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Microsoft lays off one of its responsible AI teams

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Re: Microsoft lays off one of its responsible AI teams

#321

Post by Eisenstein »

welshwelsh wrote: post #318
Eisenstein wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Much better off when were literally traumatizing babies to see how they would react to adverse stimulus. * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Little_Albert_experiment

I would agree to that sentiment only if we applied the same ethical standards to parents and people in general, not just scientists. Babies and children today are routinely subjected to avoidable adverse stimuli, such as circumcision and corporal punishment. That a typical parent can do this at will for no good reason, but a scientist wanting to do something similar to advance human knowledge must seek approval from…

A scientist can certainly circumcise and spank their own child. It is doing it to other people's kids that is a no-go. If they want to traumatize their own kid and write it up then they certainly can, but it will make for a terrible study. I'm not sure what your point is.

Re: Microsoft lays off one of its responsible AI teams

#322

Post by FeepingCreature »

hgsgm wrote: post #310
FeepingCreature wrote: post #195

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Note that if you see someone bring up Roko, it's overwhelmingly somebody arguing against alignment researchers; its use is primarily as "look at this crazy thing these people believe."

That's because the rationalist/alignment people's belief system leads to a logical conclusion that talking about Roko's Basilisk harms the person you tell, and even rationalists have a human heart interfering with their extreme ultilitarianism.

I mean, it's also because no rationalists take Roko's Basilisk intellectually seriously nowadays. There was a period of maybe a few months in 2010 where people were genuinely worried about it, and then they gradually figured out the logical holes in it. Any spread after that has been from outsiders who were fascinated with the idea. Nowadays it mostly persists as a trap for people with schizoaffective disorders.

(Disclaimer: my view is of the forum itself; I don't know how long it persisted in SF circles.)

Re: Microsoft lays off one of its responsible AI teams

#323

Post by xpe »

bioemerl wrote: post #264
whywhywhywhy wrote: post #258

End of the day the AI space will be dominated by whatever model doesn’t lecture you about “as a large language model I can’t…”. And the company that will ship that won’t have the largest “AI safety and ethics” team. ChatGPT will become as irrelevant as Dall-E2 when that happens. (Not saying this is for the best, just saying what I think will happen)

I believe it's for the best. The dangers of AI are theoretical. The dangers of corporations being in control aren't.

> The dangers of AI are theoretical.

What do you mean by this?

Many people throw out the word ‘theoretical’ as some kind of way to imply that something ‘isn’t real’ or worth worrying about. Something might seem implausible until it happens. Gravity waves were once ‘only’ theoretical after all :)

There are plenty of AI dystopian predictions, and many of these are possible and impactful. Many of these theories are based on solid understandings of human nature. It is hard to know how technology will evolve, but we have some useful tools to make risk assessments.

> The dangers of corporations being in control aren’t.

There have been plenty of dystopian predictions about corporate control too. I take the point that we’ve seen them over and over throughout history.

Re: Microsoft lays off one of its responsible AI teams

#324

Post by djvdq »

ModernMech wrote: post #292
whywhywhywhy wrote: post #258

End of the day the AI space will be dominated by whatever model doesn’t lecture you about “as a large language model I can’t…”. And the company that will ship that won’t have the largest “AI safety and ethics” team. ChatGPT will become as irrelevant as Dall-E2 when that happens. (Not saying this is for the best, just saying what I think will happen)

Depends. As with Internet forums, the presence of Nazis (or whatever similar bad actor) could ruin it for everyone else. Let’s say you are a high schooler writing an essay about WWII. You ask Google LLM about it, and it starts writing Neo Nazi propaganda about how the holocaust was a hoax, but even if it wasn’t, it would have been fine. The reason it’s telling you those things is because it’s been trained by Neo Nazi…

Blatant propaganda will of course ruin such product for regular people. But subtle propaganda? I wouldn't be so sure. And it's not only about Nazis.

Re: Microsoft lays off one of its responsible AI teams

#325

Post by djvdq »

sebzim4500 wrote: post #237
college_physics wrote: post #210

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Microsoft is very aware thanks, that is comforting > the cat is out of the bag even if you don't like it thanks for bullying us around > the legitimately talented AI thinkers who exactly authorised you to project legitimacy in a space that has not seen any regulation?

>thanks for bullying us around Who is bullying who exactly? >who exactly authorised you to project legitimacy in a space that has not seen any regulation? He's using the second meaning of 'legitimate' able to be defended with logic or justification; valid.

>Who is bullying who exactly?

People telling that we shouldn't worry about such topic, because companies are aware of them. Because companies never did bad things just to earn more, right?

Re: Microsoft lays off one of its responsible AI teams

#326

Post by m3kw9 »

hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #9

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…

Aka Chief Woke

Re: Microsoft lays off one of its responsible AI teams

#327

Post by BeFlatXIII »

worrycue wrote: post #74
anonylizard wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

What's the societal harm in karma-farming. It was all fake when it was purely humans, anyway.

Re: Microsoft lays off one of its responsible AI teams

#328

Post by BeFlatXIII »

ethbr0 wrote: post #167
vorticalbox wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you consider "karma" farming "mass harm"?

In answer, how frequently does "append Reddit" appear as a top comment on a "Google search is ad-optimized garbage now" article?

Perhaps this will force people to search on subject-specific forums instead of subsections of the everything forum.

Re: Microsoft lays off one of its responsible AI teams

#329

Post by xpe »

f0e4c2f7 wrote: post #269
whywhywhywhy wrote: post #258

End of the day the AI space will be dominated by whatever model doesn’t lecture you about “as a large language model I can’t…”. And the company that will ship that won’t have the largest “AI safety and ethics” team. ChatGPT will become as irrelevant as Dall-E2 when that happens. (Not saying this is for the best, just saying what I think will happen)

I hope you are correct. The alternative is the space being dominated by regulation.

> The alternative is the space being dominated by regulation.

This is a false dichotomy. Regulation can take many forms. It is an essential tool to reduce the probability and impact of market failures.

Using medical/health metaphors can help frame these discussions in less polarizing ways:

1. How do we balance prevention versus treatment? The key question is not if particular markets can struggle and fail in certain conditions. They do. More insightful questions are: (a) how should we mitigate the consequences and (b) what kinds of regulation are worth the cost?

2. What about public health? What happens when the patient won’t get vaccinated and contagion spreads? / We see this in computer security. Lax security by one can spillover to many. / Banks (and even financial systems), left to their own devices are not as resilient and fair as we would like.

Underlying this whole discussion is also “what timeframe are we optimizing for?” and “what exactly are we optimizing for? Economic efficiency? Equality? Something else? Some combination?”

Re: Microsoft lays off one of its responsible AI teams

#330

Post by bitterblotter »

IMTDb wrote: post #221
kramerger wrote: post #205

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think there is a lot of unjustified hatred for the AI ethics guys. From what I have seen, they have raised manu important issues so far, and led to many improvements both around ethics and AI in genetal. For example, the cops wanted to arrest people based on input from image recognition systems. Someone demonstrated that the leading system flagged multiple members of Congress as dangerous fugitives and that was the…

> Someone demonstrated that the leading system flagged multiple members of Congress as dangerous fugitives and that was the end of that. That's not a question of ethics, it's a question of the model performance.

Although it is an attempt to circumvent unethical use of AI
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