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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

#111

Post by bluescrn »

breadbreadbread wrote: post #25

Ah yes the old "banning things=bad" argument that doesn't offer alternatives to fixing the issues with AI. Just ignore the issues with environmental impact, plagiarism, CP and other non-consensual shit in the data sets, scamming capabilities! All the groups asking for regulation here have **funding** and that means they are evil but we are good for using this tool that is massively subsidized by megacorps that have a…

'It's scary, ban it!' isn't a great argument either.

Especially when 'safety' has such a blurred definition, we could be talking about anything from the threat of global apocalypse to to the 'threat' of an AI merely being able to answer questions about 'wrong' political opinions.

Skynet isn't going to happen. The biggest threat from AI is taking jobs away and creating poverty while redirecting more wealth to the super-rich.

In the short term, we're likely to be facing a lot more convincing spam/bots and deepfakery in the run up to the election - but is that the fault of the AI, or the fault of the humans directly operating their new toys/tools?

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

#112

Post by 6R1M0R4CL3 »

of course they do, that's what they want. control.

all those companies that call for laws being written about AI what they want is those laws to be written AS THEY WANT THEM TO BE. they go see the governments, spray a nice amount of FUD and EXPLAIN to them what to do, how to do it because they know how to avoid the danger and risk for the whole human race...

you can bet they will make those laws be a very nice fit to what they want to reign supreme and make sure any competition is eliminated.

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

#113

Post by cousin_it »

suslik wrote: post #53
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…

What is the reason to believe that LLMs are an evolutionary step towards AGI at all? In my mind there is a rather large leap from estimating a conditional probability of a next token over some space to a conscious entity with its own goals and purpose. Should we ban a linear regression while we're at it? It would be great to see some evidence that this risk is real. All I've witnessed so far was scaremongering posts…

> LMs might disrupt knowledge-based economy and threaten many key professions - but how is this conceptually different from any technological revolution?

To me it looks like all work can eventually (within years or few decades at most) be done by AI, much cheaper and faster than hiring a human to do the same. So we're looking at a world where all human thinking and effort is irrelevant. If you can imagine a good world like that, then you have a better imagination than me.

From that perspective it almost doesn't matter if AI kills us or merely sends us to the dust bin of history. Either way it's a bad direction and we need to stop going in that direction. Stop all development of machine-based intelligence, like in Dune, as the root comment said.

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

#114

Post by alpaca128 »

breadbreadbread wrote: post #25

Ah yes the old "banning things=bad" argument that doesn't offer alternatives to fixing the issues with AI. Just ignore the issues with environmental impact, plagiarism, CP and other non-consensual shit in the data sets, scamming capabilities! All the groups asking for regulation here have **funding** and that means they are evil but we are good for using this tool that is massively subsidized by megacorps that have a…

Banning AI is simply useless. It's a technology that anyone with sufficient processing power and access to the internet can use, so trying to ban it is guaranteed to fail just like prohibiting alcohol would be.

The only thing we can do is limit how megacorps can openly abuse the technology.

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

#116

Post by ben_w »

visarga wrote: post #100
kragen wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

OTOH, GPUs are made by machines, not by greasy fingers hand-knitting them like back in the late 1960s.

And an AI can just be wrong, which happens a lot; an AI wrongly thinking it should kill everyone may still succeed at that, though I doubt the capability would be as early as next year.

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

#117

Post by cherryteastain »

Government knows that random people having the ability to use "AI" without their control and oversight reduces their ever expanding reach. As the article demonstrates, the groundwork is already being laid by these "think tanks" to prevent a repeat of Llama 2.

We truly need an AI Stallman. FOSS AI models need to become a movement, like the push for a FOSS UNIX became in the 80s and 90s. Sadly when I wrote to Stallman on the subject he seemed disinterested/defeatist, and mostly dismissed the idea of a GPL for model weights. Looks like millennials/gen Z must become more interested in these matters ourselves, however we seem to be disinterested in politics and even more disinterested in how the devices we use daily _actually_ work than Gen X.

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

#118

Post by 127361 »

ayende wrote: post #14
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…

As long as the cost for training a model is in the 7+ figures, that means that any such open model is bound to be tracked to someone with deep enough pockets to sue. Consider that you just spend a few millions on training a model on copyrighted data. Release it would reveal that, problem. I _guess_ you can try doing training in the public, like Seti @ Home or something like that, which distributes the risk? But no id…

But if we have 100,000 people with RTX 4090s mining some new AI based cryptocurrency, that happens to train the model in the process, it's going to be a highly effective system. And we can do it anonymously over Tor or I2P.

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

#119

Post by gryn »

mirekrusin wrote: post #37
breadbreadbread wrote: post #25

Ah yes the old "banning things=bad" argument that doesn't offer alternatives to fixing the issues with AI. Just ignore the issues with environmental impact, plagiarism, CP and other non-consensual shit in the data sets, scamming capabilities! All the groups asking for regulation here have **funding** and that means they are evil but we are good for using this tool that is massively subsidized by megacorps that have a…

Less harmful would be to ban large models from being not open. If you ban open large models in US, you'll cripple US and make few megacorps very rich, very quickly. You'll drain talent to other (also competing) states. Truly bad actors won't be affected, if anything they'll get advantage. People draw weird analogies equating llama2 to nuclear device etc. nonsense but the closer analogy would be to ban on semiconducto…

I agree, but if there's enough political will (ie these orgs convince a large enough subset of the right people) the US can bully other nations to implement similar policities like it has done many times in the past.

once you understand that what they are trying to protect is the safety of their profits every of their argument start to make sense.

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