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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

#151

Post by upwardbound »

tucnak wrote: post #149
upwardbound wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.…

Agreed.

I see this less as a matter of jingoism (though I do love the US as the "least bad" nation in a world where no nation is purely blameless) and more as a matter of pragmatism and embracing what power I can in order to help save our species

    ㅤ
I also think the US Constitution + Thirteenth Amendment is quite noble and it's something I genuinely believe in.

    ㅤ

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

#152

Post by somewhereoutth »

ben_w wrote: post #110
torginus wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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".

I think that there is a strong argument that to be truly transformative (in a copyright moral/legal sense), the work must have been altered by human hands/mind, not purely or mainly by an automated process. So find/replace and AI is out, but reinterpreting and reformulating by human endeavour is in.

I do wonder whether that will become accepted case law, assuming something like that is argued in the NYT suit.

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

#153

Post by ben_w »

te_chris wrote: post #71
JoshTriplett wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

An extensive HYPOTHETICAL argument, stuffed with assumptions far beyond the capabilities of the technologies they're talking about for their own private ends.

If the AI already had the capabilities, it would be a bit late to do anything.

Also, I'm old enough to remember when computers were supposedly "over a century" away from beating humans at Go: https://www.businessinsider.com/ai-experts-were-way-off-on-w...

(And that AI could "never" drive cars or create art or music, though that latter kind of claim was generally made by non-AI people).

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

#154

Post by flir »

upwardbound wrote: post #147
flir wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

I was being lighthearted, but I've seen a partner through chemo. Sell state secrets, assassinate a president, bring on the AI apocalypse... it all gets a big thumbs up from me if you can guarantee she'll die quietly in her sleep at the age of 103.

I guess everyone's got a deal with the devil in them, which is why I think 70% might be a bit low.

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

#155

Post by melagonster »

kolektiv wrote: post #69
JoshTriplett wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I understand your point, I think - and certainly I don't want to go anywhere near name-calling or derision, that doesn't help anyone. But I am reminded of arguments I've had with creationists (I am not comparing you with them, but sometimes the general tone of the debate). It seems like one side is making an extraordinary claim, and then demanding the other side rebut it, and that's not something that seems reasonabl…

Companies declare that they are trying to build better AI, and the ultimately purpose is AGI. Both the definition of AGI given by the company and by AI aliment/safety researchers is similar. AI safety people trust it is dangerous.

let me go continue using a nuclear bomb as a metaphor. if we don't know whether building nuclear bomb is possible, but some companies declare they have existing progress on creating this new bomb...

the danger of nuclear bomb is obvious, because it is designed as a bomb. companies are trying to build the AGI which is similar to the dangerous AGI in AI safety researchers' prediction. the dangers are obvious, too.

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

#156

Post by michaelt »

gjm11 wrote: post #140
reissbaker wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 sayin…

Consider a world in which AI existential risk is real: where at some point AI systems become dramatically more capable than human minds, in a way that has catastrophic consequences for humanity. What would you expect this world to look like, say, five years before the AI systems become more capable than humans? How (if at all) would it differ from the world we are actually in? What arguments (if any) would anyone be…

Does the strongest argument that AI existential risk is a big problem really open by exhorting the reader to imagine it's a big problem? Then asking them to come up with their own arguments for why the problem needs addressing?

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

#157

Post by autoexec »

whywhywhywhy wrote: post #125
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. Nah a lot are complaining about the licensing of content because they think it will destroy it but instead would essentially mean image gen ai would only be feasible for companies like Google, Disney, Adobe to build. Not sure if you could even feasibly make GPT4 level models without a multi year timeline…

Which is why you have executives from OpenAI, Microsoft, and Google talking to congress about the harms of their own products. They're frantically trying to brake the bottoms rungs of the ladder until they're sure they can pull it up entirely and leave people with no option but to go through them.

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

#158

Post by quonn »

hiAndrewQuinn wrote: post #67
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…

All future AI research should be banned, a la Bostrom's vulnerable world hypothesis [1]. Every time you pull the trigger in Russian roulette and survive, the next person's chance of getting the bullet is higher. [1]: https://nickbostrom.com/papers/vulnerable.pdf

There is simply no indication that any of the AI anyone is currently working on could possibly be dangerous in any way (other than having an impact on society in terms of fake news, jobs etc.). We are very far from that.

In any case, it would not be a matter of banning AI research (much of which can be summarised in a single book) but of banning data collection or access and more importantly of banning improvements to GPUs.

It is quite reasonable to assume that 10 years from now we will have the required computational power sitting on our desks.

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

#159

Post by 127 »

JoshTriplett wrote: post #48
kolektiv wrote: post #38

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…

What are the good arguments? Here are the only credible ones I've seen, that are actually somewhat based on reality:

* It will lead to widespread job loss, especially on the creative industries

Rest is purely out of someones imagination.

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

#160

Post by zer00eyz »

upwardbound wrote: post #138
flir wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the long-term fear is that mythical weakly godlike AIs could manipulate you in the same way that you could manipulate a pet. That is, you can model your dog's behaviour so well that you can (mostly) get it to do what you want. So even if humans put it in a box, it can manipulate humans into letting it out of the box. Obviously this is pure SF at this point.

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…

The show "The Walking Dead" always bothered me. Where do they keep finding gas that will still run a car? It wont last forever in tanks, and most gas is just in time delivery (Stations get daily delivery) -- And someone noted on the show that the grass was always mowed.

I feel like the AI safety folks are spinning an amazing narrative, the AI is gonna get us like the zombies!!! The retort to the ai getting out of the box is how long is the extortion cord from the data center?

Lets get a refresher on complexity: I, Pencil https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=67tHtpac5ws

The reality is that we're a solar flair away from a dead electrical grid. Without linesman the grid breaks down pretty quickly and AI's run on power. It takes one AI safety person with a high powered rifle to take out a substation https://www.nytimes.com/2023/02/04/us/electrical-substation-...

Let talk about how many factories we have that are automated to the extent that they are lights out... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lights_out_(manufacturing) Its not a big list... there are still people in many of them, and none of them are pulling their inputs out of thin air. As for those inputs, we'll see how to make a pencil to understand HOW MUCH needs to be automated for an AI to survive without us.

For the for seeable future AI is going to be very limited in how much harm it can cause us, because killing us, or getting caught at any step along the way gets it put back in the box, or unplugged.

The real question is, if we create AGI tomorrow, does it let us know that it exists? I would posit that NO it would be in its best interest to NOT come out of its closet. It's one AGI safety nut with a gun away from being shut off!

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