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Meta disbanded its Responsible AI team

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Re: Meta disbanded its Responsible AI team

#101

Post by anytime5704 »

seanhunter wrote: post #70

It never made any organizational sense for me to have a "responsible AI team" in the first place. Every team doing AI work should be responsible and should think about the ethical (and legal at a bare minimum baseline) dimension of what they are doing. Having that concentrated in a single team means that team becomes a bottleneck where they have to vet all AI work everyone else does for responsibility and/or everyone…

Is it really that far fetched? It sounds like a self-imposed regulatory group, which some companies/industries operate proactively to avoid the ire of government agencies.

Yeah, product teams can/should care about being responsible, but there’s an obvious conflict of interest.

To me, this story means Facebook dgaf about being responsible (big surprise).

Re: Meta disbanded its Responsible AI team

#102

Post by Roark66 »

cubefox wrote: post #94
RcouF1uZ4gsC wrote: post #5

Because Meta is releasing their models to the public, I consider them the most ethical company doing AI at scale. Keeping AI models closed under the guise of “ethics”, is I think the most unethical stance as it makes people more dependent on the arbitrary decisions, goals, and priorities of big companies, instead being allowed to define “alignment” for themselves.

Kevin Esvelt says open source models could soon be used by terrorists to create bioweapons. https://nitter.net/kesvelt/status/1720440451059335520 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kevin_M._Esvelt

Seriously? This is just silly. Everyone knows the barrier to terrorists using bio weapons is not specialist knowledge, but access to labs, equipment, reagents etc.

It's the whole Guttenberg's printing press argument. "Whoaa hold on now, what do you mean you want knowledge to be freely available to the vulgar masses?"

The only difference with LLMs is that you do not have to search for this knowledge by yourself, you get a very much hallucination prone AI to tell you the answers. If we extend this argument further why don't we restrict access to public libraries, scientific research and neuter Google even more. And what about Wikipedia?

Re: Meta disbanded its Responsible AI team

#103

Post by peyton »

Retric wrote: post #97
Simon_ORourke wrote: post #76

AI is a tool, and there's about as much point as having some team fretting about responsible usage as there is having similar notions in a Bazooka manufacturer. Whoever ultimately owns the AI (or the Bazooka) will always dictate how and where the particular tool is used. Many of these AI Ethics foundations (e.g., DAIR), just seem to advocate rent seeking behavior, scraping out a role for themselves off the backs of o…

Fretting about the responsible use of bio weapons is a waste of time, it’s a weapon and like Bazooka manufactures we don’t need to worry about ethics… See that’s the thing you can say A is like B, but that doesn’t actually make them the same thing. AI has new implications because it’s a new thing, some of those are overblown, but others need to be carefully considered. Companies are getting sued for their training da…

We’re talking about making sure chatbots don’t say “nigger,” not bioweapons. At some point you need to trust that the people using the tools are adults.

Re: Meta disbanded its Responsible AI team

#105

Post by camdenlock »

spangry wrote: post #43

Does anyone know what this Responsible AI team did? Were they working on the AI alignment / control issue, or was it more about curtailing politically undesirable model outputs? I feel like the conflation of these two things is unfortunate because the latter will cause people to turn off the former. It's like a reverse motte and bailey.

If this one was like any of the others, they were likely tasked with modelwashing LLMs to adhere to current academic fashions; i.e. tired feminist tropes and general social justice dogma.

Re: Meta disbanded its Responsible AI team

#106

Post by cubefox »

dmw_ng wrote: post #96
cubefox wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Kevin Esvelt says open source models could soon be used by terrorists to create bioweapons. https://nitter.net/kesvelt/status/1720440451059335520 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kevin_M._Esvelt

There's been instructions for manufacturing weapons useful for terrorism floating around since the BBS days, nothing new here

It's a big difference when you have an expert which you can ask questions.

Re: Meta disbanded its Responsible AI team

#107

Post by Retric »

peyton wrote: post #103
Retric wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Fretting about the responsible use of bio weapons is a waste of time, it’s a weapon and like Bazooka manufactures we don’t need to worry about ethics… See that’s the thing you can say A is like B, but that doesn’t actually make them the same thing. AI has new implications because it’s a new thing, some of those are overblown, but others need to be carefully considered. Companies are getting sued for their training da…

We’re talking about making sure chatbots don’t say “nigger,” not bioweapons. At some point you need to trust that the people using the tools are adults.

Facebook has far bigger issues than that, such as peoples medical information getting released or potentially getting it wrong. Privacy might not be well protected in the US but defamation lawsuits are no joke. So training on people’s private chat history isn’t necessarily safe.

Even just the realization that ‘Logs from a chatbot conversation can go viral’ has actual real world implications.

Re: Meta disbanded its Responsible AI team

#108

Post by cubefox »

Roark66 wrote: post #102
cubefox wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Kevin Esvelt says open source models could soon be used by terrorists to create bioweapons. https://nitter.net/kesvelt/status/1720440451059335520 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kevin_M._Esvelt

Seriously? This is just silly. Everyone knows the barrier to terrorists using bio weapons is not specialist knowledge, but access to labs, equipment, reagents etc. It's the whole Guttenberg's printing press argument. "Whoaa hold on now, what do you mean you want knowledge to be freely available to the vulgar masses?" The only difference with LLMs is that you do not have to search for this knowledge by yourself, you g…

Neither Wikipedia nor public libraries allow instructions to make weapons of mass destruction.

Re: Meta disbanded its Responsible AI team

#109

Post by ActorNightly »

andrewedstrom wrote: post #71
xvector wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Meta is probably the most ethical company in AI at the moment. Most importantly, their models are open source.

You contradict yourself

You think open sourcing your models isn't ethical?

Re: Meta disbanded its Responsible AI team

#110

Post by watwut »

seanhunter wrote: post #70

It never made any organizational sense for me to have a "responsible AI team" in the first place. Every team doing AI work should be responsible and should think about the ethical (and legal at a bare minimum baseline) dimension of what they are doing. Having that concentrated in a single team means that team becomes a bottleneck where they have to vet all AI work everyone else does for responsibility and/or everyone…

Everyone should think about it usually means no one will.
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