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Meta disbanded its Responsible AI team

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Re: Meta disbanded its Responsible AI team

#251

Post by jprete »

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…

Assigning ethics and safety to the AI teams in question is a little like assigning user privacy to advertising analytics teams - responsible AI is in direct conflict with their natural goals and will _never_ get any serious consideration.

I heard about one specific ratchet effect directly from an AI researcher. The ethics/risk oriented people get in direct internal conflict with the charge-forward people because one wants to slow down and the other wants to speed up. The charge-ahead people almost always win because it’s easier to get measurable outcomes for organization goals when one is not worrying about ethical concerns. (As my charge-ahead AI acquaintance put it, AI safety people don’t get anything done.)

If you want something like ethics or responsibility or safety to be considered, it’s essential to split it out into its own team and give that team priorities aligned with that mission.

Internally I expect that Meta is very much reducing responsible AI to a lip service bullet point at the bottom of a slide full of organizational goals, and otherwise not doing anything about it.

Re: Meta disbanded its Responsible AI team

#252

Post by Hipoint »

fatherzine wrote: post #121
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.

not sure it's fair to trivialize ai risks. for just one example, the pen is mightier than the sword.

What about the harm that’s come from pens and keyboards? Do we need departments staffed with patronizing and humorless thought police to decide what we should be able to write and read?

Re: Meta disbanded its Responsible AI team

#253

Post by fluoridation »

joenot443 wrote: post #250
Subdivide8452 wrote: post #190

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

So what happens if the teams disagree on whether a rule was broken? The entire point of a referee is that it's supposed to be an impartial authority.

Re: Meta disbanded its Responsible AI team

#254

Post by Hipoint »

troupo wrote: post #122
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.

> At some point you need to trust that the people using the tools are adults. Ah yes. Let's see: - invasive and pervasive tracking - social credit scores - surveillance [1] All done by adults, no need to worry [1] Just one such story: https://www.404media.co/fusus-ai-cameras-took-over-town-amer...

Adults have too much freedom… Must be controlled…

Re: Meta disbanded its Responsible AI team

#255

Post by timkam »

marcus0x62 wrote: post #238
timkam wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Fully agree. Central functions of these types do not scale. Even with more mundane objectives, like operational excellence, organizations have learned that centralization leads to ivory tower nothing-burgers. Most of the resources should go to where the actual work gets done, as little as possible should be managed centrally (perhaps a few ops and thought leadership fluff folks...).

And decentralized functions tend to be wildly inconsistent across teams, with info sec being a particular disaster where I've seen that tried. Neither model is perfect.

Sure, but we are talking about research teams here, not about an ops or compliance team. Central research tends to be detached from the business units but does not provide any of the 'consistency' benefits. Central research makes sense if the objectives are outward-facing, not if one wants to have an effect on what happens in the software-building units. So I'd say that ideally/hopefully, the people of the RAI team will now be much closer to Meta's engineering reality.

Re: Meta disbanded its Responsible AI team

#256

Post by nvm0n2 »

ben_w wrote: post #214
peyton wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m not trivializing risks. I’m characterizing output. These systems aren’t theoretical anymore. They’re used by hundreds of millions of people daily in one form or another. What are these teams accomplishing? Give me a concrete example of a harm prevented. “Pen is mightier than the sword” is an aphorism.

> Give me a concrete example of a harm prevented One can only do this by inventing a machine to observe the other Everett Branches where people didn't do safety work. Without that magic machine, the closest one can get to what you're asking for is to see OpenAI's logs for which completions for which prompts they're blocking; if they do this with content from the live model and not just the original red-team effort le…

This is veering extremely close to tiger-protecting rock territory.

Re: Meta disbanded its Responsible AI team

#257

Post by imglorp »

gcr wrote: post #220
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…

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…

Maybe a better case is outsourced and empowered. What if there was a third party company that was independent, under non-disclosure, and expert in ethics and regulatory compliance? They could be like accounting auditors but they would look at code and features. They would maintain confidentiality but their audit result would be public, like a seal of good ai citizen.

Re: Meta disbanded its Responsible AI team

#258

Post by Hipoint »

rvz wrote: post #245
vasco wrote: post #195

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 di…

I’m triggered by the racism implicit in the post. The implication is that the Burmese are unsophisticated dupes and it is the white man’s burden of Zuck to make the behave.

Re: Meta disbanded its Responsible AI team

#259

Post by jprete »

watwut wrote: post #110
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…

Everyone should think about it usually means no one will.

It depends. If you embed a requirement into the culture and make it clear that people are absolutely required to think about it, at least some people will do so. And because the requirement was so clear up-front, those people have some level of immunity from pushback and even social pressure.

Re: Meta disbanded its Responsible AI team

#260

Post by fho »

_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.

Not an economist, but that does not sound bad in general. Best case you have several companies that: (a) have the knowledge to make sensible rulings and (b) have an interest that non of their direct competitors gain any unfair advantages.
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