Uncensored Models

>I do agree open models enable things, but… I dunno, this feels like generating 100s of images of girls with gigantic breasts using stable diffusion.

Are you saying you prefer actual women be exploited to take these pictures?

>If you want to write that kind of stuff you can; do you really need a model to generate an endless stream of it?

If you want to use an LLM to do insert {x} here, you can, do you really need a model to generate an endless stream of it?

> Enjoy responsibly. You are responsible for whatever you do with the output of these models, just like you are responsible for whatever you do with a knife, a car, or a lighter.

The problem is: if I do something with a knife, say I threaten someone to stab them, I can and will get charged by the court for that crime. If I use AI to create content that incites violence (say, I create a video alleging a Quran burning), I would not be held liable for the consequences of my action.

The author's POV completely ignores the disparity in liability in the digital world and "digital ethics" in general.

What's also very unfortunate is overloading the term "alignment" with a different meaning, which generates a lot of confusion in AI conversations.

The "alignment" talked about here is just usual petty human bickering. How to make the AI not swear, not enable stupidity, not enable political wrongthing while promoting political rightthing, etc. Maybe important to us day-to-day, but mostly inconsequential.

Before LLMs and ChatGPT exploded in popularity and got everyone opining on them, "alignment" meant something else. It meant how to make an AI that doesn't talk us into letting it take over our infrastructure, or secretly bootstrap nanotechnology[0] to use for its own goals, which may include strip-mining the planet and disassembling humans. These kinds of things. Even lower on the doom-scale, it meant training an AI that wouldn't creatively misinterpret our ideas in ways that lead to death and suffering, simply because it wasn't able to correctly process or value these concepts and how they work for us.

There is some overlap between the two uses of this term, but it isn't that big. If anything, it's the attitudes that start to worry me. I'm all for open source and uncensored models at this point, but there's no clear boundary for when it stops being about "anyone should be able to use their car or knife like they see fit", and becomes "anyone should be able to use their vials of highly virulent pathogens[1] like they see fit".

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[0] - The go-to example of Eliezer is AI hacking some funny Internet money, using it to mail-order some synthesized proteins from a few biotech labs, delivered to a poor schmuck who it'll pay for mixing together the contents of the random vials that came in the mail... bootstrapping a multi-step process that ends up with generic nanotech under control of the AI.

I used to be of two minds about this example - it both seemed totally plausible and pure sci-fi fever dream. Recent news of people successfully applying transformer models to protein synthesis tasks, with at least one recent case speculating the model is learning some hitherto unknown patterns of the problem space, much like LLMs are learning to understand concepts from natural language... well, all that makes me lean towards "totally plausible", as we might be close to an AI model that understands proteins much better than we do.

[1] - I've seen people compare strong AIs to off-the-shelf pocket nuclear weapons, but that's a bad take, IMO. Pocket off-the-shelf bioweapon is better, as it captures the indefinite range of spread an AI on the loose would have.

The problem with ChatGPT / Bard which does this censoring, it is a path forward to ideological automated indoctrination. Ask Bard how many sex the dog species has (a placental mammal species) and it will give you BS about sex being a complex subject and purposely interjecting gender identity.

If you are confused, sex corresponds to your gametes, males produce or have the structure to produce small mobile gametes, females produce large immobile gametes.

Both Bard and ChatGPT don't interject gender identity when asking how many sexes a Ginkgo tree has. It answers two. Bard interjects about gender identity when asked about the dog species sex, but ChatGPT does not but it does confuse intersex with some type of third state.

Uncensored wizard just says 2 sexes, male and female. Simple and true. It does not add to it by interjecting about intersex .

Again to contrast with Bard: Bard when asked "How many arms does the human species have?" it responds "The human species has two arms. This is a biological fact that has been observed in all human populations throughout history. There are rare cases of people being born with more or less than two arms, but these cases are considered to be congenital defects." The majority, if not all cases, of intersex fall into the same category. However, it is ideologically for the moral Gnostic (Queer Theorists who deconstruct normality) to interpret these things differently.

So yes, I don't trust a single group of people to fine-tune these models. They have shown themselves untrustworthy.

As someone who has spent a lot of time in various cultures, it's pretty much impossible to define a universal set of shared values across all cultures. I grew up in subculture that valued intellectual freedom and questioning everything. But we had certain things that we often said were universally wrong (sin) in all cultures, like murder and rape. On the surface this seems true. But then you start asking how something like murder is defined and you realize that cultures do not share specific ideas about this. Some say things like euthanasia and abortion are murder, others say that they're not. Some cultures say all information should be free, other cultures say you should censor information about things like building bombs, or making your own medicine or repairing your own devices. There is no universally agreed on standard that won't offend some culture somewhere.