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After OpenAI's blowup, it seems pretty clear that 'AI safety' isn't a real thing

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Re: After OpenAI's blowup, it seems pretty clear that 'AI safety' isn't a real thing

#2
But is there a real AI-threat, that would need real AI-safety?

To me it still looks like a nice bar-trick, not AI. It is very clever, very nice, even astounding. But doesn't look threatening - at some cases it is even dumb. The fear-mongering looks more like scare-marketing. Which is also clever, in my opinion.

But maybe I'm just out of touch.

Re: After OpenAI's blowup, it seems pretty clear that 'AI safety' isn't a real thing

#3

But is there a real AI-threat, that would need real AI-safety? To me it still looks like a nice bar-trick, not AI. It is very clever, very nice, even astounding. But doesn't look threatening - at some cases it is even dumb. The fear-mongering looks more like scare-marketing. Which is also clever, in my opinion. But maybe I'm just out of touch.

The only threat is automated blogspam creation. LLMs are not AI (not even close), only marketed as such.

Re: After OpenAI's blowup, it seems pretty clear that 'AI safety' isn't a real thing

#4

But is there a real AI-threat, that would need real AI-safety? To me it still looks like a nice bar-trick, not AI. It is very clever, very nice, even astounding. But doesn't look threatening - at some cases it is even dumb. The fear-mongering looks more like scare-marketing. Which is also clever, in my opinion. But maybe I'm just out of touch.

We went through the same thing with self-driving cars. All the talking heads were crowing about how many jobs were going to get eliminated soon and we needed to prepare society for the ramifications. About a decade into it and they are just starting to roll out self-driving taxis in very limited controlled fashion. And the loss of jobs that everyone was worried about is easily another decade away (if at all).

LLMs are cool and useful. So is self-driving tech. But the fear mongering is a bit premature. Folks seem to have bought in to the singularity style AGI event, but reality is AGI if possible is going to be a long slow incremental process.

Re: After OpenAI's blowup, it seems pretty clear that 'AI safety' isn't a real thing

#5
I've always interpreted AI "safety" as being more about ensuring ideological consistency and a particular narrative than anything about actually keeping humanity "safe".

And I'm not even talking about the culture war, just yesterday I tried having DALLE generate a picture for a DND character and it kept refusing to (and no it wasn't some sort of weird hentai thing) because it felt like it was not an appropriate image.

Re: After OpenAI's blowup, it seems pretty clear that 'AI safety' isn't a real thing

#6

But is there a real AI-threat, that would need real AI-safety? To me it still looks like a nice bar-trick, not AI. It is very clever, very nice, even astounding. But doesn't look threatening - at some cases it is even dumb. The fear-mongering looks more like scare-marketing. Which is also clever, in my opinion. But maybe I'm just out of touch.

It was a fire drill for AGI, and one that was failed badly.

Re: After OpenAI's blowup, it seems pretty clear that 'AI safety' isn't a real thing

#8

But is there a real AI-threat, that would need real AI-safety? To me it still looks like a nice bar-trick, not AI. It is very clever, very nice, even astounding. But doesn't look threatening - at some cases it is even dumb. The fear-mongering looks more like scare-marketing. Which is also clever, in my opinion. But maybe I'm just out of touch.

The current models are static, they do not get modified by self learning. Unless someone already build in a Skynet backdoor, we are safe.

...and I am hoping all nuclear missiles are air gapped anyway...

Re: After OpenAI's blowup, it seems pretty clear that 'AI safety' isn't a real thing

#9
Of course it isn’t. It’s about regulatory capture. They’re trying to con technically unsophisticated politicians (which is almost all of them) into granting them a monopoly or erecting a bunch of onerous regulations to make competition or decentralized open source alternatives harder.

Their allies in this are otherwise very smart people that have thought themselves into a panic over this stuff, as smart people sometimes do. Intelligence increases one’s likelihood of delusional thinking, especially when paired with an intellectual climate that praises being contrarian and intellectual edgelording as a sign of genius. (This is my personal hypothesis on why the average intelligence is not higher. It’s not always adaptive. Smart people can be way better at being dumb.)

There are dangers associated with AI but they are not the sci fi scenarios the doomers are worried about. Most of them revolve around bad things humans can do that AI can assist and accelerate, like propaganda or terrorism.

Re: After OpenAI's blowup, it seems pretty clear that 'AI safety' isn't a real thing

#10

But is there a real AI-threat, that would need real AI-safety? To me it still looks like a nice bar-trick, not AI. It is very clever, very nice, even astounding. But doesn't look threatening - at some cases it is even dumb. The fear-mongering looks more like scare-marketing. Which is also clever, in my opinion. But maybe I'm just out of touch.

Most of the ai safety arguments revolve around “once it’s powerful enough to cause damage it’ll be too late to come up with a strategy”. If you accept that it doesn’t matter that ai systems now suck, since we don’t know when they’ll improve.
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