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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

#431

Post by B1FF_PSUVM »

AstralStorm wrote: post #198
jeremyjh wrote: post #183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes and the dangers of AI overlords have been known at least since the first Terminator movie /s. Seriously though, people tend to dismiss things they are know are bad if there is no immediate harm. Certainly they had no idea how incredibly pervasive the lead from gasoline would be, that it would be detectable at harmful levels in basically everyone. It is also hard to measure these harms. How much crime of the 70s a…

Oh we instantly did know how bad it could get. General Motors,Standard Oil and DuPont knew for sure, they had industrial incidents and lied about them! US Surgeon General was bought, people with opposing opinions were sued. It was instantly obvious to anyone that using leaded gas esp. in agriculture would be deadly and toxic. The risk was ignored for profit, PR handled, underplayed. Even the chronic effects were know…

Thanks, longer piece on that: https://www.bbc.com/news/business-40593353

Re: Microsoft lays off one of its responsible AI teams

#432

Post by pmarreck »

AstralStorm wrote: post #275
pmarreck wrote: post #270

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Stable diffusion does not default to creating black people (you have to insert black into the prompt), honestly in order to make race an irrelevant or random factor, I believe the training data would have to be evenly divided between all known races... and possibly some blends of races? And I think that would be a good thing. Could you synthesize such data by (ironically perhaps) using AI to change the race of a pe…

You can certainly try this kind of data augmentation strategy. Pretty sure it'll fail because of the text analysis still being biased. You would need equalized amounts of text referring to various groups of people and topics too. That's much harder to augment.

What's stopping someone from taking training text that mentions races by name (using any common name) and having it automatically changed to a different race for a new training sample?

Re: Microsoft lays off one of its responsible AI teams

#433

Post by snickerbockers »

dweinus wrote: post #411
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…

> It seems increasingly that the concerns from the ethics branch have not come to pass at all. Nonsense, there are countless ethical and alignment harms in the wild, and have been for many years. For example: - midjourney ripping off artists = ethical harm - google search telling people to throw batteries in the ocean = alignment harm - Buzzfeed slashing staff and replacing them with chatgpt = ethical harm - google p…

>- Buzzfeed slashing staff and replacing them with chatgpt = ethical harm

yeah but in buzzfeed's case it's a bit moot because their content can't possibly get any worse than it already is.

Re: Microsoft lays off one of its responsible AI teams

#434

Post by marcosdumay »

Xcelerate wrote: post #252
bmc7505 wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Those two branches despise each other with intense passion. I never actually made this connection before, but having spent far too much time listening to both camps, this observation does ring true. Another observation I had is that there is an orthogonal axis to the safety/ethics dichotomy that follows a more scholastic approach, namely neuro/symbolism. These two branches correspond, roughly, to the debate between m…

> The symbolists place a heavier emphasis on model interpretability and believe learning emerges from a logical substrate, albeit at a much higher level of abstraction. These people still exist? Personally, I don’t think gradient descent is the way to AGI either (I think it’s efficient algorithmic search over the space of all computable programs), but I haven’t heard anything from the symbols crowd since the early 20…

Except for classifiers and LLMs, every single thing that is successful seems to be mixed. So, yes, it exists. It's only out there solving problems, instead of buying hype because there is no use-case.

Re: Microsoft lays off one of its responsible AI teams

#435

Post by [deleted] »

bioemerl wrote: post #340
xpe wrote: post #323

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 base…

I'm saying that most predictions about the dystopian AI future are typical of any generation encountering a disruptive technology. They're exaggerated and built from assumptions. They also always seem to conclude that the answer to these problems is to keep these machines centralized in the hands of big companies and governments, which is a very strange conclusion when they tend to get paychecks from those groups. At…

[deleted]

Re: Microsoft lays off one of its responsible AI teams

#436

Post by xpe »

bioemerl wrote: post #340
xpe wrote: post #323

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 base…

I'm saying that most predictions about the dystopian AI future are typical of any generation encountering a disruptive technology. They're exaggerated and built from assumptions. They also always seem to conclude that the answer to these problems is to keep these machines centralized in the hands of big companies and governments, which is a very strange conclusion when they tend to get paychecks from those groups. At…

> They also always seem to conclude that the answer to these problems is to keep these machines centralized in the hands of big companies and governments, which is a very strange conclusion when they tend to get paychecks from those groups.

I'm not sure who you mean by they.

I'd suggest a vast majority of the public mindshare (in the US at least) of technology gone wrong and dystopias come from sci-fi.

In general, I have not noticed sci-fi making such conclusions. I rarely notice them drawing any hard conclusions. Readers often come away with a mix of emotions: curiosity, anxiety, excitement, wonder, or simply the joy of stepping outside one's usual reality.

What I read and watch tends to paint a picture more than pitch or imply solutions.

- 1984 seems to make the opposite point, right? It is the classic example of the surveillance state. as such, it is a counter example of centralized power.

- A Scanner Darkly (movie) explore the question of who watches the watchers. It does not paint a pretty picture of the agency doing the surveillance.

- The Ministry of the Future shows how a government agency can't really do much without widespread decentralized underground support. As drones get cheaper, civilian activists become terrorists who assassinate climate unfriendly business people. Spoiler alert: it may not fit the pattern of a dystopian novel.

- Her (a man falling in love with his OS) explores the personal side in a compelling way.

Re: Microsoft lays off one of its responsible AI teams

#437

Post by xpe »

bioemerl wrote: post #340
xpe wrote: post #323

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 base…

I'm saying that most predictions about the dystopian AI future are typical of any generation encountering a disruptive technology. They're exaggerated and built from assumptions. They also always seem to conclude that the answer to these problems is to keep these machines centralized in the hands of big companies and governments, which is a very strange conclusion when they tend to get paychecks from those groups. At…

> Our way of life, as it stands today, will not survive. That's not bad, just different.

What do you mean by way of life?

Even if we are only talking about supposedly purely subjective things (like fashion) or seemingly arbitrary things (like 60 hertz power), or social agreements (like driving on the right side of the road), almost everything has implications.

I reject the notion that people should punt on value judgments.

Even if you subscribe some kind of moral relativism, it is wiser to reserve judgment until you see what happens.

I don't subscribe to moral relativism. Some value systems work better than others in specific contexts.

Re: Microsoft lays off one of its responsible AI teams

#438

Post by ironSkillet »

rsynnott wrote: post #298
ironSkillet wrote: post #224

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem with measuring the "harm" of something like AI vs e.g. lead is that with lead there are direct first order chemical harmful effects that are indisputable. With AI, any harm will get expressed via complex social dynamics, which involve so many other variables as well.

Okay, so for leaded petrol substitute mortgage backed securities. The person who invented those was not going “buahahah, fly my pretties, cause a global financial crisis”; they probably thought they were doing a _good, ultimately of benefit to society thing_. And yet…

And therefore we also fail as a society to effectively regulate various complex financial instruments before they actually cause an obvious problem.

My point is not that we should or should not regulate AI. It's just that I believe the causal link from certain types of AI usage to concrete harm for society is too complex for enough humans to band together and achieve consensus a priori on regulation.

Re: Microsoft lays off one of its responsible AI teams

#439

Post by hughesjj »

dragonwriter wrote: post #350
ben_w wrote: post #220

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sam Bankman-Fried is a uniquely terrible example of ideology, given St. Petersburg: https://conversationswithtyler.com/episodes/sam-bankman-frie... and https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/open-thread-250 (and, y'know, being a fraudster who temporarily pulled the wool over the eyes of the regulators not just the charities he promised money to) Also: is SBF really the central example of alignment in your head, and no…

> Also: is SBF really the central example of alignment in your head, No, he's a particularly well-known example of the broader ideology to which virtually all of tbe alignment camp subscribes, and which centers their desires for AI.

IMHO, the world would be better off without the Paypal Mafia and all their ilk.

Re: Microsoft lays off one of its responsible AI teams

#440

Post by hughesjj »

mola wrote: post #386
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…

Oh boy, the ethics problems do manifest in the real world much more than alignment problems. If only for the simple reason that ethics problems can and do arise in the use of very simple models (logistic regression) and are not preconditioned on achieving AGI or anything close. For example a logistic regression model for fraud detection that bases it's decision mostly on zip codes. Is actually a proxy for deciding ba…

Amazon dropped their AI resume reviewer because it would literally downrank you [0] if you attended a women's college or HBCU. anonylizard is talking out of their posterior in this particular thread.

[0] https://www.reuters.com/article/us-amazon-com-jobs-automatio...

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