I suspect a good chunk of "AI safety people" are just orgs propped up by the big corps to protect their interest in AI and reduce competition.
Many AI safety orgs have tried to criminalize currently-existing open-source AI
321–330 of 405 posts
Re: Many AI safety orgs have tried to criminalize currently-existing open-source AI
#322Government 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…
The problem is that open source philosophy and large language models don't mix. How can you support open source licensing, while completely ignoring that licencing to construct you model? That's the biggest reason for the lack of "AI Stalman" imo, that's asking for someone that vehemently supports taking any content they can get their hands on to make the content generator irrelevant, while also supporting the idea t…
> content distributed with open source licenses need to have their terms respected
I think we can begin more BSD-like. Take it, use it, do whatever you want with it even if it's commercial.
> datasets to be more ethical
Not what I am personally concerned with. Law is still ambiguous in this respect, no rulings have actually said (afaik) training on copyrighted content without permission is infringing. It's quite apparent at this stage that models that train on copyrighted content without approval of the content creator will always out scale those that do not.
If permission becomes a prerequisite, I began to think that free-as-in-freedom LLMs will likely need to be made people who can ignore copyright either because they're really good at anonymizing themselves or they live in places that do not enforce Western copyrights (Russia, China, various Latam countries). Once copyright becomes a concern, the government gets another tool to sic its dogs on you, and copyright is a very convenient way to destroy an enterprising FOSS LLM dev's life without looking tyrannical.
Re: Many AI safety orgs have tried to criminalize currently-existing open-source AI
#323I find it unhelpful that several different ideas are covered under the blanket term of AI safety. - There is AI safety in terms of producing "safe", politically correct outputs, no porn, etc. - There is AI safety in terms of mass society/election manipulation. - There is AI safety in terms of strong AI that kills us all a la Eliezer Yudkowsky. I feel like these three have very little in common and it makes all debate…
To add to this, the people writing these articles are not stupid and know there is more than one understanding for the words they're using. They choose not to clarify on purpose, or they're incompetent and I don't want to believe that's the case. "AI safety" imo should be the blanket term for "any harm done to society by the technology", and it's the responsibility of anyone using the term to clarify the usage. If so…
> they're tying to use the vagueness to take advantage of you
Not always. I see AI safety used without further specification all the time even here on hacker news. I doubt the users are trying to take advantage of anyone.
In that case it's more of a case of the author considering one of those meanings so much more important/relevant that they think it's obvious what they mean. But often it's not – everyone fills in the meaning they care about the most.
Re: Many AI safety orgs have tried to criminalize currently-existing open-source AI
#324Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 ne…
They declare that - but I could also declare I'm trying to build a nuclear bomb (n.b. I'm not). Whether people are likely to try and stop me, or try and apply some legal non-proliferation framework, is partly influenced by whether they believe what I'm claiming is realistic (it's not - I have a workshop, but no fissile material). Nobody gets too worried about me doing something which would be awful, but the general c…
So do we just pray AGI is impossible?
Companies are trying and spend many money to make it possible in this moment.
Re: Many AI safety orgs have tried to criminalize currently-existing open-source AI
#325Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 ne…
> Companies declare that they are trying to build better AI, and the ultimately purpose is AGI. They do declare it, but nobody has even come up with a plausible path from where we are today, to anything like AGI. At this point they might as well declare that they're trying to build time machines.
yes, but why we even give them chances? when they know their ultimately purpose is dangerous?
Re: Many AI safety orgs have tried to criminalize currently-existing open-source AI
#326Earlier quoted context omitted.
I’ve only read 2 novels and want to get in to this. What title(s) cover the machine war?
Note that there are no "thinking machines" in any of the original Dune novels by Frank Herbert. His son has worked with Brian Sanderson to create several prequels which detail the original Butlerian Jihad (the war against the machines), and a sequel series that is supposed to be based on Frank Herbert's notes, but seems to quite clearly veer off (and that one recontexualizes some mysterious characters in from the las…
The encyclopedia goes into it as well but that was blessed by FH and not written by him.
Re: Many AI safety orgs have tried to criminalize currently-existing open-source AI
#327Earlier quoted context omitted.
I didn't make any argument -- at least, not any argument for or against AI x-risk. I am not, and was not, arguing (1) that AI does or doesn't in fact pose substantial existential risk, or (2) that we should or shouldn't put substantial resources into mitigating such risks. I'm talking one meta-level up: if this sort of risk were a real problem, would all the arguments for worrying about it be dismissable as "hypothet…
This article — and my statements — are not about "is this interesting and worth a bit of effort to look into." The article is about how current AI safety orgs have tried to make current open-source models illegal. That's a much stronger position than just "this is interesting, let's look into it." Sure! By all means look into whatever seems interesting to you. But claiming that it should be banned, to me, seems like…
You made an analogy between AI x-risk and e.g. cold fusion. I pointed out that there's an important disanalogy here: no one is claiming or has claimed that cold fusion poses an existential threat. Hence, the nearest cold-fusion claim to any AI x-risk claims is "cold fusion is worth investigating" (which it was, once, and isn't now).
It looks to me as if (1) you made an analogy that doesn't really work, then (2) when I pointed out how it doesn't work, (3) you said "look, you're making an analogy that doesn't really work". That doesn't seem very fair.
I wouldn't expect hell itself to have physical-world evidence. But the idea of hell doesn't turn up as an isolated thing, it comes as part of a package that also says e.g. that the world is under the constant supervision of an all-powerful, supremely good being, and that I would expect to have physical-world evidence.
I have no problem with the principle that extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. The difficult thing is deciding which claims count as "extraordinary". A lot of theists would say that atheism is the extraordinary claim, on the grounds that until recently almost everyone believed in a god or gods. (I'm not sure that's actually quite true, but it might be true for e.g. "Western" societies.) I don't agree and I take it you don't either, but once the question's raised you actually have to look at the various claims being made and how plausible they are: you can't just say "look, obviously this claim is extraordinary and that claim isn't".
Advocates of AI x-risk might say: it's not an extraordinary claim that AI systems will keep getting more powerful -- they're doing that right now and it's not at all uncommon for technological progress to continue for a while. And it's not an extraordinary claim that they'll get smarter than us along whatever axis you choose to measure -- that's a thing that's happened over and over again in particular domains. And it's not an extraordinary claim that something smarter than us might pose a big threat to our well-being or even our existence; look at what we've done to everything else on the planet.
You, on the other hand, would presumably say that actually some or all of those are extraordinary claims. Or perhaps that their conjunction is extraordinary even if the individual conjuncts aren't so bad.
Unfortunately, "extraordinary" isn't a term with a precise definition that we know how to check objectively. It's a shorthand for something like "highly improbable given the other things we know" or "highly implausible given the other things we know", and if someone doesn't agree with you that something is an "extraordinary" claim I don't know of any way to convince them that doesn't involve actually engaging with it.
(Of course you might not care whether you convince them. If all you want to do is to encourage other people who think AI x-risk is nonsense, saying "extraordinary claim" and "burden of proof" and so on may be plenty sufficient.)
Re: Many AI safety orgs have tried to criminalize currently-existing open-source AI
#328Earlier quoted context omitted.
To add to this, the people writing these articles are not stupid and know there is more than one understanding for the words they're using. They choose not to clarify on purpose, or they're incompetent and I don't want to believe that's the case. "AI safety" imo should be the blanket term for "any harm done to society by the technology", and it's the responsibility of anyone using the term to clarify the usage. If so…
> they're tying to use the vagueness to take advantage of you Not always. I see AI safety used without further specification all the time even here on hacker news. I doubt the users are trying to take advantage of anyone. In that case it's more of a case of the author considering one of those meanings so much more important/relevant that they think it's obvious what they mean. But often it's not – everyone fills in t…
In a comment it takes too much effort to specify every word you use, so instead comments relies much more on context. If a discussion is about models getting neutered then AI safety probably means that and so on.
But when you write a full article then the context is your article so you have to specify what you mean there, and the effort to specify it in an article is relatively little work compared to doing it in every comment.
Re: Many AI safety orgs have tried to criminalize currently-existing open-source AI
#329Earlier 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…
Ha! Good one! Let's just roll back all our healthcare research, logistics, environmental advancements etc. because some boogey man tech might do something bad perhaps at sometime in the future maybe!
The majority of our healthcare research, logistics, and environmental advancements, and most other aspects of 21st-century living can be switched over to alternative technologies that do not require computers. The main thing we will definitely lose is social media, which many people would be glad to see removed from our lives, as it provides shallow and addictive dopamine hits, much like cigarettes, while diminishing the amount of time left in the day that people get to spend together in person.
Moving to non-computer-based technological alternatives takes significant cleverness. The engineers of the analog electronics era were geniuses compared to us today, and we can re-attain that lost level of skill. I welcome the challenge.
Re: Many AI safety orgs have tried to criminalize currently-existing open-source AI
#330Earlier quoted context omitted.
The way the ban is enforced, yes. But no one in their right mind believes that heroin should be openly accessible on the market like candy. We've seen how that works out with tobacco.
I think that's worked fine with tobacco. Unlike illegal drugs, alcohol and tobacco consumption have been gradually dropping over time(or moved to less harmful methods than smoking). Heroin already is openly accessible. As much as one can try to argue this is an accessibility issue, it really isn't. Anyone who is motivated to can get their hands on some heroin. The only thing that's made harder to access is high quali…
No, heroin is not "openly accessible". Massive corporations are not profiting off pushing heroin.
You'd see a massive increase in heroin use if it was fully legal. And that's not a good thing jn any possible way.