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Joint Statement on AI Safety and Openness

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Re: Joint Statement on AI Safety and Openness

#21

Post by jmfldn »

jeanloolz wrote: post #12

Leaving AI to a handful of companies is in my opinion the fastest route for inequality and power concentration/centralisation, and this is in a way an AI disaster we should be worrisome. Power corrupts, great power greatly corrupts, this is not entirely new. From where I stand, it looks like the pandora box has already been opened anyway. The era of hugginface and/or Llama2 models is only going to grow from there.

True but there is a really difficult trade off here between a big tech monopoly and decentralised open source anarchy. I say this as a Linux-using FOSS lover, but we need to open this up as much as possible without allowing superpowers to escape into the wrong hands. I guess strong regulation is the key but I'm just handwaving here really. I don't know how the tradeoff should be made. I see great dangers in hyper-powerful tech being in the hands of the few or indeed of everyone.

By the way, I'm not sure how easy it will be to stop bad actors since barriers to entry are exponentially lower to developing a malicious AI tool than, say, developing a nuke.

Re: Joint Statement on AI Safety and Openness

#22

Post by mistrial9 »

itishappy wrote: post #13
raincole wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

Excitement feels kinda weird here, but if that's really your thing, 4chan has all the AI generated celebrity deepfakes and child porn your heart desires.

personal vice is tragic but has limited consequences. I think the regulatory discussion is valid, irrespective of the "casino-city race to the bottom" that will occur globally.

Re: Joint Statement on AI Safety and Openness

#23

Post by itishappy »

pseg134 wrote: post #16
itishappy wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Excitement feels kinda weird here, but if that's really your thing, 4chan has all the AI generated celebrity deepfakes and child porn your heart desires.

[flagged]

They asked for the terrible stuff found on 4chan. I don't know how to interpret that more charitably. If you're expecting great art, look elsewhere.

Re: Joint Statement on AI Safety and Openness

#24

Post by sillysaurusx »

mwint wrote: post #19
seydor wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Let's not be so hasty. I m glad to see that MistralAI is signing this letter. their small model is truly amazing, the most useful open source model i ve tried so far. But this can change tomorrow, they may be deemed illegal and disappear from public view, it has happened before. So i'm downloading and saving whatever model i think is great.

Genuine question - does it seem plausible that a few GB of content could truly be wiped off the Internet? I’m not in the piracy scene, but my impression was they routinely pass full res movies around the Internet without much barrier to discovering and downloading them, at least to technically competent users. Is that still true?

The Pile was. It’s still available but no one will touch it, mostly due to books3.

The difference is that a few people with lots of resources take on legal risk. In the piracy example many people with few resources take on risk, which works out since no one wants to sue people with no money.

Re: Joint Statement on AI Safety and Openness

#25

Post by swatcoder »

ketzo wrote: post #8
artninja1988 wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You mean the art and voice threads? How will we survive!

Deepfake porn and AI voice extortion are real harms from these technologies that are having a meaningful impact on people’s lives already. I don’t think they’re society-ending, but that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t acknowledge them.

Thorough acknowledgment means they’re now inevitable and that we’ll naturally revise how we interpret media.

We’ve done that nearly every time there’s been a shift in media, from photography to telephones to home video to digital photo and video editing, and it just sort of happens organically and automatically as people learn what they can now do and what they can now trust.

Panicked, doomed attempts to control that sort of change is just divisive and futile.

That’s not to say that there won’t be necessary laws and regulations around near-term “AI” tech, but that deep fakes are well into the irrelevant noise of what people will learn to navigate on their own.

Re: Joint Statement on AI Safety and Openness

#26

Post by skybrian »

jeanloolz wrote: post #12

Leaving AI to a handful of companies is in my opinion the fastest route for inequality and power concentration/centralisation, and this is in a way an AI disaster we should be worrisome. Power corrupts, great power greatly corrupts, this is not entirely new. From where I stand, it looks like the pandora box has already been opened anyway. The era of hugginface and/or Llama2 models is only going to grow from there.

I disagree entirely. We shouldn't be hoping for a complex ecosystem of small, shady companies nobody ever heard of, like happened with ad networks [1]. Or worse, a scam-filled ecosystem like cryptocurrency. Or worse, an underground ecosystem like the criminals who share cracked passwords and credit card numbers.

Big companies are easier to regulate.

[1] https://lumapartners.com/lumascapes/

Re: Joint Statement on AI Safety and Openness

#27

Post by Mistletoe »

CamperBob2 wrote: post #15
chakalakasp wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes and no. AI is no different than proliferating nuclear weapons or deciding to burn all the fossil fuels -- on an individual competitive level, it makes sense to do this more and more to remain competitive. On a systems-whole level it leads to catastrophe. The whole tragedy of the commons thing, or, more recently described, the Moloch problem. https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/TxcRbCYHaeL59aY7E/meditation... Yann LeC…

AI is no different than proliferating nuclear weapons I mean, once the discussion goes THIS far off the rails of reality, where do we go from here?

Can someone outline how AI could actually harm us directly? I don’t believe for a second sci-fi novel nonsense about self-replicating robots that we can’t unplug. My Roomba can’t even do its very simple task without getting caught on the rug. I don’t know of any complicated computing cluster or machine that exists that wouldn’t implode without human intervention on an almost daily level.

If we are talking about AI stoking human fears and weaknesses to make them do awful things, then ok I can see that and am afraid we have been there for some time with our algorithms and AI journalism.

Re: Joint Statement on AI Safety and Openness

#29

Post by hyeonwho22 »

CamperBob2 wrote: post #15
chakalakasp wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes and no. AI is no different than proliferating nuclear weapons or deciding to burn all the fossil fuels -- on an individual competitive level, it makes sense to do this more and more to remain competitive. On a systems-whole level it leads to catastrophe. The whole tragedy of the commons thing, or, more recently described, the Moloch problem. https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/TxcRbCYHaeL59aY7E/meditation... Yann LeC…

AI is no different than proliferating nuclear weapons I mean, once the discussion goes THIS far off the rails of reality, where do we go from here?

Why not? It has already been shown that AI can be (mis)used to identify good candidates for chemical weapons. [1] Next in the pipeline is obviously some religious nut (who would not otherwise have the capability) using it to design a virus which doesn't set off alarms at the gene synthesis / custom construct companies, and then learning to transfect it.

More banally, state actors can already use open source models to efficiently create misinformation. It took what, 60,000 votes to swing the US election in 2016? Imagine what astroturfing can be done with 100x the labor thanks to LLMs.

[1] dx.doi.org/10.1038/s42256-022-00465-9

Re: Joint Statement on AI Safety and Openness

#30

Post by jph00 »

chakalakasp wrote: post #14
silenced_trope wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Right, this is existing players (OpenAI, Google, Microsoft, FB, etc) protecting their moat. AI can't be "paused". Sometimes I see the question "should we put a pause on AI development?" It doesn't mean anything. Some countries like China may say they're on board with pausing it but would they actually do so? Or just sign on and allow their companies to get an edge by not enforcing a pause. Same thing with the existin…

Yes and no. AI is no different than proliferating nuclear weapons or deciding to burn all the fossil fuels -- on an individual competitive level, it makes sense to do this more and more to remain competitive. On a systems-whole level it leads to catastrophe. The whole tragedy of the commons thing, or, more recently described, the Moloch problem. https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/TxcRbCYHaeL59aY7E/meditation... Yann LeC…

It is not at all true that "AI is no different than proliferating nuclear weapons". The project manager for the Nuclear Information Project said (https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/2023/7/3/23779794/artific...) :

"""

But what we are seeing too often is a calorie-free media panic where prominent individuals — including scientists and experts we deeply admire — keep showing up in our push alerts because they vaguely liken AI to nuclear weapons or the future risk from misaligned AI to pandemics. Even if their concerns are accurate in the medium to long term, getting addicted to the news cycle in the service of prudent risk management gets counterproductive very quickly.

## AI and nuclear weapons are not the same

From ChatGPT to the proliferation of increasingly realistic AI-generated images, there’s little doubt that machine learning is progressing rapidly. Yet there’s often a striking lack of understanding about what exactly is happening. This curious blend of keen interest and vague comprehension has fueled a torrent of chattering-class clickbait, teeming with muddled analogies. Take, for instance, the pervasive comparison likening AI to nuclear weapons — a trope that continues to sweep through media outlets and congressional chambers alike.

While AI and nuclear weapons are both capable of ushering in consequential change, they remain fundamentally distinct. Nuclear weapons are a specific class of technology developed for destruction on a massive scale, and — despite some ill-fated and short-lived Cold War attempts to use nuclear weapons for peaceful construction — they have no utility other than causing (or threatening to cause) destruction. Moreover, any potential use of nuclear weapons lies entirely in the hands of nation-states. In contrast, AI covers a vast field ranging from social media algorithms to national security to advanced medical diagnostics. It can be employed by both governments and private citizens with relative ease.

"""

Let's stop contributing to this "calorie-free media panic" with such specious analogies.

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