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The Future of Everything Is Lies, I Guess: Safety

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Re: The Future of Everything Is Lies, I Guess: Safety

#171

Post by intended »

BloondAndDoom wrote: post #153

I don’t even see the pint of alignment or anything about security in LLMs. I feel like this is how “some people” reacted to the internet when I was young (lots of censorship), how hackers don’t let it happen, then how we are back to that world in the hand of corporations and governments who “think of the children). LLMs are out of the bottle and not going back there, only option is building for the new world on the d…

Tech changes do not impact attackers and defenders equally.

Good things do not all have the same properties - That’s mistaking an incomplete assertion for a complete one.

Cyber security is an attackers domain. Your security is typically because you are (were) not valuable enough to earn the attention of an attacker.

When LLMs make targeting you cost effective, you will have to spend more energy defending yourself. This means that you have less time to do other useful things, reducing your net utility, while increasing attackers utility.

Also - teams in these companies DO care, I have worked with them. The decision makers are regulated by the cadence of the quarterly share holders meeting. At that point things like safety are a cost center. Reducing safety spend while minimizing reduced time on site is rewarded by markets.

Re: The Future of Everything Is Lies, I Guess: Safety

#172

Post by intended »

simianwords wrote: post #67
raincole wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you underestimate people's grievance with technology. If you make a poll my guess is more than 50% of people will say the world was a better place pre-social media. If the AI tech keeps going at the direction it's going now, more and more people will start believing the world would be better if the internet and computer had never been invented. You talk like the internet being a net positive is a given. It re…

Its usually the educated and elite PMC types who have grievance with technology. They secured their status and have lucrative jobs mostly with the help of technology and they are too scared to have anything threaten their position in society. It is highly hypocritical to behave this way but they don't seem to have the self awareness to observe it objectively. Ask any poor person in India what their sentiment is with…

I’m in India, and I sure as shit haven’t seen what you are talking about.

In 2025, we lost 22931 crores to cyber fraud - about 2.7 billion USD. People are now saying that they are relieved if the losses were only single digit crores lost.

India invented digital house arrests. There’s entire districts/cities where the primary revenue stream is from scams. Cops don’t want to involve themselves with cyber crimes because they can’t resolve them.

India’s information economy is so broken, that the idea that we are less or more democratic is not even relevant.

The amount of revenge porn, non-consensual intimate imagery released per day is heart wrenching.

I REALLY want to agree with you. I too want to talk about the good that tech can do. India cannot afford to talk about the good without dealing with the bad.

The motto of move fast and break things assumes someone else will pick up the pieces. This doesn’t hold true for India - we need to pick up the pieces.

Re: The Future of Everything Is Lies, I Guess: Safety

#173

Post by intended »

amarant wrote: post #170
munificent wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> What kind of content do you think would trigger that? The kind of political propaganda that leads to the US reelecting a convicted rapist whose selects another rapist to lead the Department of Defense who then renames it to the Department of War and, true to the name, starts unilaterally attacking other countries.

If trump getting elected was due to AI, I wonder why every nation isn't electing similarly awful politicians? Hungary just elected a new president who seems a lot better than his predecessor, and a lot better than trump. The Canadian prime minister is genuinely one of the best politicians I've seen in my lifetime! The list goes on and on. No blaming trump on anything other than the people who voted for him is like bl…

Bear with me this digression into freedom of speech, before addressing your point.

The utilitarian argument for freedom of speech and expression in America finds its roots in the Marketplace of ideas.

Verification is frankly, the task of all our markets - to set up incentives for being right.

With no government interference in the exchange of ideas, citizens would be better able to discuss ideas, including those not popular with the establishment.

Since no one has a monopoly on truth, it would be through this competition, and fair traffic society would be better able to understand truth and thrive.

That worked, when we had newspapers that were funded, where the media landscape was not consolidated, and where we didn’t have an abundance of technology that overwhelmed our ability to verify and be informed.

Today, through entirely private forces, we can monopolize, fracture and shape the traffic in our marketplace of ideas.

Trump is very much the ideal candidate to ride the media environment. The right side of the political spectrum is simply a far more efficient at providing a wrestling style experience for its audience. Its consolidated media environment largely pays lip service to journalistic standards, and sells a coordinated set of ideas for its audience.

The Fox News effect is a case in point, and this was from the 90s.

This media model has been co-opted globally, with every party and government now providing patronage to media houses to keep them afloat, and to build their own narratives.

The citizen who engages in these media markets simply does not enter a vibrant competitive market anymore.

Re: The Future of Everything Is Lies, I Guess: Safety

#174

Post by intended »

> I know this because a part of my work as a moderator of a Mastodon instance is to respond to user reports, and occasionally those reports are for CSAM, and I am legally obligated to review and submit that content to the NCMEC.

Oh ** that.

I have moderated all sorts of crap, and I am grateful that my worst has only been murders, hate speech, NCII, assaults, gore, and other forms of violence.

> I sometimes wish that the engineers working at OpenAI etc. had to see these images too. Perhaps it would make them reflect on the technology they are ushering into the world, and how “alignment” is working out in practice

This is a great idea. I’ve heard of new leaders being dropped in, and being sure they have a better handle on safety than the T&S teams.

Only after they engage with the issues, and have their assumptions challenged by uncaring reality, did they listen to the T&S teams.

There are a lot of assumptions on speech online that do not translate into operational reality.

On HN and Reddit, everyone complains about moderation and janitors, but I highly recommend coders take it as civic service and volunteer.

How can you meaningfully fix a mess, if you do not actually know what the mess is about?

Re: The Future of Everything Is Lies, I Guess: Safety

#175

Post by zozbot234 »

jasonwatkinspdx wrote: post #156
zozbot234 wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> the whole discussion of markets is a terrible starting place for deriving results in ethics/psychology. Historically, we did essentially the opposite. We figured out many aspects of human ethics and psychology first, and deduced from them how and why markets work as they do. > ... If people weren't broadly aligned on basic stuff, then autocrats, theocrats, kleptocrats and so on would simply not be interested in dis…

> Historically This is not the history, it is a mythology in opposition to the empirical evidence. Which is why you should read Graeber.

It's history of ideas. What Graeber says is ultimately aligned to this, as I pointed out in a sibling thread.

Re: The Future of Everything Is Lies, I Guess: Safety

#176

Post by [deleted] »

seizethecheese wrote: post #124
jagged-chisel wrote: post #46

"Alignment" In what world would I ever expect a commercial (or governmental) entity to have precise alignment with me personally, or even with my own business? I argue those relationships are necessarily adversarial, and trusting anyone else to align their "AI" tool to my goals, needs, and/or desires is a recipe for having my livelihood completely reassigned into someone else's wallet.

Why would relationships with a commercial entity be "necessarily adversarial"? A commercial relationship depends on the product providing more utility than the cost (for the consumer) and providing more revenue than cost (for the commercial entity). This means that while some components of the relationship may be adversarial in some areas, it cannot really be entirely adversarial.

[deleted]

Re: The Future of Everything Is Lies, I Guess: Safety

#177

Post by jpfromlondon »

jasonwatkinspdx wrote: post #127
zozbot234 wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

AIUI David Graeber famously pointed out that people in small groups can form the equivalent of a "market" simply by exchanging favours ("I'll scratch your back if you scratch mine") in an informal gift economy, without any money-like token or external unit of account. That's quite in line with what I said.

You understanding is mistaken. Graeber's "everyday communism" is not a market, and his whole larger point is that contorting everything to the lens of markets is simply ahistorical and unempirical. I'd strongly suggest reading his books. They profoundly changed my understanding of how human institutions and society form.

Reddit is over there ->

Re: The Future of Everything Is Lies, I Guess: Safety

#178

Post by rupayanc »

The power asymmetry point is what gets missed in most alignment debates. An AI model doesn't need to be misaligned to cause harm. It just needs to be misaligned with users while aligned with whoever's paying for it. That's not a future risk. That's how every enterprise SaaS product works already.

Re: The Future of Everything Is Lies, I Guess: Safety

#179

Post by catcowcostume »

weinzierl wrote: post #73

Oh boy, that’s a very generous view of human nature. The cynic in me agrees with the article’s premise, but not because I believe "alignment is a joke" , but because I doubt that humans are "biologically predisposed to acquire prosocial behavior."

It's ok, you are allowed to start from wrong premises. It's nice that you acknowledge your shortcomings.

Re: The Future of Everything Is Lies, I Guess: Safety

#180

Post by Bombthecat »

philipkglass wrote: post #36

In short, the ML industry is creating the conditions under which anyone with sufficient funds can train an unaligned model. Rather than raise the bar against malicious AI, ML companies have lowered it. This is true, and I believe that the "sufficient funds" threshold will keep dropping too. It's a relief more than a concern, because I don't trust that big models from American or Chinese labs will always be aligned wi…

Uhhh you know that the paperclip problem stems from ai just following a task, not understanding what it is doing? Not from being misalignment.

I would go out a limb and say that current a could create a paperclip problem, given powerful enough tools.

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