Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Meta disbanded its Responsible AI team

theverge.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

281–290 of 409 posts

Re: Meta disbanded its Responsible AI team

#281

Post by troupo »

Hipoint wrote: post #254
troupo wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

Look around you. We control adults all of the time. We can't trust them even with simple things like "don't kill each other" or "don't poison water supplies".

Re: Meta disbanded its Responsible AI team

#282

Post by zeroonetwothree »

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…

This feels like criticising a bar for “enhancing the inflammatory views of its customers” who then go on to do terrible things. Like, I suppose there is some influence but when did we stop expecting people to have responsibility for their own actions? Billions of people are exposed to “hate speech” all the time without going around killing people.

Re: Meta disbanded its Responsible AI team

#283

Post by makeitdouble »

vasco wrote: post #151
makeitdouble wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Whoever ultimately owns the AI (or the Bazooka) will always dictate how and where the particular tool is used. Your take confuses me, because in this case the owner is Meta. So yes, they have to think about what tools they make ("should we design a bazooka") and how they'll use what they made ("what's the target and when to pull the trigger ?") They disbanded the team that was tasked with thinking about both. From…

You will notice the goal of the team wasn't to make the world a better place, it was to reduce customer support / moderation costs.

Yes. I think that's par for the course, most decisions and team management will be aimed either at producing revenue or reducing cost.

HR isn't there for employee happiness either, strictly speaking they'll do what's needed to attract employees, reduce retention cost through non monetary measures, and potentially shield the company from lawsuits and other damages.

Re: Meta disbanded its Responsible AI team

#284

Post by zeroonetwothree »

bigfudge wrote: post #132
xvector wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

pretty sure this comes down to bad parenting and social media being relatively new on the human timeline - teething pains are to be expected

This is absolutely not just "bad parenting". When sending children to school they are now immersed in an online culture that is wholly unaligned with their best interests. There is no "good parenting" strategy that can mitigate the immense resources being poured into subverting their attentional systems for profit. Even taking away their smart phone is no solution: that requires their social exclusion from peers (dam…

You can teach them how to use social media responsibly. Or allow them a phone but limit social media usage (though I prefer the first approach). It’s not like everyone is harmed, the same studies find a positive effect for a significant minority.

Re: Meta disbanded its Responsible AI team

#286

Post by irusensei »

Considering how costly is to train models I'm sure control freaks and rent seekers are probably salivating to dig their teeth into this but as technologies progress and opposing parts of the world get hold of this all this responsible and regulated feel good corpo crap bs will backfire.

Re: Meta disbanded its Responsible AI team

#288

Post by pixl97 »

fho wrote: post #260
_heimdall wrote: post #225

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The problem case is when the companies all have a backroom meeting and go "Hey, lets ask for regulation X that hurts us some... but hurts everyone else way more"

Re: Meta disbanded its Responsible AI team

#289

Post by pixl97 »

JKCalhoun wrote: post #268
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…

Apple had* a privacy team that existed to insure that various engineering teams across Apple do not collect data they do not need for their app. (And by data I mean of course data collected from users of the apps.) It's not that engineers left to their own will do evil things but rather that to a lot of engineers (and of course management) there is no such thing as too much data. So the privacy team comes in and asks…

Honestly this seems no different than a software security team. Yes, you want your developers to know now to write secure software, but the means of doing that is verifying the code with another team.

Re: Meta disbanded its Responsible AI team

#290

Post by pixl97 »

barney54 wrote: post #233
criley2 wrote: post #230

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Customers. Customers are the external accountability.

Yea, this works great on slow burn problems. "Oh, we've been selling you cancerous particles for the last 5 years, and in another 5 years your ass is totally going to fall off. Oh by the way we are totally broke after shoving all of our money in foreign accounts"
Post reply on HN