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This is the case with literally all kinds of professional ethicists. Thanks to them, we do not routinely do scientific challenge trials and plenty of other valuable experiments, and in many cases are reduced to collecting significantly worse data and doing it very slowly and expensively.
These sorts of adjunct, off-to-the-side "ethics" teams are always corporate window dressing, and when push comes to shove they always get jettisoned when competition demands an increase in speed. I don't mean to start a flame war, but this is a reason why I think "Chief Diversity Officers" are such an ill-conceived notion. It's not that I don't think diversity in corporate environments is extremely valuable, but it's…
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This. People should understand AI safety != AI ethics. AI safety has two branches, AI ethics and AI alignment. Those two branches despise each other with intense passion. The alignment branch (responsible for developing RLHF->ChatGPT) believes AI ethics is completely trivial, and distracts attention away from existential risks. The ethics branch (responsible for all the media attention about racist AIs/bias etc) view…
> this has not caused mass social harm despite the tens of millions of users Isn’t it a bit early to tell? I can foresee ChatGPT being used to farm “karma” on social media sites to bot accounts to credibility on sites like Reddit - maybe even HN.
OpenAI is indeed partially a subsidiary of Microsoft and is essentially Microsoft AI.
Anyone who believed that they were going to stick with their AI safety / ethics bullshit is beyond naïve since it is obvious that OpenAI is now driven by AI grifters pretending to care about 'ethics' when that was never the case.
It always has been about closed source AI, money, EEE and lies. Typical Microsoft.
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This is the case with literally all kinds of professional ethicists. Thanks to them, we do not routinely do scientific challenge trials and plenty of other valuable experiments, and in many cases are reduced to collecting significantly worse data and doing it very slowly and expensively.
These sorts of adjunct, off-to-the-side "ethics" teams are always corporate window dressing, and when push comes to shove they always get jettisoned when competition demands an increase in speed. I don't mean to start a flame war, but this is a reason why I think "Chief Diversity Officers" are such an ill-conceived notion. It's not that I don't think diversity in corporate environments is extremely valuable, but it's…
This. People should understand AI safety != AI ethics. AI safety has two branches, AI ethics and AI alignment. Those two branches despise each other with intense passion. The alignment branch (responsible for developing RLHF->ChatGPT) believes AI ethics is completely trivial, and distracts attention away from existential risks. The ethics branch (responsible for all the media attention about racist AIs/bias etc) view…
I don’t think that’s really true. Rather, the faction that sees alignment as a subordinate concern within ethics hates the faction that sees ethics as a subordinate concern within alignment.
> The alignment branch (responsible for developing RLHF->ChatGPT) believes AI ethics is completely trivial, and distracts attention away from existential risks.
Not really; the alignment-priority branch has no problem recognizing (certain subsets of) the bias and other issues that are the more central focus of the ethics branch as real and significant, but they view alignment as solving them and view narrow centralized control as a mitigation (for both “alignment” and “ethics” types of issues) until it is solved. They also view progress on AI as a general priority, for a mix of commercial, ideological, and other [0] reasons, and their own progress on AI in particular as essential (because they view AI from others – either because potentially unaligned, or for other reasons – as a critical and potentially existential threat.)
> The ethics branch (responsible for all the media attention about racist AIs/bias etc) view alignment people as pie in the sky researchers whose results are irrelevant to society.
No, they view them as an enormous threat [EDIT: 3], because they are working in a way that not only insufficiently mitigates in basic approach because of a lack of priority, but also magnifies by its focus on closely concentrated control, the issues of paramount concern to the ethics-focused.
> It seems increasingly that the concerns from the ethics branch have not come to pass at all.
They have in fact come to pass in deployments of AI in all kinds of socially-significant roles. E.g, the facial recognition in the CBP One app newly mandated for asylum seekers doesn’t work well for dark-skinned faces (racial bias in facial image recognition is literally one of the earliest publicly recognized AI bias problems that motivated the AI ethics movement.) They’ve also manifested in systems deployed in welfare management [1], hiring [2], and all kinds of other areas.
[0] e.g., Roko’s Basilisk
[1] https://www.wired.com/story/welfare-algorithms-discriminatio...
[2] https://www.reuters.com/article/us-amazon-com-jobs-automatio...
[3] EDIT: It’s very hard to emphasize how much this is true. Here's, though, an illustration I came across on Twitter after first posting this message (its someone from the ehics side laying out their view of the threat from certain people on the alignment side, though that may not be obvious because the interconnected set of disagreements goes way deeper than the alignment vs ethics thing, which is just a surface manifestation): https://twitter.com/xriskology/status/1635313838508883968?t=...
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Not in this case. If intelligence always created intelligent machines that are capable of replacing us, then how is that not intelligence as well? Further, silicon-based lifeforms would be able to spread and travel the universe much easier because what is time to a machine?
Some machines might last longer than us but they are still subject to the same laws of thermodynamics. Most computers from 20+ years ago are inoperable today; show me a machine that can survive millions of years.
These sorts of adjunct, off-to-the-side "ethics" teams are always corporate window dressing, and when push comes to shove they always get jettisoned when competition demands an increase in speed. I don't mean to start a flame war, but this is a reason why I think "Chief Diversity Officers" are such an ill-conceived notion. It's not that I don't think diversity in corporate environments is extremely valuable, but it's…
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"If I don't make the world eating machine, someone else might make the world eating machine first!" No wonder we don't see aliens filling the universe. Intelligence is its own great filter.
Not in this case. If intelligence always created intelligent machines that are capable of replacing us, then how is that not intelligence as well? Further, silicon-based lifeforms would be able to spread and travel the universe much easier because what is time to a machine?
In my opinion, carbon based life forms are the most optimized solution to the problem. It'll be very hard (or close to impossible) for humans to come up with an alternative. Only if we master infinite energy and infinite computation, we might stand a chance to replace that.
These sorts of adjunct, off-to-the-side "ethics" teams are always corporate window dressing, and when push comes to shove they always get jettisoned when competition demands an increase in speed. I don't mean to start a flame war, but this is a reason why I think "Chief Diversity Officers" are such an ill-conceived notion. It's not that I don't think diversity in corporate environments is extremely valuable, but it's…
The (productive) point of the ethical AI team is to have internal people to consult when launching an AI product. Embedding ethical AI people on teams makes about as much sense as embedding legal counsel. Their services won't be used on a single team nearly enough to justify their inclusion. Of course, it can be window dressing if the company doesn't actually have product teams care. Just like a CDO position. But you…
And the ethical AI team doesn’t want to sit back and wait for people to come to them. They want a seat at the table for all important AI products.
More in my comment on the other submission about this news https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35146611