Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

AI will never be ethical or safe

meiert.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

11–20 of 37 posts

Re: AI will never be ethical or safe

#11

Post by tombert »

ckastner wrote: post #4

> The reason is this: > Both ethical and safe conduct depend on context and intent. The same apples to knives, and they can be plenty useful, and used in a safe manner.

I suppose that the argument could be made that knives are inherently unsafe, and that no matter what it is important to always treat it like it's unsafe. This doesn't imply that you shouldn't use knives, just that you should be aware of the inherent unsafety of it?

I don't know, I didn't really agree with the post, I'm trying my best to steel man it.

Re: AI will never be ethical or safe

#13

Post by rvz »

There's no such thing as "ethics in AI" in a company when there are billions of dollars of investor money on the table.

"Safety" was just the smokescreen and the perfect scare tactic towards tricking governments to turn even more tyrannical and place in extreme surveillance on everyone which benefits tech corporations, data brokers and AI companies.

Re: AI will never be ethical or safe

#14

Post by madibo3156 »

Maxatar wrote: post #3

The article immediately starts off with such a glaring contradiction that it makes it very hard to correctly interpret the remainder of it. You can't say that something can never be ethical/safe on the one hand, and then on the other hand say that being ethical/safe depends on context/intent. Those two statements contradict each other. Either AI can be safe and ethical in the right context with the appropriate intent…

[dead]

Re: AI will never be ethical or safe

#15

Post by plutokras »

amelius wrote: post #6

Can an encyclopaedia be ethical or safe? Can a search engine be ethical or safe? Can an AI be ethical or safe? If you answer differently for one or more of these questions, then you'll have to say why and where you draw the line.

I do hope the rare earth metal in my calculator is also ethically sourced.

Re: AI will never be ethical or safe

#16

Post by bnjmn »

"Context and intent cannot be known" seems like a bit of an overstatement? A qualifying clause like "in all cases, with complete confidence" would allow for the possibility of alignment in some cases (yay), but not always, and of course it's that "not always" that's problematic when you're trying to make blanket safety guarantees.

Here's a version I imagine both the author and I can nod along with: "Context and intent cannot be known at model training time, so most attempts to enforce safety or ethics guardrails purely through the weights of the model, fine-tuning, or other training-time interventions are doomed to guarantee very little at inference time."

Re: AI will never be ethical or safe

#18

Post by undecisive »

This article in a nutshell: AI will never be ethical or safe, because no tool can ever be ethical or safe, without it knowing the complete motivation of any person using it and every person who might receive its outputs.

Wasn't the article I was expecting! Not sure it helps much, except maybe if you wanted to muddy the water of ethics-and-AI discussions.

Re: AI will never be ethical or safe

#19

Post by dzink »

Water can never be safe. Water in large quantities can drown anyone. When mixed with the wrong things it can turn into chemical reactions. Water safety depends on context and intent.

So if we consider AI a chemical substance - if inserted in with limited context in tools with specific intent, can it be useful beyond tools available at this moment?

You can trust just any liquid that looks like water, just as you can trust just any model or especially any inference provider (they can switch models to save money or mess with other key parameters, or insert ads). You have to test your water supply and your AI supply regularly. And benchmark new sources. We’ll see labeling and quality guarantees in future suppliers. We’ll see personal models and model families trained and refined as brands for reliability. Bottled neatly for you by certified suppliers.

In the mean time we all just found our selves out of a desert and splashing around in this funky thing that we now find on the ground and falling for free from clouds.

Re: AI will never be ethical or safe

#20

Post by fwip »

Maxatar wrote: post #3

The article immediately starts off with such a glaring contradiction that it makes it very hard to correctly interpret the remainder of it. You can't say that something can never be ethical/safe on the one hand, and then on the other hand say that being ethical/safe depends on context/intent. Those two statements contradict each other. Either AI can be safe and ethical in the right context with the appropriate intent…

I think without reading the final line, you might get the wrong impression.

> It doesn’t make those frameworks worthless. It makes them incomplete by design—and it means, again, that AI will never be entirely ethical or safe.

Lots of people in this thread are reading the headline and making the same comparisons that the author does - "Most people don’t provide their context. They never have—not to search engines, not to librarians, not to hardware store clerks."

The article isn't saying "AI will never be ethical and safe, and it is unique in that way," it is saying "and so it is similar to these other things." If anything, it is critiquing the claims made by corporate AI that they can successfully make AI both useful and totally safe.

Post reply on HN