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Meta disbanded its Responsible AI team

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Re: Meta disbanded its Responsible AI team

#171

Post by looping8 »

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…

AI is a tool, a bazooka is not. You can use AI to create and research just as you can use it for harm, you can only the bazooka to destroy. It's a bad comparison, especially because the idea that creators of something have no responsibility about how it works is just not practical in real world. Facebook constantly has legal issues due to how people use their platform, this is them trying to prevent AI form bringing more lawsuits upon them.

Re: Meta disbanded its Responsible AI team

#172

Post by ben_w »

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.

You ought to be talking about both.

A friendly and helpful AI assistant that doesn't have any safety guardrails will give you detailed instructions for how to build and operate a bioweapon lab in the same style it will give you a cake recipe; and it will walk you though the process of writing code to search for dangerous nerve agents with the same apparent eagerness as when you ask for an implementation of Pong written in PostScript.

A different AI, one which can be used to create lip-synced translations of videos, can also be used to create realistic fakes that say anything at all, and that can be combined with an LLM to make a much more convincing simulacra — even just giving them cloned voices of real people makes them seem more real and this has already been used for novel fraud.

Re: Meta disbanded its Responsible AI team

#173

Post by happytiger »

Early stage “technology ethics teams” are about optics and not reality.

In the early stages of a new technology the core ethics lies in the hands of very small teams or often individuals.

If those handling the core direction decide to unleash irresponsibly, it’s done. Significant harm can be done by one person dealing with weapons of mass destruction, chemical weapons, digital intelligence, etc.

It’s not wrong to have these teams, but the truth is that anyone working with the technology needs to be treated like they are on an ethics team, not build an “ethical group” who’s supposed to proxy the responsibility for doing it the “right way.”

Self-directed or self-aware AI also complicate this situation immeasurably, as having an ethics team presents a perfect target for a rogue AI or bad actor. You’re creating a “trusted group” with special authority for something/someone to corrupt. Not wise to create privileged attack surfaces when working with digital intelligences.

Re: Meta disbanded its Responsible AI team

#174

Post by cubefox »

peyton wrote: post #147
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

That thread is simply unhinged. There is no terrorist with a wet lab who outright refuses to read papers and instead relies on a chatbot to work with dangerous agents.

Would you have called the possibility of large language models helping millions of people "unhinged" a few years ago as well?

Re: Meta disbanded its Responsible AI team

#175

Post by cubefox »

hollowturtle wrote: post #131
cubefox wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

expert?! can’t do math why should suggest weapon instructions better? at the first hallucination you explode on the spot

Even ChatGPT-3.5 could do more than a little math:

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/qy5dF7bQcFjSKaW58/bad-at-ari...

Re: Meta disbanded its Responsible AI team

#176

Post by peyton »

ben_w wrote: post #172
peyton wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

You ought to be talking about both. A friendly and helpful AI assistant that doesn't have any safety guardrails will give you detailed instructions for how to build and operate a bioweapon lab in the same style it will give you a cake recipe; and it will walk you though the process of writing code to search for dangerous nerve agents with the same apparent eagerness as when you ask for an implementation of Pong writt…

There’s no way to build out a wet lab with a chatbot for weapons production. It’s just not feasible. Your example is a fantasy.

Fraud is covered by the legal system.

I don’t know anything about nerve agents.

Re: Meta disbanded its Responsible AI team

#177

Post by ben_w »

hollowturtle wrote: post #131
cubefox wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

expert?! can’t do math why should suggest weapon instructions better? at the first hallucination you explode on the spot

That's why we're not already dead.

If anyone releases all the weights of a model that does everything perfectly (or at least can use the right tools which I suspect is much easier), that model is far too valuable to make it disappear, and dangerous enough to do all the things people get worried about.

The only way to prevent that is to have a culture of "don't release unless we're sure it's safe" well before you reach that threshold.

I'm happy with the imperfections of gpt-3.5 and 4, both for this reason and for my own job security. But chatGPT hasn't even reached its first birthday yet, it's very early days for this.

Re: Meta disbanded its Responsible AI team

#178

Post by Vetch »

esafak wrote: post #56
malwrar wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is no obvious reason they couldn't just train one themselves, or merely steal existing weights given enough time.

That is precious time that can be used to work on alignment.

If we're talking about open-source LLMs, among the best embedding, multimodal, pure and coding LLMs are Chinese (attested and not just benchmarks).

Re: Meta disbanded its Responsible AI team

#179

Post by cubefox »

xcdzvyn wrote: post #156
cubefox wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

All of the information AI regurgitates is either already available online as part of its corpus (and therefore the AI plays no particular role in access to that information), or completely made up (which is likely to kill more terrorists than anyone else!) Reiterating other comments, terrorists can't make bioweapons because they lack the facilities and prerequisites, not because they're incompetent.

Top AI researchers like Geoffrey Hinton say that large language models likely have an internal world model and aren't just stochastic parrots. Which means they can do more than just repeating strings from the training distribution.

Facilities are a major hurdle for nuclear weapons. For bioweapons they are much less of a problem. The main constraint is competency.

Re: Meta disbanded its Responsible AI team

#180

Post by quickthrower2 »

jojobas wrote: post #149
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…

In other news, police is not needed because everyone should just behave.

But there are no responsible X teams for many X. But AI gets one.

(Here X is a variable not Twitter)

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