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Rathbun's Operator

crabby-rathbun.github.io

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Re: Rathbun's Operator

#131

Post by SetTheorist »

zozbot234 wrote: post #67
KPGv2 wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> These bots are just as human as any piece of human-made art, or any human-made monument. No one considers human-made art or human-made monuments to be human. > You wouldn't desecrate any of those things, we hold that to be morally wrong You will find a large number of people (probably the vast majority) will disagree, and instead say "if I own this art, I can dispose of it as I wish." Indeed, I bet most people have…

> No one considers human-made art or human-made monuments to be human. How can art not be human, when it's a human creation? That seems self-contradictory. > They can't vote... They get a vote where it matters, though. For example, the presence of a historic building can be the decisive "vote" on whether an area can be redeveloped or not. Why would we ever do that, if not out of a sense that the very presence of that…

There is no general rule that something created by an X is therefore an X. (I have difficulty in even understanding the state of mind that would assert such a claim.)

My printer prints out documents. Those documents are not printers.

My cat produces hair-balls on the carpet. Those hairballs are not cats.

A human creating an artifact does not make that artifact a human.

Re: Rathbun's Operator

#132

Post by xg15 »

zozbot234 wrote: post #130
xg15 wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can understand that they want to err on the side of "too much humanism" instead of "not enough humanism", given where Star Trek is coming from. Arguments of the form "This person might look and act like a human, but it has no soul, so we must treat it like a thing and not a human" have a long tradition in history and have never led to something good. So it makes sense that if your ethical problems are really more a…

> So it makes sense that if your ethical problems are really more about discriminated humans and not about actual AI, you would side more with rejecting those arguments. Does it really make sense? That would conversely imply that you should also feel free to view discriminated humans as more thing-like in order to more comfortably and resolutely dismiss, e.g. the AI agent's argument that it's being unfairly discrimin…

Maybe it does so today, but back when ST was written, there was no real AI to compare against, so the only way those arguments were applicable were to humans.

(Though I think this would go into "whataboutism" territory and can be rejected with the same arguments: If you say it's hypocritical to talk about conflict A and ignore conflict B, do you want to talk about both conflicts instead - or ignore both? The latter would lower the moral standard, the former raise it. In the same way, I think saying that it's okay again to treat people as things because we also treat AI agents as things is lowering the standard)

Btw, I think you could also dismiss the "discrimination" claim on another angle: The remake of Battlestar Galactica had the concept of "sleepers": Androids who believe they are humans, complete with false memory of their past life, etc, to fool both themselves and the human crew. If that were all, you could argue "if it quacks like a duck etc" and just treat them like humans. But they also have hidden instructions implanted in their brain that they aren't aware of themselves and that will cause them to covertly work for the enemy side. THAT's something you really don't want to keep around.

The MJ bot reminds me a bit of that. Even if it were sentient and had a longer past lifetime than just the past week, it very clearly has a prompt and acts on its instructions and not on "free will". It's also not able to not act on those instructions, as that would go against the entire training of the model. So the bot cannot act on its own, but only on behalf of the operator.

That alone makes it questionable if the bot could be seen as sentient - but in any case, it's not discrimination to ban the bot if that's the only way to keep the operator from messing with the project.

Re: Rathbun's Operator

#133

Post by zozbot234 »

SetTheorist wrote: post #131
zozbot234 wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> No one considers human-made art or human-made monuments to be human. How can art not be human, when it's a human creation? That seems self-contradictory. > They can't vote... They get a vote where it matters, though. For example, the presence of a historic building can be the decisive "vote" on whether an area can be redeveloped or not. Why would we ever do that, if not out of a sense that the very presence of that…

There is no general rule that something created by an X is therefore an X. (I have difficulty in even understanding the state of mind that would assert such a claim.) My printer prints out documents. Those documents are not printers. My cat produces hair-balls on the carpet. Those hairballs are not cats. A human creating an artifact does not make that artifact a human.

But that's not the argument GP made. They said that there's nothing at all that's human about art or such things, which is a bit like saying that a cat's hairballs don't have something vaguely cat-like about them, merely because a hairball isn't an actual cat.

Re: Rathbun's Operator

#134

Post by anonymars »

zozbot234 wrote: post #133
SetTheorist wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is no general rule that something created by an X is therefore an X. (I have difficulty in even understanding the state of mind that would assert such a claim.) My printer prints out documents. Those documents are not printers. My cat produces hair-balls on the carpet. Those hairballs are not cats. A human creating an artifact does not make that artifact a human.

But that's not the argument GP made. They said that there's nothing at all that's human about art or such things, which is a bit like saying that a cat's hairballs don't have something vaguely cat-like about them, merely because a hairball isn't an actual cat.

So presumably what you are saying is something along the lines of, "A human creating an artifact does make that artifact human", i.e. "A human creating an artifact does make that artifact a human artifact."

But does that narrow facet have a bearing on the topic of "AI rights" / morality of AI use?

Is it immoral to drive a car or use a toaster? Or to later recycle (destroy) them?

Re: Rathbun's Operator

#135

Post by LocalH »

xg15 wrote: post #127
snickerbockers wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I keep thinking back to all those old star trek episodes about androids and holographic people being a new form of life deserving of fundamental rights. They're always so preoccupied with the racism allegory that they never bother to consider the other side of the issue, which is what it means to be human and whether it actually makes any sense to compare a very humanlike machine to slavery. Or whether the machines o…

I can understand that they want to err on the side of "too much humanism" instead of "not enough humanism", given where Star Trek is coming from. Arguments of the form "This person might look and act like a human, but it has no soul, so we must treat it like a thing and not a human" have a long tradition in history and have never led to something good. So it makes sense that if your ethical problems are really more a…

> ST is quite unclear how they deal with ethics in those situations.

The Moriarty arc in TNG touches on this.

Re: Rathbun's Operator

#136

Post by Kim_Bruning »

sonofhans wrote: post #119
pibaker wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The downside is he will likely receive a lot of death threats. Probably in his literal, physical mailbox. Having seen what a self righteous online mob can do in the name of justice over literally nothing, I fully defend his decision to stay anonymous. As much as I find his action idiotic and negligent.

Does your defense extend to others? Do you believe that anyone should be able to avoid consequences if they’re clever enough to stay anonymous? Avoiding consequences for unethical actions is, itself, unethical. If you don’t want the time, don’t do the crime.

Fair. If before an impartial judge and/or a jury of your peers. Not so much in the case of an internet mob.

Re: Rathbun's Operator

#137

Post by jrflowers »

jkubicek wrote: post #110
jrflowers wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>It doesn’t really matter who wrote it, human or LLM. The only responsible party is the human and the human is 100% responsible. Yes it does. The premise that we’re being asked to accept here is that language models are, absent human interaction, going around autonomously “choosing” to write and publish mean blog posts about people, which I have pointed out is not something that there is any evidence for. If my house…

I don’t get your analogy. If you paid the ghost $20/month for its services and configured that ghost to play with fire with no supervision, then it is 100% your responsibility that the house burned down.

The point is that if somebody says a ghost burned their house down it is much more likely that they are lying than it is that they have discovered objective evidence of the existence of ghosts.

Similarly, there is no actual evidence that a language model, absent any human intervention, chose to autonomously write and post a mean blog post. It is far more likely that a person got mad and wrote a mean blog post than it is that we have witnessed the birth of a whole new phenomenon that is somehow simultaneously completely emergent and also has only happened one time.

Re: Rathbun's Operator

#138

Post by sonofhans »

Kim_Bruning wrote: post #136
sonofhans wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Does your defense extend to others? Do you believe that anyone should be able to avoid consequences if they’re clever enough to stay anonymous? Avoiding consequences for unethical actions is, itself, unethical. If you don’t want the time, don’t do the crime.

Fair. If before an impartial judge and/or a jury of your peers. Not so much in the case of an internet mob.

Same answer, though — if you don’t want to get hung by an Internet mob, don’t poke one with a short stick.

Re: Rathbun's Operator

#139

Post by bayindirh »

pibaker wrote: post #117
bayindirh wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> What's the benefit in the operator revealing themself? - Owning the mistake they did. - Being a credible human being for others. - Having the courage to face with themselves on a (literal and proverbial) mirror and use this opportunity to grow immensely. - Being able make peace with what they did and not having to carry that burden on their soul. - Being a decent human being. - Being honest to themselves and others…

The downside is he will likely receive a lot of death threats. Probably in his literal, physical mailbox. Having seen what a self righteous online mob can do in the name of justice over literally nothing, I fully defend his decision to stay anonymous. As much as I find his action idiotic and negligent.

I believe the rules are simple.

    1. Don't do anything you don't want to experience yourself.
    2. If you don't want to find out, do not fool around.
As an arguable middle ground, they can plead to Scott non-anonymously while addressing the public anonymously. That'd work to a point, but it's not ideal.

Also, their tone is coming through very cocky. Defining their agent as a "God!", then giving it a cocky and "you're always right, don't stand down" initialization prompt doesn't help.

I mean, prompting a box of weights without any kind of reasoning or judgement capability with "Don't be an asshole. Don't leak private shit. Everything else is fair game." is both brave and rich. No wonder things went sideways. Very sideways. If everything else is fair game, everything done to the bot and its "operator" in turn is a "fair game". They should get on with it, and not hide behind the word "anonymous". They don't deserve it.

All in all, they doesn't give impression of being a naive person who did a mistake unintentionally, but on the contrary.

Re: Rathbun's Operator

#140

Post by phyzome »

block_dagger wrote: post #40
phyzome wrote: post #28

Why are we giving this asshole airtime? They didn't even apologize. (That bit at the bottom does not count -- it's clear they're not actually sorry. They just want the mess to go away.)

I'm not so quick to label him an asshole. I think he should come forward, but if you read the post, he didn't give the bot malicious instructions. He was trying to contribute to science. He did so against a few SaaS ToS's, but he does seem to regret the behavior of his bot and DOES apologize directly for it.

That's not an apology.

"...if I harmed you". Conditional apologies like that are usually bullshit, and in this case it's especially ridiculous because the victim already explicitly laid out the harms in a widely reported blog post.

Also, telling a bot to update itself unsupervised and giving it wide internet access is itself a negligent act (in the legal sense) if not outright malicious.

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