby wrote:
| > _Bad acting humans with AI systems are the threat_
|
| Does this mean "humans with bad motives" or does it extend to
| "humans who deploy AI without an understanding of the risk"?
|
| I would say the latter warrants a discussion on the AI systems,
| if they make it hard to understand the risk due to opaqueness.
| m463 wrote:
| It reminds me of dog breeds.
|
| Some dogs get bad reputations, but humans are an intricate part
| of the picture. For example, German Shepherds are objectively
| dangerous, but have a good reputation because they are trained
| and cared for by responsible people such as for the police.
| kurthr wrote:
| The disturbing thing to consider is that it might be bad acting
| AI with human systems. I can easily see a situation where a bad
| acting algorithm alone wouldn't have nearly so negative an
| effect, if it weren't tuned precisely and persuasively to get
| more humans to do the work of increasing the global suffering
| of others for temporary individual gain.
|
| To be clear, I'm not sure LLMs and their near term derivatives
| are so incredibly clever, but I have confidence that many
| humans have a propensity for easily manipulated irrational
| destructive stupidity, if the algorithm feeds them what they
| want to hear.
| pmarreck wrote:
| Well, it's a good thing we have easily-procured open-source LLM's
| (including uncensored ones) out now, so that everyone can play
| and we can quickly find out that these FUD tactics were nonsense!
|
| https://ollama.ai/
|
| https://ollama.ai/library
| SirMaster wrote:
| Well it's better than the opposite thought right?
|
| If they were lying about there being no or low danger when there
| really was a high danger?
| toasted-subs wrote:
| I got fired from Google because somebody was tracking and
| harassing me within the city of Mountain View.
|
| If we are going to worry about AIs let's identify individuals who
| aren't representing the government and causing societal issues.
| TheCaptain4815 wrote:
| Kind of interesting point cause the US government has an
| incentive to regulate this field and try pushing more gains
| towards big tech (mostly american) instead of open source.
| specialist wrote:
| One nuclear bomb can ruin your whole day.
|
| This feels like the Cold War's nuclear arms treaty and policy
| debates. How many nukes are too many? 100? 10,000?
|
| The people pearl clutching about AI are focused on the wrong
| problem.
|
| The threat (to humanity) is corporations. AI is just their force
| multiplier.
|
| h/t Ted Chiang. I subscribe to his views on this stuff. More or
| less.
| more_corn wrote:
| Yes... but. Lying is the wrong way to frame it "using the real
| risk to distract" would be better. I'm concerned and my concern
| is not a lie. Terminator was a concern and that predated any
| effort to capture the industry.
|
| Also for those who think skynet is an example of a " hysterical
| satanic cult" scare there are active efforts to use AI for the
| inhumanly large task of managing battlefield resources. We are
| literally training AI to kill and it's going to be better than us
| basically instantly.
|
| We 100% should NOT be doing that. Calling that very real concern
| a lie is a dangerous bit of hyperbole.
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