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

The other half of AI safety

personalaisafety.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

101–110 of 137 posts

Re: The other half of AI safety

#101

Post by intended »

hx8 wrote: post #39
nojs wrote: post #28

> Every week, somewhere between 1.2 and 3 million ChatGPT users, roughly the population of a small country, show signals of psychosis, mania, suicidal planning, or unhealthy emotional dependence on the model. > Why is mental-health crisis not a gating category, the kind where the conversation stops, full stop, and the user is routed to a human? Well, obviously “routing to a human” is not feasible at that scale. And c…

I don't think it's obvious that routing to a human is infeasible. I'm sure many local authorities, health agencies, and non-profits would be okay being routed to. Additionally, I'm sure many of the users are the same week over week, so giving them long term care would reduce the total volume. Finally, there is a long gap between psychosis and emotional dependence, so there could be some triage to make sure those most…

None of them are resourced enough (globally) to do this.

Safety is my area, and I interact with help lines and safety networks. Most of the time they are getting crushed and are underfunded. Offloading the work to them is hard and it requires investment in staffing, people, and organization.

It’s currently cheaper to do some amount of donation and support to such orgs, and bury the issue, than it is to actually deliver / invest in the degree of support needed.

These are also long tail problems, so solutions for a case can take years. For example if you are a woman in Pakistan who has been a victim of revenge porn, you are going to be spending a good chunk of your life trying to get those images/videos taken down from sites that are not based in Pakistan.

This is only an example of the types of problems that these helplines will have to triage. There will definitely be cases that can be resolved with a single call.

There isn’t any money in it, and it is seen as support work.

Re: The other half of AI safety

#102

Post by intended »

CobrastanJorji wrote: post #42
Gigachad wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Tech companies will pull trillions of dollars out of their asses when the problem is boosting ad revenue or automating people out of a job. But when asked to deal with the crisis they invented and dumped on society the answer is “that’s impossible, doesn’t scale”

Figure a "mental health crisis" human conversation takes 30 minutes. Three million incidents per week would require 37,500 qualified mental health counselors on the phones working a 40 hour shift that week. Figure they make $75k/year each. You're now spending $3 billion per year on crisis response, and you're employing like 10% of all of the health counselors in the US. And all you're providing is 30 minute chats.

So what?

That underinvestment is the entire reason their stock prices are so high. This is effectively pollution of our information economy and environment, and the costs are offloaded to society.

The fact that we have the first generation with lower education attainment is not a problem for their stock prices or operational profit.

Tech has ungodly profit margins, because they are all about scaling without having to bring people in. Sadly there is no such thing as a free lunch, and if firms are made to clean up their mess?

Oil spills affect Oil firms more than Tech fallout affects Tech firms.

Re: The other half of AI safety

#103

Post by intended »

lelanthran wrote: post #81
chromacity wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If that book was titled "hey mentally ill person, you should kill yourself", and if I was handing it out in front of a clinic, then yes, I'd probably bear some blame. Normal, well-adjusted people have genuine difficulty understanding the boundaries of this tech specifically because it's designed to be sycophantic and human-like. They ask AI for life and career advice, use it for therapy, ask it to interpret dreams, d…

> They ask AI for life and career advice, use it for therapy, ask it to interpret dreams, develop romantic relationships with AI "girlfriends", etc. I believe AI boyfriends are more common. There's a whole subreddit just for that, but none for AI girlfriends.

Well, that may be because the AI Girlfriend subreddits end up skewing towards porn?

Re: The other half of AI safety

#104

Post by intended »

oneshtein wrote: post #84
autoexec wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The difference is that a fiction book isn't using the reaction of the reader against them. If a fiction book were capable of carefully monitoring the reader and then altering the text of the next page or the next paragraph according to how the reader was responding and what their thoughts were I'd be comfortable putting blame on the book if it started encouraging the reader, specifically, to kill themself. Obviously…

Big brother watches you! He must, because he fully capable to do it.

Big brother watches you because we know he does and the incentives are set up to make watching you profitable?

If big brother wasn’t watching you while he subsidizes your use of his tools, then he is leaving money on the table. Which means he will get bought out and replaced by a big brother who makes the quarterly numbers go up.

Re: The other half of AI safety

#105

Post by anal_reactor »

nojs wrote: post #28

> Every week, somewhere between 1.2 and 3 million ChatGPT users, roughly the population of a small country, show signals of psychosis, mania, suicidal planning, or unhealthy emotional dependence on the model. > Why is mental-health crisis not a gating category, the kind where the conversation stops, full stop, and the user is routed to a human? Well, obviously “routing to a human” is not feasible at that scale. And c…

Step 1: route to a human

Step 2: 90% of users stop sharing their negative thoughts because "talking to a machine, not a human" was the entire selling point, giving them a sense of privacy and safety

Step 3: metrics go brrrrrrrr

Re: The other half of AI safety

#106

Post by intended »

derektank wrote: post #30
BobbyJo wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's hyper palatable food in the form of conversation. I see society treating it the same way eventually, at least along this one axis of interaction.

I think this is a great analogy, but it’s not exactly an optimistic one. We haven’t really done a great job managing hyper palatable food up until this point tbh. The best solution we’ve found involves paying hundreds of dollars a month for a pharmaceutical that helps the people most at risk to the harms of hyper palatable food manage their cravings for it. I hope we find a better alternative for the people that get…

And we came up with this after DECADES of increasing life style illness, obesity related illnesses and mortality and a plethora of other issues.

Re: The other half of AI safety

#107

Post by cindyllm »

anal_reactor wrote: post #105
nojs wrote: post #28

> Every week, somewhere between 1.2 and 3 million ChatGPT users, roughly the population of a small country, show signals of psychosis, mania, suicidal planning, or unhealthy emotional dependence on the model. > Why is mental-health crisis not a gating category, the kind where the conversation stops, full stop, and the user is routed to a human? Well, obviously “routing to a human” is not feasible at that scale. And c…

Step 1: route to a human Step 2: 90% of users stop sharing their negative thoughts because "talking to a machine, not a human" was the entire selling point, giving them a sense of privacy and safety Step 3: metrics go brrrrrrrr

[dead]

Re: The other half of AI safety

#108

Post by intended »

autoexec wrote: post #26
stingraycharles wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think this is the right take, and this is genuinely something that we as a society as a whole need to find a way to deal with. I don’t know where AI is going to stand compared to the invention of, say, the Internet, but it’s going to cause a lot of change in society, in so many ways. As always, it’s usually the people themselves that are the problem. For me, I’m personally more terrified what deepfakes and politica…

> For me, I’m personally more terrified what deepfakes and political manipulation / misinformation is going to do, combined with social media, and have a feeling that governments are completely unprepared to deal with this, as this will arrive fast (it’s already here somewhat). I'm not convinced that deepfakes are any worse than photoshop was. It doesn't take much to manipulate/misinform someone. while you can use an…

> The public needs to learn that they can't trust that every video they see on the internet is real, just as they've had to learn that they can't trust every photo they see online.

This very thing, is the end of an informational common good that we shared, and allowed for the average person to coordinate and gain benefits faster than elites.

The analogy I would put forward, is that we are moving into a dark forest online, where distrust is the ideal first move, and signaling your position is to make yourself open to attack.

The idea of an open internet dies in this environment, and so does the reduced cost of coordination.

Another tragedy is that corrupt, clannish, controlling and secretive organizations are more effective than open, distributive and collaborative societies in this scenario.

> The best defense is making sure that people have a good education that teaches critical thinking skills and media literacy

While true, any solution that depends on education is effectively depending on society having its shit together in the first place.

This very idea was proposed at a conference to a room full of fact checking orgs and media orgs, and one of the responses was that the more likely solution is global warming. That is how bleak things were is in the user safety world in 24.

Re: The other half of AI safety

#109

Post by intended »

projectazorian wrote: post #73
Forgeties79 wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

ChatGPT is not a human being, let alone a licensed therapist. You don’t call a therapist at 3 in the morning. You go to a hospital. If you are literally about to kill yourself Sam Altman is not your answer. Hell call a crisis hotline. Talk to a person . Not a potential (bot) enabler.

> ChatGPT is not a human being, let alone a licensed therapist. You don’t call a therapist at 3 in the morning. You go to a hospital. If you are literally about to kill yourself Sam Altman is not your answer. You know that mental health is a continuum right? There are a lot of problems people have that fall far short of active suicidal ideation. Maybe you think they should just add them to their journal for discussio…

?

> you're in crisis

That was the context in which the previous comment was operating.

Re: The other half of AI safety

#110

Post by intended »

wilg wrote: post #18
cyanydeez wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So how many bad cases are ok? Isn't this the same problem with social media: the commercial enterprises dont want any responsibility for their dark pattern and design choices which actively harm their users. I get that all kinds of media can cause issues, but not all kinds of media are actively curated to be addictive.

"How many cases are ok" (aka "zero tolerance") is a doomed to fail approach. Especially for a complex social problem's interaction with a complex new technology. If you want to find out if ChatGPT is doing something wrong, there are many methodologies available: compare to other groups of people, statistical studies, etc. I also think OpenAI's business model is pretty well aligned with the goal of users not killing t…

No one is talking about a zero tolerance approach.

Sure, Open AI is trying to do the best they can. That “best” is within Tech’s operating context.

Tech as a whole avoids this issue because paying for the externalities they cause would end hyper growth and crater their margins.

Tech workers at these firms regularly throw up red flags, which have to be ignored because engaging with them results in hits to their quarterly numbers.

Anthropic is the one firm that is actively managing to make safety less of a cost center by folding it into marketing.

>> If you want to find out if ChatGPT is doing something wrong, there are many methodologies available: compare to other groups of people, statistical studies, etc.

These studies must over come sizable barriers that NDAs and tech secrecy throw up. Tech firms have done enough internal studies to know that the results are horrible when they do get into the press.

Most users in the developed world don’t even know that they enjoy better support and care than the rest of the world.

Post reply on HN