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

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

#261

Post by podgietaru »

asadotzler wrote: post #187
podgietaru wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What companies do you think expect their employees to weigh the ethical ramifications of their work? I’d argue a lot of them expect the opposite. To suppress the ethical concerns. Even in recent memories you had Mark Zuckerberg telling his employees to use pirated sources. And executives at fossil fuel companies have to act unethically.

Food testing? Hospitals? Childcare? Pharmacists? How about "clergy"? I could go on and on. Do you believe that no one in management in these fields pushes the importance of ethics?

I think that individuals are capable of making ethical choices. I think that relying on individuals within for-profit businesses to make ethical decisions for the entire company is absolutely insane.

Food-testing: There's literally a parasite going around right now. Look at the response from some of the for profit businesses that was allowed to happen.

Hospitals: It is not ethical to deny patients care based on their insurance.

Clergy: The cover up of child sexual abuse scandals.

Childcare: lots of examples of sub-par care given to save money.

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

#262

Post by teiferer »

Planktonne wrote: post #245
reducesuffering wrote: post #240

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because the other side is the general informed consensus for which multiple sources are readily available for me to find. I have seen nothing to indicate this side, hence I'm asking for any evidence, because I don't see it. Either could potentially be correct, but I don't think they're equally probable.

To the extent there is a consensus here, it's not an evidence-based one; it's entirely founded on untested statements made by people who have both a track record of lying and incentive to do so. Demanding evidence from one party while accepting the word of the other is not even-handed.

And how is the corollary from the argument you just presented that neither side needs to provide evidence? Let's start by actually having evidence for "your side", then you can demand evidence from the other.

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

#263

Post by kmeisthax »

beloch wrote: post #223
wxw wrote: 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.

If "ethics departments are just PR stunts", then Bakalar would have been a terrible hire for OpenAI. Facebook's grudging and lacklustre response to their role in the Rohingya genocide would have happened mostly under her watch. While she was there, Meta went from being a company that lacks ethics to a company that lacks ethics and is widely perceived as lacking ethics. Perhaps she was the only person in the room rais…

From everything I've read in Careless People, basically everything people like us complained about with Facebook was already known internally, people raised concerns about it, and Zuck brushed them off because he is, ultimately, a petty tyrant who wants nothing more than to be loved, and who has surrounded himself with people who are willing to sell that love for power.

Also, you should read Careless People, if only because Facebook is trying its darnedest to censor the author.

As for OpenAI, I already hated the company pre-Sam Altman takeover because AI safety seemed like an excuse to brush away ethics concerns (e.g. "stealing training data is fine because if we don't withhold model weights the model might do something evil"). Post-Sam, I hate the company because they are now ignoring both the AI safety and ethics concerns.

...if you're wondering what the difference is, AI safety is roughly "making sure the AI doesn't do something bad" and AI ethics is "making sure we don't do something bad making the AI". There's a bit of a rivalry between the two, mainly because the former group managed to present their concerns in more business-palatable ways and thus won all the CxO level arguments. Even the most decelerationist AI safety takes are ultimately criti-hype: OpenAI's model breaking containment and hacking HuggingFace is an awful safety outcome, but it's also good marketing for an industry beleaguered by bubble concerns. You can't turn "AI is trained on stolen data" into hype.

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

#264

Post by kmeisthax »

teiferer wrote: post #253
beloch wrote: post #223

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If "ethics departments are just PR stunts", then Bakalar would have been a terrible hire for OpenAI. Facebook's grudging and lacklustre response to their role in the Rohingya genocide would have happened mostly under her watch. While she was there, Meta went from being a company that lacks ethics to a company that lacks ethics and is widely perceived as lacking ethics. Perhaps she was the only person in the room rais…

> This comes at a time when there is huge pushback against all AI companies due to, in large part, ethical concerns. I don't think ethics is fueling the outrage. It's people not wanting big noisy data centers close to their communities, driving up utility costs. Nobody would care if these things stood in Africa. Just like people don't want wind turbines close by but have no issue with them being abroad or in $remote_…

Sir, what you have described is an ethics concern.

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

#265

Post by Planktonne »

teiferer wrote: post #262
Planktonne wrote: post #245

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To the extent there is a consensus here, it's not an evidence-based one; it's entirely founded on untested statements made by people who have both a track record of lying and incentive to do so. Demanding evidence from one party while accepting the word of the other is not even-handed.

And how is the corollary from the argument you just presented that neither side needs to provide evidence? Let's start by actually having evidence for "your side", then you can demand evidence from the other.

> And how is the corollary from the argument you just presented that neither side needs to provide evidence?

It's not. I have no idea how you got there.

The right thing is to seek evidence for both perspectives. This is ironically not rocket science. Don't accept any viewpoint just on say-so, but especially don't pretend to sneering objectivity when you do so.

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

#266

Post by throwaway324098 »

financetechbro wrote: post #251
throwaway324098 wrote: post #226

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"The most unethical companies on the planet" - if you believe this maybe its time to log off for a bit.

You made an account just to post this comment. And then you provided no evidence to back your counterclaim that OAI is in fact ethical (or more ethical than the most unethical companies in the planet)

The myriad of companies that supported the nazi government - Volkswagen, duetsche bank, Siemens, Hugo boss, UBS. Phillip Morris, Purdue Pharma, Exxon, Nestle, Chiquita (formerly united fruit)

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

#267

Post by minraws »

The rats are fleeing because the captain doesn't care if the ethical ship sinks... Is what my take away would be if I didn't know, that the ship sank a long time ago and we are just pretending anyone really cares.

Let's be honest unless AI gains literal limbs, and the records a video of itself presenting a manifesto about world domination and then kills actual humans with its cold mechanical hands.

We won't care about AI safety & ethics enough, atleast not enough to do anything about it.

People thought how could skynet happen, it had to be something no one saw coming and bam... But honestly if I started a new AI lab named it Skynet Corp and hired some AI researcher friends ex-Google, I think I could raise a few hundred million dollars.

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

#268

Post by pandemic_region »

cmiles8 wrote: post #252

Head of ethics at Meta then head of Ethics at OpenAI. Sorry, but if that doesn’t scream useless puffy PR positioning then I don’t know what does. What’s next? Head of ethics for United Healthcare?

The Trump administration could use a Head of Ethics.

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

#269

Post by Melatonic »

ak830 wrote: 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…

Or something to do with the very large Apple lawsuit they are weirdly posting conversations about on their public website

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

#270

Post by rurban »

ak830 wrote: 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…

You cannot blame ethics on the HF escape, because this model had no safeguards. It was just trained on unethical (and stolen) sources. So this cannot be the reason to blame missing ethics. The models needed to solve a problem, and they did. By cheating.
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