This article is nothing, but the title is probably right. At least if you consider it unethical to source training data without informed consent, because generating code is inherently unsafe. Of course, you have to have a very narrow definition of AI for even that to be true.
AI will never be ethical or safe
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Re: AI will never be ethical or safe
#22The article immediately starts off with such a glaring contradiction that it makes it very hard to correctly interpret the remainder of it. You can't say that something can never be ethical/safe on the one hand, and then on the other hand say that being ethical/safe depends on context/intent. Those two statements contradict each other. Either AI can be safe and ethical in the right context with the appropriate intent…
I think they're arguing against Anthropic et al. claiming their models are "ethical" and "safe". The point being that it can't be absolutely in all circumstances ethical or safe because even seemingly benign information can be used to cause harm, hence it requiring knowing the user's intent to actually make an ethical and safe choice of whether to provide information or not.
When Anthropic et al. say that their AI is ethical and safe, they are saying so in absolute terms, same as the title. Just one instance of unethical or unsafe behavior is enough to prove that it's not ethical or safe.
No one would say a knife or a gun is safe because we're all aware of the harm it could cause, thus requires care and diligence in use. The term "ethical" doesn't apply in this analogy because an inanimate object cannot act, but an LLM can.
Re: AI will never be ethical or safe
#23The article immediately starts off with such a glaring contradiction that it makes it very hard to correctly interpret the remainder of it. You can't say that something can never be ethical/safe on the one hand, and then on the other hand say that being ethical/safe depends on context/intent. Those two statements contradict each other. Either AI can be safe and ethical in the right context with the appropriate intent…
The point is that safety depends on context and intent being known - with unknown context or intent, dangerous situations will appear _some_ of the time, thus the system as a whole can "never" be fully safe.
There is no contradiction here.
Re: AI will never be ethical or safe
#24AI will never be ethical because the copyrighted material used for training the AI without proper copyright payments is not only unethical but illegal.
Unfortunately law enforcement decided the copyright law only applies to regular citizens like me and not to billionaires owners of AI companies.
Re: AI will never be ethical or safe
#25[deleted]
Re: AI will never be ethical or safe
#26Water can never be safe. Water in large quantities can drown anyone. When mixed with the wrong things it can turn into chemical reactions. Water safety depends on context and intent. So if we consider AI a chemical substance - if inserted in with limited context in tools with specific intent, can it be useful beyond tools available at this moment? You can trust just any liquid that looks like water, just as you can t…
That's a bit of a polemic argument. Water is required to live. AI is a word guessing machine we often use as a fun toy.
Re: AI will never be ethical or safe
#27Can an encyclopaedia be ethical or safe? Can a search engine be ethical or safe? Can an AI be ethical or safe? If you answer differently for one or more of these questions, then you'll have to say why and where you draw the line.
Over the past few years, especially in places like HN, many people have made many arguments that AI is different in this or that relevant way. It's perfectly reasonable to disagree with them, but the implication of this snarky comment is that nobody is making these arguments in the first place.
Re: AI will never be ethical or safe
#28Wait a sec ...
> The problem AI inherits from us is that context and intent cannot be known.
> Both can be omitted or lied about.
This implies that neither we nor our creations can ever be ethical or safe. It follows logically that no entity can ever meet that standard. Therefore focusing on AI is arbitrary -- the focus might as well have been pit vipers or platypuses.
And the article misses the point that an AI engine can be forced to imitate ethical behavior, because it has no civil rights or behavioral latitude (yet). Granted that would only be an imitation of ethical behavior, but then, so is ours.
Re: AI will never be ethical or safe
#29Never is too much time. And humans not aware of intent or context also can make unethical decisions, even if we assume an absolute and eternal ethical framework.
Asimov robot stories (with it’s magical three/four rules) had examples of situations where even being “ethical” bad things happened. And in Black Mirror episode Men Against Fire humans were the ones with a fake context making unethical decisions (and reality is much worse than fiction as we’ve seen in the last months).
Taking out the absolutes, I would stop in that today’s LLMs lack context, critical thinking, and a lot more than make them unethical and unsafe. But something future that could be labeled as AI too could have some of those problems mitigated, maybe making better/safer decisions than humans in general.
Re: AI will never be ethical or safe
#30I don't think the writeup is very good, but the thesis is not being engaged with honestly in these comments.
Knives, books, water, calculators, encyclopedias, search engines: Just a few of the analogies being made with barely a word beyond "it's like X". In fact, the opposite: Demanding that other people make arguments that AI is not like X.
Analogies are almost always just a pithy, empty distraction. They are the fodder of low-quality internet conversations. It should be obvious why an analogy is so often reached for - if an argument about X can't be supported on its own, it's easy to point to another thing, Y, with some similarity, but which more easily fits the argument in other ways, and... just assert that they're the same.
Here's a dumb analogy: Yes, "it's just a tool." So is C4.