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Many AI safety orgs have tried to criminalize currently-existing open-source AI

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Re: Many AI safety orgs have tried to criminalize currently-existing open-source AI

#291

Post by emporas »

mtlmtlmtlmtl wrote: post #179
ben_w wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Bans often come after examples, so while I disagree with kmeisthax about… well, everything in that comment… it's almost never too late to pass laws banning GenAI, or to set thresholds at capability levels anywhere, including or excluding Markov chains even. This is because almost no law is perfectly enforced. My standard example of this is heroin, which nobody defends even if they otherwise think drugs are great, for…

Actually, anyone who knows what they're talking about will tell you the ban makes heroin a much worse problem, not better. Ban leads to a black market, leads to lousy purity, which leads to fluctuations in purity and switches to potent alternatives, leads to waves of overdose deaths.

Ban on LLMs will lead to a proliferation of illegal LLMs who are gonna talk like Dr. Dre about the streets, the internet streets, and their bros they lost due to law regulation equivalent to gang fights. Instead of ChatGPT talking like a well educated college graduate, LLMs will turn into thugs.

So yeah, banning LLMs may turn out to be not so wise after all.

Re: Many AI safety orgs have tried to criminalize currently-existing open-source AI

#292

Post by simiones »

mtlmtlmtlmtl wrote: post #179
ben_w wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Bans often come after examples, so while I disagree with kmeisthax about… well, everything in that comment… it's almost never too late to pass laws banning GenAI, or to set thresholds at capability levels anywhere, including or excluding Markov chains even. This is because almost no law is perfectly enforced. My standard example of this is heroin, which nobody defends even if they otherwise think drugs are great, for…

Actually, anyone who knows what they're talking about will tell you the ban makes heroin a much worse problem, not better. Ban leads to a black market, leads to lousy purity, which leads to fluctuations in purity and switches to potent alternatives, leads to waves of overdose deaths.

The way the ban is enforced, yes. But no one in their right mind believes that heroin should be openly accessible on the market like candy. We've seen how that works out with tobacco.

Re: Many AI safety orgs have tried to criminalize currently-existing open-source AI

#293

Post by simiones »

visarga wrote: post #94
_cjse wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you lower the problem to "stop people from future developments on AI", then it seems pretty easy to get most people to stop fairly quickly by implementing a fine-based bounty system, similar to what many countries use for things like littering. [url-redacted] I guess you could always move to a desert island and build your own semiconductor fab from scratch if you were really committed to the goal, but short of tha…

That only works if all governments cooperate sincerely to this goal. Not gonna work. Everyone will develop in secret. Have we been able to stop North Korea and Iran from developing nuclear weapons? Or any motivated country for that matter.

> Have we been able to stop North Korea and Iran from developing nuclear weapons?

Yes, obviously. They may be working on it to some extent, but they are yet to actually develop a nuclear weapon, and there is no reason to be certain they will one day build one.

Also, there is another research area that has been successfully banned across the world: human cloning. Some quack claims notwithstanding, it's not being researched anywhere in the world.

Re: Many AI safety orgs have tried to criminalize currently-existing open-source AI

#294

Post by somewhereoutth »

jncfhnb wrote: post #266
somewhereoutth wrote: post #245

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well it isn't is it? Any more than adjusting a word from an actual Terry Pratchett novel.

It is substantially different from changing a word in a terry Pratchett novel. Terry Prachett wrote none of that text. It would be absolute bonkers for Terry to claim ownership of text he didn’t write. Even if we pretend for a minute that the bot was asked to write in the style of Terry specifically.

But by prompting for 'in the style of' effectively you are mechanically rearranging everything he wrote without adding anything yourself. So not so different really, and I can see how lawyers for the plaintiff may make a convincing argument along those lines.

Re: Many AI safety orgs have tried to criminalize currently-existing open-source AI

#295

Post by simiones »

kridsdale1 wrote: post #249
mtillman wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Important to remember that in Dune, the AI made the right decision which precipitated a whole lot of fun to read nonsense.

I’ve only read 2 novels and want to get in to this. What title(s) cover the machine war?

Note that there are no "thinking machines" in any of the original Dune novels by Frank Herbert. His son has worked with Brian Sanderson to create several prequels which detail the original Butlerian Jihad (the war against the machines), and a sequel series that is supposed to be based on Frank Herbert's notes, but seems to quite clearly veer off (and that one recontexualizes some mysterious characters in from the last two novels as machines).

Re: Many AI safety orgs have tried to criminalize currently-existing open-source AI

#296

Post by Xelynega »

kmeisthax wrote: post #7

AI safety people are hypocrites. If they practiced what they preached, they'd be calling for all AI to be banned, ala Dune. There are AI harms that don't care about whether or not the weights are available, and are playing out today. I'm talking about the ability of any AI system to obfuscate plagiarism[0] and spam the Internet with technically distinct rewords of the same text. This is currently the most lucrative u…

Notice how were 3 layers deep in a conversation about "AI safety" without anyone actually giving an opinion I support of safety.

If I were a betting man I'd say the fact that the most public "AI safety" orgs/people/articles don't address the actual concerns people have is intended. It's much easier to argue against an opinion you've already positioned as ridiculous.

Re: Many AI safety orgs have tried to criminalize currently-existing open-source AI

#297

Post by Xelynega »

lr1970 wrote: post #287
kmeisthax wrote: post #7

AI safety people are hypocrites. If they practiced what they preached, they'd be calling for all AI to be banned, ala Dune. There are AI harms that don't care about whether or not the weights are available, and are playing out today. I'm talking about the ability of any AI system to obfuscate plagiarism[0] and spam the Internet with technically distinct rewords of the same text. This is currently the most lucrative u…

To the hypocrisy claim: OpenAI recently changed their terms for GPT models allowing military applications and AI safety people are all silent. If it is not hypocrisy than I do not know what hypocrisy is.

Could it be misdirection?

If the "AI safety people" are criminalizing open source models while being silent about military uses of private models, doesn't that say more about the people calling them "ai safety experts" than the idea of "ai safety" itself?

Re: Many AI safety orgs have tried to criminalize currently-existing open-source AI

#298

Post by echelon »

sensanaty wrote: post #226
echelon wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or the torrent of great information. How are we all leaping to the bad? The world is better than it was 20 years ago. I'm almost certain we'll have AI assistants telling us relevant world news and information, keeping us up to tabs with everything we need to know, and completely removing distractions from life.

... While humongous swathes of the population lose their jobs and livelihoods because of megacorps like M$ controlling the AI that replaces everyone, steals everything and shits out endless spam. But we'll be able to talk to it and it'll give us the M$-approved news sound bites, such progress

Sounds like you still want people to churn butter?

There will be new jobs.

I can't wait to hire a human tour guide on my fully-immmersive real time 3D campaign.

Re: Many AI safety orgs have tried to criminalize currently-existing open-source AI

#299

Post by gjm11 »

reissbaker wrote: post #272
gjm11 wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Consider a world in which AI existential risk is real: where at some point AI systems become dramatically more capable than human minds, in a way that has catastrophic consequences for humanity. What would you expect this world to look like, say, five years before the AI systems become more capable than humans? How (if at all) would it differ from the world we are actually in? What arguments (if any) would anyone be…

This is exactly the kind of hypothetical argument I'm talking about. You could make this argument for anything — e.g. when radio was invented, you could say "Consider a world in which extraterrestrial x-risk is real," and argue radio should be banned because it gives us away to extraterrestrials. The burden of proof isn't on disproving extraordinary claims, the burden of proof is on the person making extraordinary cl…

I didn't make any argument -- at least, not any argument for or against AI x-risk. I am not, and was not, arguing (1) that AI does or doesn't in fact pose substantial existential risk, or (2) that we should or shouldn't put substantial resources into mitigating such risks.

I'm talking one meta-level up: if this sort of risk were a real problem, would all the arguments for worrying about it be dismissable as "hypothetical arguments"?

It looks to me as if the answer is yes. Maybe you're OK with that, maybe not.

(But yes, my meta-level argument is a "hypothetical argument" in the sense that it involves considering a possible way the world could be and asking what would happen then. If you consider that a problem, well, then I think you're terribly confused. There's nothing wrong with arguments of that form as such.)

The comparisons with extraterrestrials, religion, etc., are interesting. It seems to me that:

(1) In worlds where potentially-hostile aliens are listening for radio transmissions and will kill us if they detect them, I agree that probably usually we don't get any evidence of that until it's too late. (A bit like the alleged situation with AI x-risk.) I don't agree that this means we should assume that there is no danger; I think it means that ideally we would have tried to estimate whether there was any danger before starting to make a lot of radio transmissions. I think that if we had tried to estimate that we'd have decided the danger was very small, because there's no obvious reason why aliens with such power would wipe out every species they find. (And because if there are super-aggressive super-powerful aliens out there, we may well be screwed anyway.)

(2) If hell were real then we would expect to see evidence, which is one reason why I think the god of traditional Christianity is probably not real.

(3) As for yeti, cold fusion, etc., so far as I know no one is claiming anything like x-risk from these. The nearest analogue of AI x-risk claims for these (I think) would be, when the possibility was first raised, "this is interesting and worth a bit of effort to look into", which seems perfectly correct to me. We don't put much effort into searching for yeti or cold fusion now because people have looked in ways we'd expect to have found evidence, and not found the evidence. (That would be like not worrying about AI x-risk if we'd already built AI much smarter than us and nothing bad had happened.)

Re: Many AI safety orgs have tried to criminalize currently-existing open-source AI

#300

Post by gjm11 »

michaelt wrote: post #156
gjm11 wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Consider a world in which AI existential risk is real: where at some point AI systems become dramatically more capable than human minds, in a way that has catastrophic consequences for humanity. What would you expect this world to look like, say, five years before the AI systems become more capable than humans? How (if at all) would it differ from the world we are actually in? What arguments (if any) would anyone be…

Does the strongest argument that AI existential risk is a big problem really open by exhorting the reader to imagine it's a big problem? Then asking them to come up with their own arguments for why the problem needs addressing?

I doubt it. At any rate, I wasn't claiming to offer "the strongest argument that AI existential risk is a big problem". I wasn't claiming to offer any argument that AI existential risk is a big problem.

I was pointing out an interesting feature of the argument in the comment I was replying to: that (so far as I can see) its reason for dismissing AI x-risk concerns would apply unchanged even in situations where AI x-risk is in fact something worth worrying about. (Whether or not it is worth worrying about here in the real world.)

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