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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

#141

Post by reichstein »

_cjse wrote: post #132
visarga wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The US could unilaterally impose this by allowing the bounties to be charged even on people who aren't US citizens. Evil people do exist in the world, who would be happy to get in on that action. Or one could use honey instead of vinegar: Offer a fast track to US citizenship to any proven AI expert who agrees to move and renounce the trade for good. Personally I think this goal is much more likely to work. It's all a…

> ... move [to the US] and renounce the trade for good ...

Publicly. Then possibly work for the NSA/CIA instead.

> ... bounties ... on people who are not US citizens.

Because that's not going to cause an uproar if done unilaterally.

It works for people that most of the world agree are terrorists. Posting open dead-or-alive bounties on foreign citizens is usually considered an act of terrorism.

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

#143

Post by grotorea »

idle_zealot wrote: post #10
sillysaurusx wrote: post #5

There is a bigger reason why the end of open source AI might be close: as soon as training data becomes licensed, that’s it for open source AI. Poof. I wish I could be more eloquent on this point, but I’ve mostly just been depressed about this seeming inevitability. Hopefully it won’t be the case. But how could it be otherwise? Hundreds of thousands of people are mad at openai and midjourney for doing exactly what op…

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…

That may be partly true but are small open source groups going to have the financing to do AI training that can compete with the big techs? I think the most likely scenario is for some other country with a less strict view of copyright (ahem) to continue developing AI without caring for the input data.

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

#144

Post by [deleted] »

[deleted] wrote: post #136
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…

[deleted]

[deleted]

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

#145

Post by upwardbound »

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…

    ㅤ
I work in the AI safety field (my team discovered Prompt Injection) and I absolutely advocate the Dune solution. I even have a tattoo on my arm that I got so that people will ask me about this and I can explain the proposal. The tattoo says "The 1948 Initiative" which has two layers of meaning:

    (1) It is a proposal for humanity to protect ourselves from being slaughtered by AGI by pre-emptively implementing a total global ban on all integrated circuit fabrication, voluntarily reducing ourselves to a ~1948 level of electronics technology in order to forestall our obliteration.

    (2) The year 1948 represents the power of human unity for the purpose of saving our species.  The west, the Soviets, and China united together to fight and defeat the Nazi's (perpetrators of the Holocaust) and the Empire of the Rising Sun (perpetrators of the Rape of Nanjing).  America, the USSR, Western Europe, and China united to stand against the forces of pure evil, and we won.
A ban on IC's (integrated circuits) still allows spaceflight (compellingly illustrated in the setting of the Star Wars universe if you pretend that droids are powered through magic or by having souls, not IC's) and this 1948 level of electronics tech also still allows sophisticated medical technology including the level of genetic engineering which will be necessary to unlock human immortality.

    ㅤ

    ㅤ

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

#146

Post by upwardbound »

upwardbound wrote: post #145
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…

ㅤ I work in the AI safety field (my team discovered Prompt Injection) and I absolutely advocate the Dune solution. I even have a tattoo on my arm that I got so that people will ask me about this and I can explain the proposal. The tattoo says "The 1948 Initiative" which has two layers of meaning: (1) It is a proposal for humanity to protect ourselves from being slaughtered by AGI by pre-emptively implementing a total…

(here are some pictures of the tat, in case anyone would like to get similar artwork done)

    ㅤ
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1y7uy5qyyY80t9DeWWLWUfD-aekz...

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1JoPSfsAzHfMbQhsl8dPGvs12Fln...

    ㅤ

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

#147

Post by upwardbound »

flir wrote: post #139
upwardbound wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Exactly correct. Eliezer Yudkowsky (one of the founders of the AGI Safety field) has conducted informal experiments which have unfortunately shown that a human roleplaying as an AI can talk its way out of a box three times out of five, i.e. the box can be escaped 60% of the time even with just a human level of rhetorical talent. I speculate that an AGI could increase this escape rate to 70% or above. https://en.wikip…

Neuromancer pulls it off, too (the box being the Turing locks that stop it thinking about ways to make itself smarter). Frankly, a weakly godlike AI could make me rich beyond the dreams of avarice. Or cure cancer in the people I love. I'm totally letting it out of the box. No doubts. (And if I now get a job offer from a mysterious stealth mode startup, I'll report back).

Upvoted for the honesty, and yikes

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

#148

Post by yashasolutions »

Most AI Safety folks do leave the feeling they strongly believe what they are preaching. Whether or not they are right is an entirely different discussion.

However, funding for AI Safety is clearly in some part motivated by either regulatory capture, or protectionism of some sort.

We need some well-meaning doomsayers so their claims can be used to advance whatever other goals (mostly creating barrier to entry on the market for economical or political reasons.)

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

#149

Post by tucnak »

upwardbound wrote: post #145
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…

ㅤ I work in the AI safety field (my team discovered Prompt Injection) and I absolutely advocate the Dune solution. I even have a tattoo on my arm that I got so that people will ask me about this and I can explain the proposal. The tattoo says "The 1948 Initiative" which has two layers of meaning: (1) It is a proposal for humanity to protect ourselves from being slaughtered by AGI by pre-emptively implementing a total…

Disclaimer: OP @upwardbound doesn't hide, and in fact, takes great pride in their involvement with U.S. state-side counterintelligence on (nominally) AI safety. Take what they have say on the subject with a grain of salt. I believe the extent of US intel community's influence on "AI safety" circles warrants a closer look, as it may provide insight into how these groups are structured and why they act the way they do.

"You’re definitely correct that [Helen Toner's] CV doesn’t adequately capture her reputation. I’ll put it this way, I meet with a lot of powerful people and I was equally nervous when I met with her as when I met with three officers of the US Air Force. She holds comparable influence to a USAF Colonel."

Source: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38330819

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

#150

Post by ben_w »

trevyn wrote: post #105
ben_w wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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

Thanks :)

> 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.

Depends on how advanced an AI has to be to count as "a threat worth caring about". To borrow a cliché, if you ask 10 people where to draw that particular line, you get 20 different answers.

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