AI Ethics is being narrowed on purpose, like privacy was

Post by dwohnitmok » Fri, Aug 08, 2025, 4:19 AM UTC

datadrivenangel wrote: post #88

dwohnitmok wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I have yet to meet a single AI safety person that knows how to rename a file in linux. You are meeting very few AI safety people then. A significant fraction of the AI safety people I've run into can build and train an LLM from scratch (without AI assistance FWIW), let alone have a grasp of basic command-line operations.

Where are you running into these unicorn AI safety people?

Post by ben_w » Fri, Aug 08, 2025, 2:26 PM UTC

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…

Post by qcnguy » Sat, Aug 09, 2025, 12:49 PM UTC

ben_w wrote: post #123

qcnguy wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> Serious safety researchers are doing stuff like understanding neural circuits. Very different. There's a very broad range of unsolved safety issues in AI, and what she does is perfectly validly in that category even though she herself will deny the value of anything in the general category of "TESCREAL". It's like how computer science safety can be anything and everything from "Should platforms like Meta be require…

Post by tucnak » Sat, Aug 09, 2025, 2:32 PM UTC

nathias wrote: post #122

tucnak wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I say, this is indeed the case in view of LLM lessons we have learnt along the way—most importantly, Wittgenstein had argued that in order to model language, you first need to model arbitrary discourses—this turned out to be the case (symbolic v. probabilistic) as LLM have shown to perform symbolic computation from learned representations, whilst the inverse has not been shown _ever_. Layman way of formulating this w…

I'm unfamiliar with any philosophers rejecting the discoveries of linguistics, but this has no bearing on ethics and its problems, nor is linguistics 'Wittgensteinian'.

Post by p3rls » Mon, Aug 11, 2025, 1:10 PM UTC

missingdays wrote: post #85

p3rls wrote: post #73

It's hilarious listening to people talk about AI ethics while their bots like perplexity knock my server offline trying to download 50000 files at once. Thank god for cloudflare.

Are you saying the author of the article is using bots to download files from your server?