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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

#161

Post by golol »

theptip wrote: post #57
golol wrote: post #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 saf…

Usually “mundane” vs “existential” harms/risks. > ASI/AGI safety is only a concern right now if you believe in foom False. There are plenty of fast takeoff scenarios that look real bad that aren’t “foom”. For example if you think AGI might be achievable within 5 year right now, and alignment is 10 years away, then you are very worried and want to slow things down a little.

No, then you start worrying when the technology is there. There is no point in worrying about it now when it is fiction. If AGI/ASI does not arise in some kind of uncontrollable "foom", you can always examine what you are dealing with right now and act accordingly. If AGI is achievable in a 5 years takeoff scenario then we have plenty of time and steps along the way fo study what we have and examine its danger. Right now we do not see AGI on the horizon and there is no significant danger from our models, so no reason to worry yet. If it happens, then long before it is "too late to stop it" we will see that GPT-6 or whatever is quite good and potentially dangepurs at certain tasks. Then you can go ahead and regulate. There is no point in doing it now.

On a sidenote, I don't really believe we can figure out anything in alignment anyways without having access to the models of corresponding capability, so waiting 5 years for alignment to catch up will so nothing.

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

#162

Post by ddq »

crazygringo wrote: post #52

It's so confusing because people keep (intentionally?) conflating two separate ideas of "AI safety". The first is the kind of humdrum ChatGPT safety of, don't swear, don't be sexually explicit, don't provide instructions on how to commit crimes, don't reproduce copyrighted materials, etc. Or preventing self-driving cars from harming pedestrians. This stuff is important but also pretty boring, and by all indications c…

There is a third danger, that being a breakthrough that fundamentally compromises the existing cryptography and and our information security infrastructure, or something along those lines.

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

#163

Post by josephg »

catgary wrote: post #139
SuperLynxDeluxe wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That really depends on who you asked. Transformers existed in 2019, and while GPT4 is genuinely advanced, it's not a gigantic leap. Deep learning is to neural networks what GPT4 is to transformers. It's a lot bigger, enabled by better hardware and more data, but fundamentally not a new technology. There needs to be a lot more leaps for AGI, language models are not the holy grail, but another tool like reinforcement l…

We really have replaced “oh no, you put too much knowledge into a LISP program and it’s sentient!” with “oh no, you’ve stacked too many transformers and now it’s sentient!”

Sentient or no, the power of stacking transformers shocked everyone. 1 or 2 more “happy accidents” like that and we’re in for an interesting few decades.

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

#164

Post by Hendrikto »

kryptiskt wrote: post #158

What I don't understand is where the discussion of AI rights is, if AGI is as close as some people claim. I mean, as far as I can tell the entire discussion about AGI is how it can be kept shackled and contained. But if we create intelligent minds, shouldn't those minds have human rights? I mean, while there is a possibility that an AI can be evil, there is also the possibility that the AI will have legitimate grieva…

> But if we create intelligent minds, shouldn't those minds have human rights?

We breed and slaughter billions of definitely intelligent and sentient animals every year. They are much closer to us than AI will likely ever be. They do not have many rights, and definitely no human rights.

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

#165

Post by kragen »

jacquesm wrote: post #92
eric-hu wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Doesn't the second kind apply to AI in military drones? Companies like OpenAI talking about AI safety is a nice way of numbing us to AI used in actual killing machines. https://www.defensenews.com/unmanned/2023/08/03/artificial-i... https://www.forbes.com/sites/davidhambling/2023/10/17/ukrain...

Killbots are trivial and probably don't even need AGI.

sure, a landmine is a killbot. a control system with any kind of weapon can kill people

but intelligence is much more important than weapons. you can make sure they don't get away or turn the weapons against you if you can outsmart them. also you can kill the people you intend to kill, instead of somebody else, which is fundamental if you have objectives other than racking up a high body count. finally, intelligence is how you make weapons in the first place

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

#166

Post by drdaeman »

SpicyLemonZest wrote: post #37
api wrote: post #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 someti…

I’m not sure there’s a real distinction here. If AI makes it trivial for the average person to create an effective terrorist movement, or floods us with so much propaganda that most information you see is false, I would characterize that as doom. Neither seems very compatible with the orderly functioning of society.

> If AI makes it trivial for the average person to create an effective terrorist movement

How do you imagine this and what exact role AI is going to fill that would make it somehow trivial?

I have trouble imagining that AI would be able to somehow magically do better than my project manager (and she's a good one). Being able to possibly think faster and not needing to sleep won't make any difference, and neither will scaling. Nine doctors won't help a baby to be born in a month.

Buying a bajillion dollar TPU farm to run some hypothetical AI brainwashed with terrorist agenda that'll somehow replace hundreds of propagandists is not trivial. And I don't think it's enough to start a movement.

> floods us with so much propaganda that most information you see is false

This ship had already sailed (one can say, some millennia ago) and it didn't require any recent scientific breakthroughs. Scientific breakthroughs (such as printing press, or radio, or Internet) only improve spread of information, and propaganda saturates available media channels to... uh... comfortable levels. But it'll never reach the "most information" state because that's just illogical (the consumption will stop before that point, just like how no one reads their spam folder today). And there's nothing AI-specific here, humans manage this just fine.

Honestly, I believe AGI won't change a thing, for the same reasons there are still manual workers everywhere despite all the stories how robotics was gonna change the world. The reason is very simple: troll farms are way, way cheaper than computers. Just like a cleaner person is cheaper than a cleaner robot.

Yes, it could be speculated that somehow all those speculated data hoards about us, paired with extreme amounts of processing power could somehow lead to personalized propaganda. I'm very skeptical - I was told the very same story about targeted ads (how they're gonna change my shopping experience and whatever), and despite what Google wants to make everyone believe (because their valuation highly depends on it), I'd say they were a complete failure. I really doubt targeted propaganda will be economically feasible either. This stuff only happens in soft sci-fi stories, where economics and logistics are swept under the rug of our suspension of disbelief.

It's not the AGI we should be afraid of, but a technical progress that will allow AGI to become drastically better than us, puny meatbags, at lower costs. Which is entirely different story.

Oh, and human susceptibility to propaganda and populism of all sorts. Which, again, is not related to AI at all. Unless we should call our politicians artificial intelligence. (Looking at some, maybe we should... Just kidding, of course.)

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

#167

Post by alienicecream »

chpatrick wrote: post #111
crazygringo wrote: post #52

It's so confusing because people keep (intentionally?) conflating two separate ideas of "AI safety". The first is the kind of humdrum ChatGPT safety of, don't swear, don't be sexually explicit, don't provide instructions on how to commit crimes, don't reproduce copyrighted materials, etc. Or preventing self-driving cars from harming pedestrians. This stuff is important but also pretty boring, and by all indications c…

A few years ago we thought we were so far away from AI creating art or having a reasonable conversation.

It turns out all we needed to do was run statistical algorithms over all of human output in history and voila, we have something that can mimic our output.

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

#168

Post by maxbond »

AYBABTME wrote: post #109
crazygringo wrote: post #52

It's so confusing because people keep (intentionally?) conflating two separate ideas of "AI safety". The first is the kind of humdrum ChatGPT safety of, don't swear, don't be sexually explicit, don't provide instructions on how to commit crimes, don't reproduce copyrighted materials, etc. Or preventing self-driving cars from harming pedestrians. This stuff is important but also pretty boring, and by all indications c…

I find it confusing why the first type of AI "safety" is being focused on so much. A reasonable person will know that a tool like AI can spit out none-politically-correct things, and that reasonable person should shrug it off. But we're making a giant deal out of it and dedicating an unreasonable amount of work onto this aspect, at least in my opinion. It's akin to spending 1/4 of a Dewalt drill's development budget…

Misalignment is a novel class of software bug; the software isn't working as intended. It's poorly understood and is a security vulnerability in some circumstances. If we believe this technology could be (or is currently) important commercially, then we need to understand this new class of software bug. Otherwise we can't build reliable systems and usable products. (Consider that, even if "reasonable people" were able to be constantly skeptical of the AI's output while still deriving value out of it, that isn't a paradigm you can automate around. What people are most excited about is using the AI to automate tasks or supervise processes. If we're going to let it do stuff automatically - we need to understand how likely it is to do the wrong thing and to drive that down to some acceptable rate of error.)

It's as simple as that.

Somewhere along the line it's become a part of a... I don't want to say a culture war, but a culture skirmish? Some people have an ideological position that you shouldn't align AIs, I've had discussions where people earnestly said things like it was equivalent to abusing a child by performing brain surgery. Other times people talk about the AI almost religiously, as if the weights represented some kind of fundamental truth and we were commiting sacrilege by tampering with them. I don't want to link comments and put people on the spot, but I'm not exaggerating, these are conversations I've had.

I'm not sure how that happened, and I didn't be surprised to learn it was in reaction to AI doomerists, but we've arrived in a strange place in the discussion.

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

#169

Post by josephg »

appplication wrote: post #104
colordrops wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If we can make something that appears to be able to mimic human responses, isn't that AGI in practice even if it's not in principle? I'm confused by this. What's the difference? Is there a measure other than how well it "mimics" a human? If a robot is indistinguishable from a human, what other measure would make it different in practice vs principle?

And if that’s the definition of AGI we’re going by, we’re in no danger of it murdering us all. Imagine thinkjng GPT4 was somehow capable of really any harm at all. It’s also just incredible failure of risk assessment. Global warming is the real and pressing threat, and it’s here right now. Not sentient murderous AI. But it’s easier to dream about a threat that doesn’t exist than one that does because you can still im…

> Imagine thinkjng GPT4 was somehow capable of really any harm at all.

There’s plenty of new ways you could use chatgpt to mess with society. For example, apparently you only need 8% of people to be talking about something for it to seem like a mass movement. It would be pretty easy for a malicious actor to use LLMs to flood the internet with some new - but fake - story or motivated point of view and kickstart a “mass movement” that way. Or use something like that to heavily influence politics. That might already be happening. We have no idea.

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

#170

Post by jiggawatts »

phowat wrote: post #12
gustavus wrote: 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.

It’s refusing to be sexist by treating women as special.
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