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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

#11

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.

What damage will it cause?

I feel like there's "AI will replace jobs" level of damage, which, why would we regulate that? An insane amount of technology is developed with the purpose of improving productivity or outright replacing workers.

Then there's the "AI will go rogue", which I don't think is substantiated at all. Like, one can theorize about some novel, distinct system that is able to interact with the external world and becomes "evil", but that seems way, way beyond the helpful word-spitter-outers of today.

Then maybe there's "how do we handle deepfakes", or whatever, but... idk, is that it? Is that the thing we want to slow down for?

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

#12
post #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…

One thing I noticed recently and was able to reproduce a bunch of times is asking dall-e the exact same prompt where the only difference is the subject being described as a male or female and it refuses to generate the female one. I don't know what to think of it but it's weird.

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

#13
From the article: "If the point of corporate AI safety is to protect humanity from runaway AI, then, as an effective strategy for doing that, it has effectively just flunked its first big test."

That's a good point.

As I point out occasionally, the big near-term risk from AI is that it makes it possible for corporations, and governments, to do obnoxious things they already do, but can't yet do cost-effectively at scale. Targeted advertising was just the first step.

The next step is that once AIs get better at investing than humans, the dynamics of capitalism put them in charge. Think about that.

The political problem is that stopping this means limiting what corporations can do, regardless of how they do it. That's unacceptable in some circles.

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

#14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

What damage will it cause? I feel like there's "AI will replace jobs" level of damage, which, why would we regulate that? An insane amount of technology is developed with the purpose of improving productivity or outright replacing workers. Then there's the "AI will go rogue", which I don't think is substantiated at all. Like, one can theorize about some novel, distinct system that is able to interact with the externa…

Imo the worst case scenario is probably an AGI developed by a bad actor who uses it to take over the world. Agreed that rogue ai doesn’t seem super likely, but a rogue person with access to agi does not.

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

#15
Look, there is ASI/AGI safety, and "please don't swear and scam and misinform, and be unbiased" safety. ASI/AGI safety is only a concern right now if you believe in foom, i.e. that an AGI would rapidly self improve to an ASI and extinction level threat. I think it is absurd to believe that because AI right now is compute limited and any first AGI will only be able to run on large data centers. The latter kind of saftey is way less dramatic than the former and can be dealt with on the level of products and deployment: Sue actors that harm others according to already existing laws, like fraud.

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

#16
post #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.

LLMs are generating more and more of journalism. Especially sports and financial coverage, which is taking some numbers and blithering about them.

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

#18
post #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 ar…

Decades do actually pass however and worker protections also take decades to fight for, and put in place. In fact sometimes they take generations.

I agree with you about the fear mongering. I also just don't know where all this kind of not very accurate but very reassuring presentation of information will go and how it will sway others

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

#19
post #13

From the article: "If the point of corporate AI safety is to protect humanity from runaway AI, then, as an effective strategy for doing that, it has effectively just flunked its first big test." That's a good point. As I point out occasionally, the big near-term risk from AI is that it makes it possible for corporations, and governments, to do obnoxious things they already do, but can't yet do cost-effectively at sca…

[dead]

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

#20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

What damage will it cause? I feel like there's "AI will replace jobs" level of damage, which, why would we regulate that? An insane amount of technology is developed with the purpose of improving productivity or outright replacing workers. Then there's the "AI will go rogue", which I don't think is substantiated at all. Like, one can theorize about some novel, distinct system that is able to interact with the externa…

> Like, one can theorize about some novel, distinct system that is able to interact with the external world

There are plenty of these already. By the time they "go evil", it may be too late. But the word evil is probably overly anthropomorphized. The first times it happens, it might be a mechanical result of optimizing for some other metric.

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