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Avoiding AI is hard – but our freedom to opt out must be protected

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Re: Avoiding AI is hard – but our freedom to opt out must be protected

#91

Post by jclulow »

exsomet wrote: post #88
danielmarkbruce wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's also a silly idea. Companies get sued all the time. There is recourse. If you run a bank that runs an AI model to make decisions on home loans and the effect is no black people get a loan, you are going to find yourself in court the exact same way as if you hire loan officers who are a bunch of racists. There is no difference. It is available to the entity running inference. Every single token and all the prob…

Taking the example of healthcare, a person may not have time to sue over an adverse decision. If the recourse is “you can sue the insurance company, but it’s going to take so long you’ll probably die while you’re waiting on that”, that’s not recourse.

Right, this is the bedrock upon which injunctive relief is made available; viz., when money after the fact would not cancel out the damages caused by a party doing the wrong thing. Unfortunately you can't get that relief without having an expensive lawyer, generally, so it doesn't end up being terribly equitable for low income folks.

Re: Avoiding AI is hard – but our freedom to opt out must be protected

#92

Post by amelius »

beloch wrote: post #82

>* "AI decision making also needs to be more transparent. Whether it’s automated hiring, healthcare or financial services, AI should be understandable, accountable and open to scrutiny." You can't simply look at a LLM's code and determine if, for example, it has racial biases. This is very similar to a human. You can't look inside someone's brain to see if they're racist. You can only respond to what they do. If a hu…

The question I have is: should an AI company be allowed to push updates without testing by an independent party (e.g. in self driving cars)?

Re: Avoiding AI is hard – but our freedom to opt out must be protected

#93

Post by JimDabell »

guappa wrote: post #80
JimDabell wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> There should be nothing where any kind of AI system can make a final decision. This would forbid things like spam filters.

You never look into your spam folder?

A huge amount of spam never makes it into spam folders; it’s discarded silently.

Re: Avoiding AI is hard – but our freedom to opt out must be protected

#94

Post by strogonoff »

MoltenMan wrote: post #53
heavyset_go wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> On the other hand, blocking training on published information doesn’t make sense: If you don’t want your stuff to be read, don’t publish it! There's a difference between reading something and ripping it off, no matter how you launder it.

I think the line is actually much blurrier than it might seem. Realistically everything is a remix of things people have done before; almost nothing is truly brand new. So why specifically are people allowed to build on humanity's past achievements, but not AI?

> why specifically are people allowed to build on humanity's past achievements, but not AI?

Let’s untangle this.

1. Humanity’s achievements are achievements by individuals, who are motivated by desires like recognition, wealth, personal security, altruism, self-actualisation.

2. “AI” does not build on that body of work. A chatbot has no free will or agency; there is no concept of “allowing” it to do something—there is engineering it and operating a tool, and both are done by humans.

3. Some humans today engineer and operate tools, for which (at least in the most prominent and widely-used cases) they generally charge money, yet which essentially proxy the above-mentioned original work by other humans.

4. Those humans engineer and operate said tools without asking the people who created said work, in a way that does not benefit or acknowledge them, thus robbing people of many of the motivations mentioned in point 1, and arguably in circumvention of legal IP protections that exist in order to encourage said work.

Re: Avoiding AI is hard – but our freedom to opt out must be protected

#95

Post by PieTime »

GeorgeCurtis wrote: post #41
Bjartr wrote: post #31

> Imagine applying for a job, only to find out that an algorithm powered by artificial intelligence (AI) rejected your resume before a human even saw it The article says this like it's a new problem. Automated resume screening is a long established practice at this point. That it'll be some LLM doing the screening instead of a keyword matcher doesn't change much. Although, it could be argued that an LLM would better…

> It also influences hiring decisions, rental applications, loans, credit scoring, social media feeds, government services and even what news or information we see when we search online. I think, more frighteningly, the potential for it to make decisions on insurance claims and medical care.

I know people who’ve died because of AI algorithms years ago. They’ve implemented state programs with no legal oversight and only governed by an algorithm.

Re: Avoiding AI is hard – but our freedom to opt out must be protected

#96

Post by squidbeak »

kazinator wrote: post #71
danielmarkbruce wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is an underlying assumption there that is certainly incorrect. So many stupid comments about AI boil down to "humans are incredibly good at X, we can't risk having AI do it". Humans are bad at all manner of things. There are all kinds of bad human decisions being made in insurance, health care, construction, investing, everywhere. It's one big joke to suggest we are good at all this stuff.

Bad decisions in insurance are, roughly speaking, on the side of over-approving. AI will perform tirelessly and consistently at maximizing rejections. It will leave no stone unturned in search for justifications why a claim ought to be denied.

This has an easy public policy fix through something like a national insurance claim assessment agency, with an impartial prompt, which AI will make reasonably cheap to fund. It's always been perverse that insurance companies judge the merits of their own liabilities.

Re: Avoiding AI is hard – but our freedom to opt out must be protected

#97

Post by guappa »

JimDabell wrote: post #93
guappa wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You never look into your spam folder?

A huge amount of spam never makes it into spam folders; it’s discarded silently.

If you use microsoft outlook most of the spam never makes it into the spam folder because it goes to the inbox.

Do you have a source for your somewhat unbelievable claim?

Re: Avoiding AI is hard – but our freedom to opt out must be protected

#99

Post by bandrami »

guappa wrote: post #97
JimDabell wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A huge amount of spam never makes it into spam folders; it’s discarded silently.

If you use microsoft outlook most of the spam never makes it into the spam folder because it goes to the inbox. Do you have a source for your somewhat unbelievable claim?

Mail server op here: mail exchangers (mine included) absolutely silently drop insane amounts of email submissions without any indication to the sender or the envelope recipient. At most there's a log the operator can look at somewhere that notes the rejection and whatever rules it was based on.

Re: Avoiding AI is hard – but our freedom to opt out must be protected

#100

Post by roenxi »

kazinator wrote: post #71
danielmarkbruce wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is an underlying assumption there that is certainly incorrect. So many stupid comments about AI boil down to "humans are incredibly good at X, we can't risk having AI do it". Humans are bad at all manner of things. There are all kinds of bad human decisions being made in insurance, health care, construction, investing, everywhere. It's one big joke to suggest we are good at all this stuff.

Bad decisions in insurance are, roughly speaking, on the side of over-approving. AI will perform tirelessly and consistently at maximizing rejections. It will leave no stone unturned in search for justifications why a claim ought to be denied.

That isn't what the incentives point too; in a free market the insurers are aligned to accuracy. An insurer who has a reputation of being unreasonable about payouts won't have any customers - what is the point of taking out a policy if you expect the insurer to be unreasonable about paying? It'd take an odd customer to sign up for that.

If they over-approve they will be unprofitable because their premiums aren't high enough. If they under-approve it'll be because their customers go elsewhere.

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