OpenAI agrees with Dept. of War to deploy models in their classified network

(Person Of Interest for those who haven't seen it, watched it a decade ago and it's actually quite surprising how on point it ended up being)

this is going to end up being interpreted as "well, the president signed off on the operation. see - there's a human in the loop!" - is it?

So there’s the difference, and an erasure of a red line. OpenAI is good with autonomous weapon systems. Requiring human responsibility isn’t saying much. Theres already military courts, rules of engagement, and international rules of war.

* no military use

* no lethal use

* no use in support of law enforcement

* no use in support of immigration enforcement

* no use in mass surveillance

* no use in domestic mass surveillance (but mass surveillance of foreigners is OK)

* no use in domestic surveillance

* no use in surveillance

* require independent audits

* require court oversight

* require company to monitor use

* require company to monitor use and divulge it to employees

* some other form of human rights monitoring or auditing

* some other form of restriction on theaters/conflicts/targets

* company will permit some of these uses (not purport to forbid them by license, contract, or ToS) but not customize software to facilitate them

* company can unilaterally block inappropriate uses

* company can publicly disclose uses it thinks are inappropriate

* some other form of remedy

* government literally has to explain why some uses are necessary or appropriate to reassure people developing capabilities, and they have some kind of ongoing bargaining power to push back

It feels normal to me that a lot of people would want some of those things, but kind of unlikely that they would readily agree on exactly which ones.

I even think there's a different intuition about the baseline because one version is "nobody works on weapons except for people who specifically make a decision to work for an arms company because they have decided that's OK according to their moral views" (working on weapons is an abnormal, deliberate decision) and another version is "every company might sell every technology as part of a weapons system or military application, and a few people then object because they've decided that's not OK according to their moral views" (refusing to work on weapons is an abnormal, deliberate decision). I imagine a fair number of people in computing fields effectively thought that the norm or default for their industry was the latter, because of the perception that there are "special" military contractors where people get security clearances and navigate military procurement processes, and most companies are not like that, so you were not working on any form of weapon unless you intentionally chose to do so. But, having just been to the Computer History Museum earlier this week, I also see that a lot of Silicon Valley companies have actually been making weapons systems for as long as there has been a Silicon Valley.

This is really about the imminent strike on Iran which is now super telegraphed. They are gonna use ChatGPT for target selection, and the likely outcome is that it will fuck things up and a bunch of civilians are going to die because of this decision.

When this happens, Altman will go from being merely a drifter to having blood on his hands.