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Meta disbanded its Responsible AI team

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Re: Meta disbanded its Responsible AI team

#241

Post by aetimmes »

toomim wrote: post #184
jojobas wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In other news, police is not needed because everyone should just behave.

Police are needed for society when there's no other way to enforce rules. But inside a company, you can just fire people when they misbehave. That's why you don't need police inside your company. You only need police at the base-layer of society, where autonomous citizens interact with no other recourse between them.

People do what they are incentivized to do.

Engineers are incentivized to increase profits for the company because impact is how they get promoted. They will often pursue this to the detriment of other people (see: prioritizing anger in algorithmic feeds).

Doing Bad Things with AI is an unbounded liability problem for a company, and it's not the sort of problem that Karen from HR can reason about. It is in the best interest of the company to have people who can 1) reason about the effects of AI and 2) are empowered to make changes that limit the company's liability.

Re: Meta disbanded its Responsible AI team

#242

Post by microtherion »

seanhunter wrote: post #70

It never made any organizational sense for me to have a "responsible AI team" in the first place. Every team doing AI work should be responsible and should think about the ethical (and legal at a bare minimum baseline) dimension of what they are doing. Having that concentrated in a single team means that team becomes a bottleneck where they have to vet all AI work everyone else does for responsibility and/or everyone…

> At some point AI becomes important enough to a company (and mature enough as a field) that there is a specific part of legal/compliance in big companies that deals with the concrete elements of AI ethics and compliance and maybe trains everyone else, but everyone doing AI has to do responsible AI. It can't be a team.

I think both are needed. I agree that there needs to be a "Responsible AI" mindset in every team (or every individual, ideally), but there also needs to be a central team to set standards and keep an independent eye on other teams.

The same happens e.g. in Infosec, Corruption Prevention, etc: Everyone should be aware of best practices, but there also needs to be a central team in organizations of a certain size.

Re: Meta disbanded its Responsible AI team

#243

Post by Moldoteck »

cageface wrote: post #8
corethree wrote: post #6

Safety for AI is like making safe bullets or safe swords or safe shotguns. The reason why there's so much emphasis on this is liability. That's it. Otherwise there's really no point. It's the psychological aspect of blame that influences the liability. If I wanted to make a dirty bomb it's harder to blame google for it if I found the results through google, easier to blame AI for it if I found the results from an LLM…

It's more like making safe nukes. One person can do a lot more damage with AI than they can with a gun.

Lol. Can you point pls how an llm be as dangerous as a nuclear bumb? Ok, let's go deeper, suppose we have created real AGI that is running on a ton of compute, how will this be as dangerous as nuclear bomb? By launching them? You know, this is impossible right? More chances it'll mess with trading systems but again, nothing to the scale of a nuclear bomb

Re: Meta disbanded its Responsible AI team

#244

Post by _heimdall »

torginus wrote: post #113
Simon_ORourke wrote: post #76

AI is a tool, and there's about as much point as having some team fretting about responsible usage as there is having similar notions in a Bazooka manufacturer. Whoever ultimately owns the AI (or the Bazooka) will always dictate how and where the particular tool is used. Many of these AI Ethics foundations (e.g., DAIR), just seem to advocate rent seeking behavior, scraping out a role for themselves off the backs of o…

I dislike the weapon analogy, because it implies that proliferation of AI (ergo everyone running an LLM on their PCs for code completion or for the ability to speak to a home assistant) is akin to everybody having a cache of unlicensed firearms. It has been the agenda of most FAANG corporations (with the notable exception of Apple) to turn the computers average people own into mere thin clients with all the computing…

People running LLM should at least feel more comfortable there. LLMs simply aren't AI, they're machine learning (at least with the models we currently have)

Re: Meta disbanded its Responsible AI team

#245

Post by rvz »

vasco wrote: post #195
endisneigh wrote: post #188

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Whataboutism, really? Their statement hardly excludes those entities….

I was illustrating their problem has to be with all social media, not specifically Meta. If you believe Meta does something different from those others you can say that!

> If you believe Meta does something different from those others you can say that!

Yes. Such as profiting off of inflammatory posts and ads which incited violence and caused a genocide in Myanmar of Rohingya muslims with Meta doing nothing to prevent the spread other than monetizing off of it. [0]

There is no comparison or any whataboutsim that comes close to that which Meta should entirely be responsible for this disaster.

[0] https://time.com/6217730/myanmar-meta-rohingya-facebook/

Re: Meta disbanded its Responsible AI team

#246

Post by ethbr1 »

criley2 wrote: post #230
gcr wrote: post #220

Earlier quoted context omitted.

the people I’ve seen doing responsible AI say they have a hell of a time getting anyone to care about responsibility, ethics, and bias. of course the worst case is when this responsibility is both outsourced (“oh it’s the rAI team’s job to worry about it”) and disempowered (e.g. any rAI team without the ability to unilaterally put the brakes on product decisions) unfortunately, the idea that AI people effectively sel…

The idea that any for-profit company can self-govern without external accountability is also magical thinking A "Responsible AI Team" at a for-profit was always marketing (sleight of hand) to manipulate users. Just see OpenAI today: safety vs profit, who wins?

Self-government can be a useful function in large companies, because what the company/C-suite wants and what an individual product team want may differ.

F.ex. a product team incentivized to hit a KPI, so release a product that creates a legal liability

Leadership may not have supported that trade-off, but they were busy with 10,000 other strategic decisions and not technical.

Who then pushes back on the product team? Legal. Or what will probably become the new legal for AI, a responsible AI team.

Re: Meta disbanded its Responsible AI team

#247

Post by nyokodo »

_heimdall wrote: post #225
Mountain_Skies wrote: post #215

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Independent is the tricky part. AI companies already are asking for government regulation but how independent would that regulation really be?

As independent as any other government oversight/regulation in the US, it'd either be directly run or heavily influenced by those being regulated.

> it'd either be directly run or heavily influenced by those being regulated.

Which is also the probable fate of an AGI super intelligence being regulated by humans.

Re: Meta disbanded its Responsible AI team

#248

Post by nvm0n2 »

_heimdall wrote: post #232
peyton wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We’re talking about making sure chatbots don’t say “nigger,” not bioweapons. At some point you need to trust that the people using the tools are adults.

If that's your biggest concern with AI, that's a perfect example of why we need ethics teams in AI companies. All of these companies are building towards AGI, the complex ethics both of how an AGI is used and what rights it might have as an intelligent being go well beyond racist slurs.

Certainly but have any of the AI ethics teams at these big companies done any work on those bigger ethical issues, or is it all language control?

Re: Meta disbanded its Responsible AI team

#249

Post by Kalium »

Subdivide8452 wrote: post #190
seanhunter wrote: post #70

It never made any organizational sense for me to have a "responsible AI team" in the first place. Every team doing AI work should be responsible and should think about the ethical (and legal at a bare minimum baseline) dimension of what they are doing. Having that concentrated in a single team means that team becomes a bottleneck where they have to vet all AI work everyone else does for responsibility and/or everyone…

That’s like saying a sports game doesn’t need a referee because players should follow the rules. At times you perhaps don’t follow them as close because you’re too caught up. So it’s nice to have a party that oversees it.

One key question is if the teams are being effective referees or just people titled "referee".

If it's the latter, then getting rid of them does not seem like a loss.

Re: Meta disbanded its Responsible AI team

#250

Post by joenot443 »

Subdivide8452 wrote: post #190
seanhunter wrote: post #70

It never made any organizational sense for me to have a "responsible AI team" in the first place. Every team doing AI work should be responsible and should think about the ethical (and legal at a bare minimum baseline) dimension of what they are doing. Having that concentrated in a single team means that team becomes a bottleneck where they have to vet all AI work everyone else does for responsibility and/or everyone…

That’s like saying a sports game doesn’t need a referee because players should follow the rules. At times you perhaps don’t follow them as close because you’re too caught up. So it’s nice to have a party that oversees it.

Curling famously doesn’t have referees because players follow the rules. It wouldn’t work in all sports, but it’s a big part of curling culture.
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