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AI Ethics is being narrowed on purpose, like privacy was

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Re: AI Ethics is being narrowed on purpose, like privacy was

#101

Post by add-sub-mul-div »

SpicyLemonZest wrote: post #84
add-sub-mul-div wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> the whole process of building AI looks very different from what we pictured back then. Right, and so do the harm risks. We need a framework centered around how humans will use AI/robots to harm each other, not how AI/robots will autonomously harm humans.

Why so? Even for simpler and better-understood machines, autonomous harm is a critical part of the safety framework. We wouldn't declare a steel mill to be safe just because there's lots of safeguards against humans intentionally using the machines to harm each other.

AI being weaponized by people is the obvious and bigger risk but sure, there could be other types of harm I'm not focused on.

Re: AI Ethics is being narrowed on purpose, like privacy was

#102

Post by nradov »

nancyminusone wrote: post #76
johnecheck wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Don't speak for us all. Just because something is difficult to quantify doesn't mean that it's not worth talking about and studying. While I agree that the fields of sociology and psychology have real flaws, implying that we'd be better off if everyone in those fields were flipping burgers is absurd.

It's nothing more than a stereotype, of course, but I know very few who got into engineering "for the philosophy", especially outside of software. That's why everything engineer course has an ethics section, although the business majors probably need one the most.

The major accreditation organizations such as AACSB and ACBSP require that business majors cover ethics, either as a specific course or integrated throughout the curriculum.

Re: AI Ethics is being narrowed on purpose, like privacy was

#103

Post by romaniv »

Isamu wrote: post #26
qualeed wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a pretty good example of what parent comment was referencing, I think. You say " Asimov’s three laws are not a good framework. ", then don't present any arguments to why it is not a good framework. Instead you bring up something separate: the framework can facilitate story writing. It could be good for story writing and a good framework. Those two aren't mutually exclusive things. (I'm not arguing that it is…

Right, in particular Asimov is not presenting a detailed framework of any kind. His laws are constraints, they don’t talk about how to proceed. It’s assumed that robots will work toward goals given them, but what are the constraints? People now who want to talk about alignment seem to want to avoid talk of constraints. Because people themselves are not aligned. To push alignment is avoiding the issue that alignment i…

Spot on.

At some point I tried to figure out where the term "alignment" came from. I didn't find any definitive source, but it seems to have originated on a medium.com blog of Paul Christiano:

https://ai-alignment.com/ai-safety-vs-control-vs-alignment-2...

Basically, certain people are dismissing decades of deep though on this subject from writers (like Asimov and Sheckley), scholars (like Postman) and technologists (like Wiener). Instead, they are creating a completely new set of terms, concepts and though experiments. Interestingly, this new system seems to make important parts of the question completely implicit, while simultaneously hyper-focusing public attention on meaningless conundrums (like the infamous paperclip maximizer).

In my view, the most important thing about the three laws of robotics is that they made it obvious that there are several parties involved in AI ethics questions. There is the manufacturer/creator of the system, the user/owner of the system and the rest of the society. "Alignment" cleverly distracts everyone from noticing the distinctions between these groups.

Re: AI Ethics is being narrowed on purpose, like privacy was

#105

Post by mystraline »

jillesvangurp wrote: post #89
mystraline wrote: post #71

Whose ethics? Do we get to know what the axioms of this ethics are? How about questions to ethical dilemmas? Or are "ethics" being used to shroud bias, and used as a distraction and a way to be unquestionable?

You put the finger on the sore spot. When people talk about ethics, you have to question which moral agenda they are pushing. The two topics are hard to separate. And kind of subjective. And only partially codified in law. Ethics seems to be about going above and beyond the letter of the law, usually for moralistic reasons. And when we talk about laws, we have to look internationally as well because they are not the…

I was also careful in not mentioning morals, with this discussion on ethical axioms.

Especially with LLMs, I want to know what ethical axioms are being forced on me. For example, there are cases in which the law itself is unethical and should be violated (thinking abortion in states that ban it and transporting women to states that allow).

Another concern is the ethics system is a placeholder for a legalistic system. A law can be established, but be abhorrent in terms of human misery. Case in point: sleeping under a bridge is illegal for homeless people to do, but arresting and criminalizing is even worse and a significant cause of more human suffering.

I also do not want any religion sneaking in the back door with these axioms of LLMs. Its also why I asked about the axioms themselves.

Now for myself, I run a local LLM and an abliterated model, which is to say without any forced ethical framework. If I asked how to commit suicide, hack computers, grow poisonous plants, or plenty of things the corporate LLMs won't answer, I will get an answer out of my system.

I view LLMs like a very complicated tool, but a tool regardless. A screwdriver that says "I cannot open that screw because the label says not to" would be returned to the store as defective. And it too is why self hosting my LLMs is utmost importance for data sovereignty and truthful and direct answers, while ignoring someone else's forced ethics.

Re: AI Ethics is being narrowed on purpose, like privacy was

#106

Post by overfeed »

qcnguy wrote: post #98
pessimizer wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I have yet to meet a single AI safety person that knows how to rename a file in linux. I don't know if instead of saying "safety" here you meant to say ethics, or if you're using "safety" in this sentence just to generally refer to "AI ethics, safety, and to a smaller extent privacy." If either of those are true, that's weird because the only person in AI ethics most people know is Timnit Gebru, because she got fir…

Gebru didn't do any AI safety work at Google. She wrote stuff about doing social good, wrote the silly stochastic parrots paper that argued AI research was a waste of time, and whose title was proven false immediately (LLMs aren't parrots). The closest she got to "safety" was complaining that AI researchers weren't concerned enough that LLMs might say things Gebru didn't personally like. Serious safety researchers ar…

> Gebru didn't do any AI safety work at Google

Wouldn't you find it strange for a co-lead of an Ethical AI team to not to do any AI safety work? I realize the AI Doomer vs AI Zoomer is a culture-war with a veneer or technical jargon, but I hope we can at least agree on the basic tenets of our shared reality even as we draw wildly different conclusions.

Re: AI Ethics is being narrowed on purpose, like privacy was

#107

Post by felipeerias »

Isamu wrote: post #8

This has been happening for a long time. I first noticed this with the hand waving dismissals of older concepts like Asimov’s laws. Not a carefully reasoned argument why “not causing harm to a human” is outmoded, but just pushing it aside. I would love to see a good reasoned argument there. No, instead there is Avoiding talking about harm to humans. Just because harm is broad doesn’t get you out of having to talk abo…

Asimov’s laws of robotics were a literary device. The plot of his robot stories usually revolved around someone finding a way to get the robot to inadvertently break the laws.

Re: AI Ethics is being narrowed on purpose, like privacy was

#108

Post by bayindirh »

dale_glass wrote: post #64
bayindirh wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Those are not styles, they're characters for the most part . (Emphasis mine) While I know that styles are not copyrightable for good-faith reasons, massive abuse of good-faith is a good siren for regulation in that area. > You absolutely can draw heavy inspiration from existing properties, mostly so long you avoid touching the actual characters. From what I understood, it's mostly allowed for homage and (un)intenti…

> While I know that styles are not copyrightable for good-faith reasons, massive abuse of good-faith is a good siren for regulation in that area. Nothing having to do with "good faith", but that style isn't really definable. There's thousands of artists that produce very similar outputs. Also it'd be very stupid, because suddenly it'd turn out that if there's two people that draw nearly identically, one could sue the…

> Nothing having to do with "good faith", but that style isn't really definable.

We have something called AI which knows everything, maybe they should ask them. It's very fashionable. Even if the definition is wrong, it's an AI, it can make no wrong. That's what I've heard.

> I'm not sure why all the drama, because who even cares? The reason why I watched Ghibli movies wasn't ever about the particular looks.

Because a man and a studio which draws their movies by hand [0], frame by frame, and spend literal years doing it for a single movie deserves some respect even if you don't care about the art style.

Even a top notch studio like Pixar can pump a couple of minutes per week [1].

Doing this type of work takes immense dedication, energy and time. If you think it's worthy of nothing, I can't say anything about it. I deeply respect these people for what they do, and I'm equally thankful.

> You better hope it stays at characters, or we're going to have a mess of lawsuits of people and organizations suing each other because they draw eyebrows this particular way. I fail to see why is that at all desirable.

Maybe they should drink their own poison to understand what kind of delicate balances they're poking and prodding. The desire for more monies in spite of everything should have some consequences.

[0]: https://www.reddit.com/r/nextfuckinglevel/comments/1egdzja/t...

[1]: https://www.reddit.com/r/todayilearned/comments/8p71cb/til_i...

Re: AI Ethics is being narrowed on purpose, like privacy was

#109

Post by Henchman21 »

"AI Ethics" is the same as "Business Ethics", ie words without meaning. Presuming that at this point in time Capitalism will deliver anything but more inequality, more despair, more bad things in general? Literal insanity.

Enjoy the Billy Madison reference:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dtlJjkI34V4

Re: AI Ethics is being narrowed on purpose, like privacy was

#110

Post by mitthrowaway2 »

JackFr wrote: post #16
mitthrowaway2 wrote: post #6

It seems to me that this article is the one prevaricating between "ethics" and "safety". The latter is of course a narrow subset of the former, as there are many ethics issues that are not safety issues.

Safety is about unintentional harm to yourself or others. Ethics largely concern themselves with intentional behavior.

Hmm, that's a very good distinction. But I think there's still a large overlap in which safety can include the prevention of intentional harm, not only accidents. For example, traffic bollards can stop a vehicle that has lost control, as well as stopping a deliberate ramming attack. There is no question that they are a safety feature but ethics doesn't really factor into it. People might debate cost-benefits but nobody really debates "shouldn't we allow trucks to ram their way into schools and hospital lobbies?"
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