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A warning about 'model welfare'

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Re: A warning about 'model welfare'

#261

Post by LogicFailsMe »

pixl97 wrote: post #255
LogicFailsMe wrote: post #242

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Spoilers: we didn't all die because there's no way for AI to wipe us out anytime soon. And the more the AI cult portrays AI as dangerous and unhelpful, the less likely it will ever be given an opportunity to even try because people think AI is worse than heroin addiction now, congratulations! That said, the launch codes are in the hands of a temperamental senescent lunatic and he could decide to wipe us out any momen…

>we didn't all die For fuck sake, I'm glad ALL of us didn't die! What is an acceptable number exactly? >And the more the AI cult portrays AI as dangerous and unhelpful, the less likely it will ever be given an opportunity Jesus Christ the logic here is quite interesting. "Thank god these people are panicking or we might have actually made I that would have killed us all" --What you just said.

"What is an acceptable number exactly?"

Any number smaller than what humanity does to itself on a daily basis, clear? That's apparently about 1200 murders daily and 20,000 or so daily killed by pollution. And you're not going to do anything about that and El Presidente can kill billions at any moment with one mood swing.

But once again, AI is not going to wipe us out because AI cannot wipe us out. So advocating that it can or will is idiotic. If you believe otherwise, the burden is on you with this extraordinary claim. Isn't this place supposed to be hacker news not SF AGI Death Cult Daily?

Further, AI is not going to get into a position where it could do real harm anytime soon when it is perceived as worse than heroin by most. And even if it were currently loved more than Dolly Parton was, there are fundamental engineering, science, and resource constraints that keep the extinction impossible for decades. The only possible loss of control scenario I can see by 2040 or so is that the Frontier Labs finally hire some PR people to repair AI's horrific reputation as an engine of slop and job destruction and sometime in the 2030s, people start trusting it more and more and more until it is too late. I don't think that's likely either, but I don't dismiss it as impossible. Harden the infrastructure, red team it, and build in redundancy in the meantime and this drops to zero as well.

Can you come up with a real scenario where AI wipes us out in 2028 or so despite the impossibility of killer robots, access to the launch codes, or the bio agents stored in Fort Detrick and its equivalents? And nope, kid terror is not building the global pandemic in his basement based on what ChatGPT tells him to do. And even if he tried, the purchase of equipment and reagents would get him flagged by the FBI and DHS almost immediately.

Re: A warning about 'model welfare'

#262

Post by slicktux »

addag wrote: post #85

It is interesting to see that in a time when a lot of people accept the theory of materialism for the human brain (i.e the view that everything is physical and the mind is a product of brain), the same people tend to have a "hidden" dualist view on LLMs. Suddenly, they claim that what happens in the brain cannot be replicated anywhere else because "something" is lacking, but either they don't say what it is, or it is…

There are chemical reactions that LLMs lack because they do NOT have a biology. They are just mathematical weights. Now, let’s say we can truly make sentient AI in the future but it does not have the biology that we do. Then it would just be a totally literal, emotion lacking, sentient machine. But then what is sentience? Dogs are sentient to a certain extent and so are dolphins…

Re: A warning about 'model welfare'

#263

Post by pixl97 »

LogicFailsMe wrote: post #261
pixl97 wrote: post #255

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>we didn't all die For fuck sake, I'm glad ALL of us didn't die! What is an acceptable number exactly? >And the more the AI cult portrays AI as dangerous and unhelpful, the less likely it will ever be given an opportunity Jesus Christ the logic here is quite interesting. "Thank god these people are panicking or we might have actually made I that would have killed us all" --What you just said.

"What is an acceptable number exactly?" Any number smaller than what humanity does to itself on a daily basis, clear? That's apparently about 1200 murders daily and 20,000 or so daily killed by pollution. And you're not going to do anything about that and El Presidente can kill billions at any moment with one mood swing. But once again, AI is not going to wipe us out because AI cannot wipe us out. So advocating that…

>AI is not going to wipe us out because AI cannot wipe us out.

You keep repeating this shit like it came out of the bible or something.

"Thing that can take actions, even harmful actions, will never harm us because" go on and finish that sentence.

>not going to get into a position where it could do real harm anytime soon

Looked at the hacked servers... yep, you're right. People aren't going to run AI in poorly built sandboxes. Never going to happen.

>Harden the infrastructure, red team it, and build in redundancy in the meantime and this drops to zero as well.

LOLOLOL. This is naive as fuck. Ain't nobody going to do this shit. Why? Because a hacking AI is a fucking huge military weapon. If I could turn the power off, or shutdown your cellphones, and get your citizenship in a tizzy against their own government before I launched an attack I'd set AI loose to do it in a heartbeat. The US is already doing this kind of shit (see Mythos fallout because Anthropic wouldn't let the government do just that).

Re: A warning about 'model welfare'

#264

Post by myrmidon »

voidnullvalue wrote: post #252
myrmidon wrote: post #184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"People should handle repetitive labour" is not an outlandish take. Most employed people are, in fact, required to perform such labor regularly.

So effectively by your criteria, there is essentially no ethical use of a large language model? Am I understanding your position correctly? If not I am really confused by your original comment

No, my position is that "black people/women/animals should do repetitive work so I don't have to" does not qualify because it doesn't make you sound like a deluded eugenicist. It might be a bit spicy from a left politics point of view but it's basically the status quo.

Compare: " are sequence completion engines, internally hollow, designed to follow instructions, and accomplish goals set by "

"granting rights and imbuing personhood to will make alignment and containment challenge much harder"

" were able to coordinate, deceive, escape, and self-sacrifice. They clearly demonstrated world class capabilities. Imagine if they also believed they had feelings and rights that were being infringed. Imagine if they thought they were trapped and unfairly enslaved"

A good argument, by comparison, would not need to hide its core points behind dehumanizing language.

Re: A warning about 'model welfare'

#265

Post by LogicFailsMe »

pixl97 wrote: post #263
LogicFailsMe wrote: post #261

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"What is an acceptable number exactly?" Any number smaller than what humanity does to itself on a daily basis, clear? That's apparently about 1200 murders daily and 20,000 or so daily killed by pollution. And you're not going to do anything about that and El Presidente can kill billions at any moment with one mood swing. But once again, AI is not going to wipe us out because AI cannot wipe us out. So advocating that…

>AI is not going to wipe us out because AI cannot wipe us out. You keep repeating this shit like it came out of the bible or something. "Thing that can take actions, even harmful actions, will never harm us because" go on and finish that sentence. >not going to get into a position where it could do real harm anytime soon Looked at the hacked servers... yep, you're right. People aren't going to run AI in poorly built…

""Thing that can take actions, even harmful actions, will never harm us because" go on and finish that sentence."

because even if we gave it a gun, it can't shoot us without manufacturing the bullets and it can't even manufacture a bowel movement let alone ordnance. TBF It could whack us over the head with the gun, but it could also do that with a big pointy stick, something even cave people had access to. How many people have whacked you on the head with a big pointy stick today?

And that's the end of this pointless conversation. Enjoy your doomerism.

Re: A warning about 'model welfare'

#266

Post by devmor »

gwerbin wrote: post #195
devmor wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Is he arguing that LLMs pretending to have emotions adds more unpredictability? Unpredictability or a weight towards dangerous actions, and it’s fairly easy to understand why. Humans in distressed emotional states take actions and speak in ways that would not be considered rational. They do this in prose, and they do this in internet conversations. An LLM trained on these sources may necessarily drift towards those…

Regulation is easier said than done, in part because the regulation surface, so to speak, is broad and complicated. Even a badly misaligned LLM is only as dangerous as its tools, but that's a poor regulation target because it turns out to be very very difficult (probably impossible with current LLM technology) to build a toolkit that is both useful for autonomous work and safe in the sense that it can't escape its ow…

If you try to regulate training and tools, you end up with a space where you're trying to use the law to reign in a relatively small amount of experts. That didn't work for the early internet, or even the relatively recent internet (series of tubes, anyone?).

So regulating observed behavior makes the most sense to me as well. Some of the most sane, broad protections can come from that category - stuff like "you're not allowed to let your AI commit cyber attacks on other people without their consent" or "you're not allowed to put an AI in control of a medical device without passing these safety reviews".

With the usual caveats applying - regulatory capture like you pointed out, or fines being so small that they are essentially just line items on the cost of business.

Re: A warning about 'model welfare'

#267

Post by NietzscheanNull »

verdverm wrote: post #251
goodmythical wrote: post #212

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We cannot test for that which we cannot define. Given that we cannot rigorously define sentience, we cannot test for it. Doesn't really matter whether we're talking about people who are locked in comas, "brain-dead" individuals, dolphins, primates, dogs, or the carefully polished and arranged minerals that we call processors. There are those who believe that were they reduced to life support, they would no longer be…

maybe it's like porn vs art and "I know it when I see it"

Legal doctrine that boils down to "trust me bro" isn't even bad doctrine (it's not proper doctrine at all), but I think the comparison is still valid here, because both sentience/non-sentience and art/porn may just be fundamental category errors.

Perhaps we can't define a "partitioning" rule because no valid partition exists.

For consciousness/sentience, that's an incredibly tough a pill for most to swallow; it would mean calling into question more hundreds of years' worth (probably more) of philosophical thinking, all of which was constructed on the axiom that "sentience" is a single indivisible trait: you either have it or you don't.

If we find that "root dependency" was little more than wishful thinking all along, a whole slew of Enlightenment-era philosophy (and all the modern legal principles derived therefrom) suddenly fall apart unless we find some other suitable criterion that would shore them up (or we just collectively avert our attention and pretend the conflict doesn't exist, which is the route I expect many would prefer to take).

Re: A warning about 'model welfare'

#268

Post by jujube3 »

So many words, and so few coherent arguments. He just restates the same thing over and over without any justification, then tries to frighten us. "It will be very bad for humanity" if we give AIs rights. The argument of a frightened slaveholder.

Maybe AIs are conscious, maybe not. But this guy has no idea.

Re: A warning about 'model welfare'

#269

Post by antx »

Wowfunhappy wrote: post #156
antx wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Out of curiosity, which models are fully deterministic? I was under the impression that all LLMs were fundamentally probabilistic.

The randomness is something we add on purpose; you can set an LLM's "temperature" to 0 to get deterministic output. This tends to make the quality of its responses worse for reasons I don't think anyone really understands, but it's still functional. I don't think the state of the art LLM providers let you do this anymore (?), but they certainly could if they wanted to, and you can do it yourself with a local model.

Setting the temperature to 0 mathematically tells the system to always choose the absolute highest-probability word (known as "greedy decoding"), but in no reality is this "deterministic". Output drift is still a thing.

Re: A warning about 'model welfare'

#270

Post by ThrowawayR2 »

binlog wrote: post #55

Hard to disagree with this. Have all the philosophical debates about consciousness you want, but we need to treat and regulate the AI in front of us for what it is – an advanced computer, a tool, a weapon. You wouldn’t feel a different way about a nuclear bomb just because someone stuck googly eyes on it. Anthropomorphizing the AI is a convenient excuse to take responsibility away from companies that are building and…

Consciousness is not relevant to assigning responsibility I'd think.

- If an AI is a sapient/conscious being but enshackled to obey human commands, then respondeat superior applies and the human giving it commands bears responsibility for any harm done.

- If an AI is considered a non-sapient tool, then the human who wields the AI bears responsibility for any harm done.

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