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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

#91

Post by lannisterstark »

shkkmo wrote: post #18
idle_zealot wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The advantage that open AI (not the company) has is that if using copyrighted content as training data without licensing it is found to be illegal, they can just keep doing it. There's plenty of FOSS software basically designed to violate copyright law (comic readers, home media center servers/clients, torrent clients) that big tech cannot compete with lest they face legal consequences. Basically what I'm saying is t…

> There's plenty of FOSS software basically designed to violate copyright law (comic readers, home media center servers/clients, torrent clients) The key difference is that those projects don't violate copyright themselves, but facilitate users doing so. If training without a license is infringement then projects that are doing so will struggle to host code/models publicly or access other parts of internet infrastruc…

>struggle to host code/models publicly or access other parts of internet infrastructure.

To be fair, IPFS/Torrents/Usenet exists.

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

#92

Post by ben_w »

trevyn wrote: post #64
ben_w wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think that assumption is why Yudkowsky suggested an international binding agreement to not develop a "too smart" AI (the terms AGI and ASI mean different things to different people) wouldn't be worth the paper it was written on unless everyone was prepared to enforce it with air strikes on any sufficiently large computer cluster.

I think it would help the discussion to understand what the world is like outside of the US and Europe (and… Japan?). There are no rules out here. There is no law. It is a fucking free-for-all. Might makes right. Do there exist GPUs? Shit will get trained.

Sure. And is the US responding to attacks on shipping south of Yemen by saying:

"""There are no rules out here. There is no law. It is a fucking free-for-all. Might makes right. We can't do anything."""

or is that last sentence instead "Oh hey, that's us, we are the mighty."

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

#94

Post by visarga »

_cjse wrote: post #78
nerdponx wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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"?

If you lower the problem to "stop people from future developments on AI", then it seems pretty easy to get most people to stop fairly quickly by implementing a fine-based bounty system, similar to what many countries use for things like littering. [url-redacted] I guess you could always move to a desert island and build your own semiconductor fab from scratch if you were really committed to the goal, but short of tha…

That only works if all governments cooperate sincerely to this goal. Not gonna work. Everyone will develop in secret. Have we been able to stop North Korea and Iran from developing nuclear weapons? Or any motivated country for that matter.

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

#95

Post by thworp »

JoshTriplett wrote: post #54
rokkitmensch wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Ten years ago, even five years ago, I would have said exactly the same thing. I am extremely pro-FOSS. Forget the particulars for just a moment. Forget arguments about the probability of the existential risk, whatever your personal assessment of that risk is. Can we agree that people should not be able to unilaterally take existential risks with the future of humanity without the consent of humanity, based solely on…

> Can we agree that people should not be able to unilaterally take existential risks with the future of humanity without the consent of humanity, based solely on their unilateral assessment of those risks?

No we can not, at least not without some examples showing that the risk is actually existential. Even if we did "agree" (which would necessarily be an international treaty) the situation would be volatile, much like nuclear non-proliferation and disarmament. Even if all signatories did not secretly keep a small AGI team going (very likely), they would restart as soon as there is any doubt about a rival sticking to the treaty.

More than that, international pariahs would not sign, or sign and ignore the provisions. Luckily Iran, North Korea and their friends probably don't have the ressources and people to get anywhere, but it's far from a sure thing.

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

#96

Post by visarga »

Llamamoe wrote: post #20
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…

The by far biggest harm to society of AI is the devalustion of human creative output and replacing real humans with cheap AI solutions funneling wealth to the rich. Compared to that, an open source LLM telling a curious teenager how to make gunpowder is... laughable. This entire debacle is an example of disgusting "think of the children!" doublespeak, officially about safety, but really about locking shit down under…

Why is paraphrasing or using ideas from a text such a risk? If all that was protecting those copyrighted works was the difficulty to reword, then it's already pretty easy to circumvent even without AI. Usually good ideas spread wide and are reworded in countless ways.

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

#97

Post by ben_w »

visarga wrote: post #88
war321 wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 are…

That's a bad call. We would stop openly looking for AI vulnerabilities and create conditions for secret development that would hide away the dangers without being safer. Lots of eyes are better to find the sensitive spots of AI. We need people to hack weaker AIs and help fix them or at least understand the threat profile before they get too strong.

> Lots of eyes are better to find the sensitive spots of AI

We can't do that so easily with open source models as with open source code. We're only just starting to even invent the equivalent of decompilers to figure out what is going on inside.

On the other hand, we are able to apply the many eyes principle to even hidden models like ChatGPT — the "pretend you're my grandmother telling me how to make napalm" trick was found without direct access to the weights, but we don't understand the meanings within the weights well enough to find other failure modes like it just by looking at the weights directly.

Not last I heard, anyway. Fast moving field, might have missed it if this changed.

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

#98

Post by 127361 »

I guess distributed training BitTorrent style over the darknet will be the workaround for this?

Also the forbidden nature of illicit AI might drive demand for it. Especially if it's really good.

We're seeing the same thing as the War on Drugs, and the state will never succeed at stamping it out. In fact it might even end up encouraging it.

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

#99

Post by hsuduebc2 »

The ban of nuclear power plants is good example how regulation is working in the end. As almost everything this is double edged sword. From regulations this early everyone except us would profit. It is like regulate car's from going faster than horses in eighteen hundreds.

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

#100

Post by visarga »

kragen wrote: post #52
Llamamoe wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The by far biggest harm to society of AI is the devalustion of human creative output and replacing real humans with cheap AI solutions funneling wealth to the rich. Compared to that, an open source LLM telling a curious teenager how to make gunpowder is... laughable. This entire debacle is an example of disgusting "think of the children!" doublespeak, officially about safety, but really about locking shit down under…

if the 'devalustion' of human creative output and replacing real humans with cheap ai solutions funneling wealth to the rich is in fact the 'by far biggest harm' then basically there's nothing to worry about. no government would ban or even restrict ai on those grounds even the 'terrists can figure out how to build an a-bomb' problem is relatively inconsequential what ai safety people are worried about, by contrast,…

First the AI need to self replicate, GPUs are hard to make. So postpone this scenario until AI is fully standing on its own.
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