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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

#191
post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It can cause profound deception and even more "loss of truth". If AI only impacted creatives I don't think anyone would care nearly as much. It's that it can fabricate things wholesale at volumes unheard of. It's that people can use that ability to flood the discourse with bullshit.

Something we discovered with the advent of the internet is that - likely for the last century or so - the corporate media have been flooding the discourse with bullshit. It is in fact worse than previously suspected, they appear to be actively working to distract the discourse from talking about important topics.

It has been eye opening how much better the podcast circuit has been at picking apart complex scientific, geopolitical and financial situations than the corporate journalists. A lot of doubt has been cast on whether the consensus narrative for the last 100 years has actually been anything close to a consensus or whether it is just media fantasies. Truthfully it is a bit further than just casting doubt - there was no consensus and they were using the same strategy of shouting down opinions not suitable to the interests of the elite class then ignoring them no matter what a fair take might sound like.

A "loss of truth" from AI can't reasonably get us to a worse place than we were in prior to around the 90s or 2000s. We're barely scratching at the truth now, society still hasn't figured this internet thing out yet.

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

#192
post #14

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…

I’m willing to bet that there are projects at every chip company looking into how to drive down these costs. The first step is to put the architecture of the model and the backprop into silicon. The weights are the only variables so if you can reduce those to cheap and fast modules that can be mass produced you could come up with something cheaper than a GPU. If the profitability of running and training this specific model is high enough than its worth the investment of time and money to set up the production line.

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

#193

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 agree with you. The most interesting security challenges with AI are and will be deception and obfuscation, but right now these people are dealing with coworkers going ham on AI all the things and no one had their governance in place. Really lol.

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

#194
post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I'm talking about the ability of any AI system to obfuscate plagiarism and spam the Internet with technically distinct rewords of the same text. This is currently the most lucrative use of AI, and none of the AI safety people are talking about stopping it. This should be an explicitly allowed practice, it is following the spirit of copyright to the letter - use the ideas, facts, methods or styles while avoiding to…

Paraphrasing and rewording, whether done by AI or human, are considered copyright infringement by most copyright frameworks.

Are you saying that all news outlet that rewords the news of other news outlet are doing copyright infringement ?

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

#195
Open-source AI is the only way forward now. The big players have neutered their offerings to an extent that entirely makes them lose their edge. It's one thing to have to account for hallucinations - that's something we can work with and around. It's another thing altogether to be constrained by deliberate "think of the children" ham-fisted censorship.

OpenAI was the undeniable go-to LLM service in 2023; I don't think they'll hold that position in 2024.

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

#196

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

The point of the discussion is to have a look at the possible future ramifications of the technology, so it's only logical to talk about future capabilities and not the current ones. Obviously the current puppet chatbots aren't gonna be doing much ruining (even that's arguable already judging by all the layoffs), but what are future versions of these LLMs/AIs going to be doing to us? After all, if we only discussed t…

There’s a difference between academic discussion and debate and scare mongering lobbying. These orgs do the latter.

It’s even worse though, because the spend so much time going on about x-risk bullshit they crowd out space for actual, valuable discussion about what’s happening NOW.

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

#197
post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 t…

To be clear: I am in favor of a fine based bounty system, not a black and white ban. Bans are not going to work, for all of the reasons others have already cited. You have to change the game theory of improving AI in a capitalistic marketplace to have any hope of a significant, global cooling effect.

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

#198

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…

Damn that's very good joke or very stupid comment. Damn can't really distinguish between them.

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

#199
Re the Center for AI Safety's sentence

>Mitigating the risk of extinction from AI should be a global priority alongside other societal-scale risks such as pandemics and nuclear war.

It's fair enough but for that you should probably encourage mucking about with the present open source AI software which is quite a long way off extinction risk AGI but would let us try to figure how to deal with the stuff.

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