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Many AI safety orgs have tried to criminalize currently-existing open-source AI

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Re: Many AI safety orgs have tried to criminalize currently-existing open-source AI

#41

Post by mtillman »

kmeisthax wrote: post #7

AI safety people are hypocrites. If they practiced what they preached, they'd be calling for all AI to be banned, ala Dune. There are AI harms that don't care about whether or not the weights are available, and are playing out today. I'm talking about the ability of any AI system to obfuscate plagiarism[0] and spam the Internet with technically distinct rewords of the same text. This is currently the most lucrative u…

Important to remember that in Dune, the AI made the right decision which precipitated a whole lot of fun to read nonsense.

Re: Many AI safety orgs have tried to criminalize currently-existing open-source AI

#42

Post by nerdponx »

kmeisthax wrote: post #7

AI safety people are hypocrites. If they practiced what they preached, they'd be calling for all AI to be banned, ala Dune. There are AI harms that don't care about whether or not the weights are available, and are playing out today. I'm talking about the ability of any AI system to obfuscate plagiarism[0] and spam the Internet with technically distinct rewords of the same text. This is currently the most lucrative u…

It's way too late to ban any of this. How do you propose to make that work? That would be like banning all "malicious software", it's a preposterous idea when you even begin to think about the practical side of it. And where do you draw the line? Is my XGBoost model "AI", or are we only banning generative AI? Is a Markov chain "generative AI"?

Re: Many AI safety orgs have tried to criminalize currently-existing open-source AI

#43

Post by war321 »

Wish this wasn't as common as it turned out to be sadly. Best thing to hope for is that the ability to train models continue to get cheaper and more accessible over time. Figuring out how to go from tens/hundreds of millions of images needed for a foundation model to thousands or hundreds would be a start.

Re: Many AI safety orgs have tried to criminalize currently-existing open-source AI

#44

Post by JoshTriplett »

GaggiX wrote: post #32
JoshTriplett wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> AI safety people are hypocrites. If they practiced what they preached, they'd be calling for all AI to be banned They are calling for all AI (above a certain capability level) to be banned. Not just open, not just closed, all . There are risks that apply only to open. There are risks that apply only to closed. But nobody should be developing AGI without incredibly robustly proven alignment, open or closed, any more…

>They are calling for all AI (above a certain capability level) to be banned. Not just open, not just closed, all. That's not true if you read the article.

I did read the article. Several of the organizations mentioned simply don't talk about openness, and are instead talking about any model with sufficiently powerful capabilities, so it's not obvious why the article is making their comments about open models rather than about any model. Some of the others have made side comments about openness making it harder to take back capabilities once released, but as far as I can tell, even those organizations are still primarily concerned with capabilities, and would be comparably concerned by a proprietary model with those capabilities.

Some folks may well have co-opted the term "AI safety" to mean something other than safety, but the point of AI safety is to set an upper bound on capabilities and push for alignment, and that's true whether a model is open or closed.

Re: Many AI safety orgs have tried to criminalize currently-existing open-source AI

#45

Post by rokkitmensch »

JoshTriplett wrote: post #21
kmeisthax wrote: post #7

AI safety people are hypocrites. If they practiced what they preached, they'd be calling for all AI to be banned, ala Dune. There are AI harms that don't care about whether or not the weights are available, and are playing out today. I'm talking about the ability of any AI system to obfuscate plagiarism[0] and spam the Internet with technically distinct rewords of the same text. This is currently the most lucrative u…

> AI safety people are hypocrites. If they practiced what they preached, they'd be calling for all AI to be banned They are calling for all AI (above a certain capability level) to be banned. Not just open, not just closed, all . There are risks that apply only to open. There are risks that apply only to closed. But nobody should be developing AGI without incredibly robustly proven alignment, open or closed, any more…

I oppose regulating what calculations humans may perform in the strongest possible terms.

Re: Many AI safety orgs have tried to criminalize currently-existing open-source AI

#46

Post by war321 »

kmeisthax wrote: post #7

AI safety people are hypocrites. If they practiced what they preached, they'd be calling for all AI to be banned, ala Dune. There are AI harms that don't care about whether or not the weights are available, and are playing out today. I'm talking about the ability of any AI system to obfuscate plagiarism[0] and spam the Internet with technically distinct rewords of the same text. This is currently the most lucrative u…

Pretty sure they do. I follow a few of these safetyist people on twitter and they absolutely argue that companies like OpenAI, Google, Tencent and literally anyone else training a potential AGI should stop training runs and put them under oversight at best and no one should even make an AGI at worst.

They just go after open source as well since they're at least aware that open models that anyone can share and use aren't restricted by an API and, to use a really overused soundbyte, "can't be put back in the box".

Re: Many AI safety orgs have tried to criminalize currently-existing open-source AI

#47

Post by war321 »

JoshTriplett wrote: post #44
GaggiX wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>They are calling for all AI (above a certain capability level) to be banned. Not just open, not just closed, all. That's not true if you read the article.

I did read the article. Several of the organizations mentioned simply don't talk about openness, and are instead talking about any model with sufficiently powerful capabilities, so it's not obvious why the article is making their comments about open models rather than about any model. Some of the others have made side comments about openness making it harder to take back capabilities once released, but as far as I ca…

The safety movement really isn't as organized as many here would think.

Doesn't help that safety and alignment means different things to different people. Some use it to refer to near term issues like copyright infringement, bias, labor devaluation, etc. While others use it for potential long term issues like pdoom, runaway ASIs and human extinction. The former sees the latter as head in the cloud futurists ignoring real world problems, whiles the latter sees the former as worrying about minor issues in the face of (potential) catastrophe.

Re: Many AI safety orgs have tried to criminalize currently-existing open-source AI

#48

Post by JoshTriplett »

kolektiv wrote: post #38
JoshTriplett wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> AI safety people are hypocrites. If they practiced what they preached, they'd be calling for all AI to be banned They are calling for all AI (above a certain capability level) to be banned. Not just open, not just closed, all . There are risks that apply only to open. There are risks that apply only to closed. But nobody should be developing AGI without incredibly robustly proven alignment, open or closed, any more…

I'm not convinced the onus should be on one side to prove why something isn't an existential risk. We don't start with an assumption that something is world-ending about anything else; we generally need to see a plausibly worked-through example of how the world ends, using technology we can all broadly agree exists/will shortly exist. If we're talking about nuclear weapons, for example, the tech is clear, the pattern…

AI safety / x-risk folks have in fact made extensive and detailed arguments. Occasionally, folks arguing against them rise to the same standard. But most of the arguments against AI safety look a lot more like name-calling and derision: "nuh-uh, that's sci-fi and unrealistic (mic drop)". That's not a counterargument.

> If we're talking about nuclear weapons, for example, the tech is clear, the pattern of human behaviour is clear: they could cause immense, species-level damage.

That's easy to say now, now that the damage is largely done, they've been not only tested but used, many countries have them, the knowledge for how to make them is widespread.

How many people arguing against AI safety today would also have argued for widespread nuclear proliferation when the technology was still in development and nothing had been exploded yet? How many would have argued against nuclear regulation as being unnecessary, or derided those arguing for such regulation as unrealistic or sci-fi-based?

Re: Many AI safety orgs have tried to criminalize currently-existing open-source AI

#49

Post by trevyn »

JoshTriplett wrote: post #21
kmeisthax wrote: post #7

AI safety people are hypocrites. If they practiced what they preached, they'd be calling for all AI to be banned, ala Dune. There are AI harms that don't care about whether or not the weights are available, and are playing out today. I'm talking about the ability of any AI system to obfuscate plagiarism[0] and spam the Internet with technically distinct rewords of the same text. This is currently the most lucrative u…

> AI safety people are hypocrites. If they practiced what they preached, they'd be calling for all AI to be banned They are calling for all AI (above a certain capability level) to be banned. Not just open, not just closed, all . There are risks that apply only to open. There are risks that apply only to closed. But nobody should be developing AGI without incredibly robustly proven alignment, open or closed, any more…

> nobody should be developing AGI without incredibly robustly proven alignment, open or closed, any more than people should be developing nuclear weapons in their garage.

I have an alternate proposal: We assume that someone, somewhere will develop AGI without any sort of “alignment”, plan our lives accordingly, and help other humans plan their lives accordingly.

Re: Many AI safety orgs have tried to criminalize currently-existing open-source AI

#50

Post by visarga »

kmeisthax wrote: post #7

AI safety people are hypocrites. If they practiced what they preached, they'd be calling for all AI to be banned, ala Dune. There are AI harms that don't care about whether or not the weights are available, and are playing out today. I'm talking about the ability of any AI system to obfuscate plagiarism[0] and spam the Internet with technically distinct rewords of the same text. This is currently the most lucrative u…

> I'm talking about the ability of any AI system to obfuscate plagiarism and spam the Internet with technically distinct rewords of the same text. This is currently the most lucrative use of AI, and none of the AI safety people are talking about stopping it.

This should be an explicitly allowed practice, it is following the spirit of copyright to the letter - use the ideas, facts, methods or styles while avoiding to copy the protected expression and characters. LLMs can do paraphrasing, summarisation, QA pairs or comparisons with other texts.

We should never try to put ideas under copyright or we might find out humans also have to abide by the same restrictive rules, because anyone could be secretly using AI, so all human texts need to be checked from now on for copyright infringement with the same strictness.

The good part about this practice is that a model trained on reworded text will never spit out the original word for word, under any circumstances because it never saw it during training. Should be required pre-processing for copyrighted texts. Also removing PII. Much more useful as a model if you can be sure it won't infringe word for word.

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