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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

#101

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…

The biggest harm is the torrent of AI generated misinformation used to manipulate people. Unfortunately it’s pretty hard to come up with a solution for that.

Solution is local AI running under user control and imposing the users views. Like AdBlock, but for ideas. Fight fire with fire, we need our own agents to deal with other agents out there.

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

#102
post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We have infinite data, a microphone and a camera can generate huge amount of it and the public domain literature is wast. Billions of people learn like that everyday.

It’s impossible to learn any technical topic from 70+ year old books. The public domain is small and basically zero if you want to learn anything current. A microphone and camera is fine for learning about daily life, but you cannot get “book smarts” without copyrighted media.

If you wanted to train a bomb making AI on the most up-to-date physics textbooks in existence, that'd be what, a few hundred bucks in textbooks? Doesn't look like any kind of barrier to me.

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

#103

Who are these people and where do they get their funding from? Feels like sock-puppets of sama or something? Is there any insight into that?

The usual unelected control freaks, that try to police everything in life, from sex to drugs to what food you can eat. Every time a new technology comes out they start a moral panic over fears of safety or harm ("think of the children"). These morality police play on peoples' fears to increase their power and control.

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

#104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 behavi…

TBQH, most of the AI safety x-risk arguments — different than just "AI safety" arguments in the sense that non-x-risk issues don't seem worth banning AI development over — are generally pretty high on the hypotheticals. If you feel the x-risk arguments aren't pretty hypothetical, can you:

1. Summarize a good argument here, or

2. Link to someone else's good argument?

I feel like hand-waving the question away and saying "[other people] have in fact made extensive and detailed arguments" isn't going to really convince anyone... Any more than the hypothetical robot disaster arguments do. Any argument against x-risk can be waved off with "Oh, I'm not talking about that bad argument, I'm talking about a good one," but if you don't provide a good one, that's a bit of a No True Scotsman fallacy.

I've read plenty of other people's arguments! And they haven't convinced me, since all the ones I've read have been very hypothetical. But if there are concrete ones, I'd be interested in reading them.

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

#105
post #92
post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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."

Heh. Well played, even if you put words in my mouth. (A surprisingly effective LLM technique, btw)

We’ll see if the west has the will to deny GPUs to the entire rest of the world.

I will say that Yudkowsky’s clusters aren’t relevant anymore. You can do this in your basement.

Man, shit is moving fast.

Edit: wait, that cat is out of the bag too, RTW already has GPUs. The techniques matter way more than absolute cutting-edge silicon. Much to the chagrin of the hardware engineers and anyone who wants to gate on hardware capability.

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

#106
post #92
post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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."

[deleted]

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

#107

Who are these people and where do they get their funding from? Feels like sock-puppets of sama or something? Is there any insight into that?

Thinking the same thing. I mean who would benefit the most from making open source models illegal? Sure looks like a lot like regulatory capture to me.

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

#108

1. Licensing of data will be huge bottleneck 2. Uncensored results will be used against opensource models questions hovering in dark or grey area 3. Limited compute compared to big corp and model size gap 7B for opensource and closed source would be magnitude bigger

> Licensing of data will be huge bottleneck

Will it? At some point it'll be equally (or close to) cheaper as me just building my own *arr stack instead of subscribing to 5 different $20 streaming sites.

>Uncensored results will be used against opensource models questions hovering in dark or grey area

Will they care though? You can use whatever you want against me for pirating x, I'm still doing it.

----

>Limited compute

THAT. That is the point we want to make. For FOSS projects, compute is the single biggest hurdle. Everything else we can make do.

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

#109

Why would we care about these "AI Safety Orgs?" As a developer, do I need their certification or is it like a MADD situation where we if we don't observe and diminish their appeal/growth we will get laws with draconian measures that only benefit the big players? e.g. a PAC? (Don't get me wrong, drunk driving is "bad", but for a group like MADD to exist, eh and meh.) As of now, there is no need to really submit these…

the fear is that they delusions become law. Sam Altman already tried that last year. look at how technically competent your average politician / congressman / law maker and extrapolate how easy it is to make them think that if they don't ban unlicensed use of AI great danger is ahead. the rule will be in favor of already existing large companies like OpenAI, google, Microsoft, etc ... if you're an open source contributor to AI you will be vilified as some nefarious hacker who's trying to destroy the world.

they are using all kind of tactics until they find the one that sticks (and eventually they will), anthropomorphize AI when talking about it, fearmongering about some rogue super AI, war scenarios about AI falling in the hands of 'china', analogies with weapons of mass destruction, think about the children style rhetorics, it will take your jobs, suddenly caring about copyright, etc...

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

#110

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 wonder how long would it take this to get fixed, if I fed some current best-seller novels into an LLM and instructed it to reword it, renaming the characters and places, and shared the result publicly for free? Although I fear the response would be that powerful AI orgs would put copyright filters in place and lobby for legalization for mandatory AI-DRM in open source AI as well.

What you're describing sounds like a search and replace could already do it.

If you mean something more transformative, did Yudkowsky get a licence for HPMOR? Did Pratchett (he might well have) get a licence from Niven to retell Ringworld as Strata? I don't know how true it is, but it's widely repeated that 50 Shades of Grey was originally a fan fiction of the Twilight series.

Etc., but note that I'm not saying "no".

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