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OpenAI’s head of ethics leaves less than a year after joining

ft.com

211–220 of 379 posts

Re: OpenAI’s head of ethics leaves less than a year after joining

#211
post #200

> Previously, she was chief ethicist at Meta. She spent 6 years at Meta. I get the sense there are other factors at play than "ethics departments are just PR stunts". There's no way she isn't already aware of that. Unfortunately, the article is light on any other details.

Being "chief ethicist at Meta" under Zuckerberg... is like being head rabbi at Auschwitz under Rudolf Höß.

Re: OpenAI’s head of ethics leaves less than a year after joining

#212
post #193

I'm super confused as to why no one is theorizing the obvious...? Given none of us know the inner workings of why she left, why not resort to the most simple and straightforward conclusion: she left because OpenAI needed a scapegoat to blame the HuggingFace incident on. Given she is the chief "ethicist", even if not directly her fault, the HF incident could be directly blamed on her by not steering the implementation…

In the wake of a security incident, the executive that is typically scapegoated is the CISO.

However, with all things AI, this is a very weird situation because CISOs are let go when an organization is breached by external attackers; in this case internal attackers -- which were not human, let alone employees -- inadvertently breached other organizations. I don't think the normal conventions apply anymore.

Re: OpenAI’s head of ethics leaves less than a year after joining

#213
post #193

I'm super confused as to why no one is theorizing the obvious...? Given none of us know the inner workings of why she left, why not resort to the most simple and straightforward conclusion: she left because OpenAI needed a scapegoat to blame the HuggingFace incident on. Given she is the chief "ethicist", even if not directly her fault, the HF incident could be directly blamed on her by not steering the implementation…

Scapegoat for what? They did not even apologize for that incident. They treated it purely as a chance for publicity. It cannot be a scapegoat if nobody even mentions it.

Re: OpenAI’s head of ethics leaves less than a year after joining

#214
post #193

I'm super confused as to why no one is theorizing the obvious...? Given none of us know the inner workings of why she left, why not resort to the most simple and straightforward conclusion: she left because OpenAI needed a scapegoat to blame the HuggingFace incident on. Given she is the chief "ethicist", even if not directly her fault, the HF incident could be directly blamed on her by not steering the implementation…

What's "obvious" is she was chief ethicist at the most unethical companies on the planet - it's like being a lawyer for the mafia - doesn't inspire longevity, either via scapegoating or preservation of one's own sanity.

lmao i completely agree

Re: OpenAI’s head of ethics leaves less than a year after joining

#218
post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

You would be creating a counterfactual inconsistent with most’s understanding of the role and bringing this person’s motives and credibility into question without supporting evidence?

It would be deeply unethical to manufacture an incident to grab some headlines about how amazing your hacking machine really is.

Re: OpenAI’s head of ethics leaves less than a year after joining

#219

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Come on, what do you think the ethics team at Raytheon is going to say "Hmm, our elected leaders are relying heavily on dangerously inaccurate AI to choose bombing targets and our weapons hit a girl's school as a result, let's withhold weapons from our own govt till that's resolved"? Obviously not. The ethics team at Raytheon is not going to ever be allowed to overrule the leadership or more importantly the political…

I have literally no clue, hence I won't try to claim I know exactly what's going on there. For all we know, the ethics team at Raytheon could have stopped multiple international nuclear wars already.

They make sure that they are executing contracts in a way that doesn't break the ethics of the jurisdictions they are operating in, they aren't a bunch of naive people pleading for less war.

Re: OpenAI’s head of ethics leaves less than a year after joining

#220
post #196

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I doubt she and others left just because of this one incident. My guess is that OpenAI has been doing more and more domestic spying type work as well as more and more military work - target selection and the like. That's how the schoolhouse was blown up by a Tomahawk. An AI was fed old information, didn't realize or do proper validation, an analyst copy-pasted, then someone just punched the coordinates into the their…

The schoolhouse was an intentional target - the children of some military leaders went there. They triple-tapped the school hoping to kill parents going in to save the kids.

citation needed
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