321–330 of 439 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
But AI isn't going to be unaligned. It's going to be aligned the same way we are because it learns from our data.
we mostly know how to make it understand what we want. we don't know how to make it care about what we want, except via reinforcement learning. there are good reasons to believe rl won't work for this once the ai reaches a certain levels of capability.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> At no point in the next 30 years will there not be an active community of people who "loathe" AI and work to obstruct it. Then I have good news for you: If humanity goes extinct in the next few years because of unaligned superintelligence, there actually will no longer "be an active community of people who loathe AI and work to obstruct it"
>If humanity goes extinct in the next few years because of unaligned superintelligence This is either a misunderstanding of the anti-AI crowd or an intentional attempt to discredit them. The majority of anti-AI people don't actually fear this because that belief would require that this person has already bought into the hype regarding the actual power and prowess of AI. The bigger motivator for anti-AI folks is usual…
Exactly, "lack of intelligence" is really a much bigger concern than "superintelligence". Companies and government will happily try to save money and avoid accountability by letting AI do work that it can only do poorly and it will be humans who are left with the accelerated AI powered enshittification and blind/soulless paperclip maximization that results.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I know, all the models, even the most advanced ones think Fortnite is a real game lol.
It’s the test I’ve used for AI for many years. I ask it to draw a screenshot from this imaginary “Fortnite” game. If it draws something rather than pointing out fortnite doesn’t exist then I know it’s failed. One time it drew a fortnight riding a bike. Hilarious.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
[flagged]
Please don't fulminate or post snarky comments on HN. The guidelines make it clear we're trying for something better here. If an argument has merit, it can be presented thoughtfully and persuasively, rather than belligerently. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
"I'm not shaming! Not embracing AI is comparable to people who didn't embrace smart phones or the Internet though".
This is a regurgitation of a marketing slogan frequented by OpenAI and similar organizations for the past four years. "AI is the future. If you don't embrace it you will be left behind".
It's intellectually insulting to be subject to as it relies primarily on fear to convince.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
People love harping on this one, but model collapse hasn't turned out to be an issue in practice.
I don't really understand why model collapse would happen. I understand that if I have an AI model and then feed it its own responses it will degrade in performance. But that's not what's happening in the wild though - there are extra filtering steps in-between. Users upvote and downvote posts, people post the "best" AI generated content (that they prefer), the more human sounding AI gets more engagement etc. All of…
At the same time though AI generated content can be generated much much faster than human generated content so eventually AI slop downs out anything else. You only have to check the popular social media platforms to see this in action and AI generated posts are widely promoted and pushed on users the same way most web searches return results with AI generated pages ranked highly.
Humans can't keep up and companies are actively working to bypass the human filter and intentionally promote AI generated content.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I am so very tired of people who compare AI to smart phones or the Internet as large. There were never such wide scale and, above all, centralized efforts to coerce and shame people into using the Internet or smart phones in spite of their best efforts.
Oh, yeah, no, definitely super easy to have been a professional software developer over the last 20 years whilst conscientiously objecting from using the Internet.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> The easiest way to grow AI resistance is to get Dario Amodei and Sam Altman on TV and let them talk. Tell me more? I'm guessing you might say: neither connects with everyday people, they have misaligned incentives*, they (like most corporate leaders) don't speak directly, they have more power than almost any elected leader in the world, ... Did I miss anything? My take: when it comes to character and goals and ther…
You're overthinking the parent comment, I think. When Dario goes on TV he says things like "AI is going to put 50% of white collar workers out of a job in a few years". The average TV viewer who hears that doesn't know what AI alignment means, they just hear that this guy, whatever his intentions, is threatening their ability to survive in this economy.
A surprisingly high number of people are already being tricked into supporting things that clearly threaten their ability to survive in this economy, and even their ability to survive period. I wouldn't trust the general public to be smart enough not to line up to shoot themselves in the foot/face. They'll get increasingly angry as they get increasingly screwed over, but it remains to be seen how long that will take or who they'll blame for it.
I'm old enough to remember a time when the primary hacker cause was DRM, the DMCA, patent trolls, export controls for PGP, etc. All things that made it difficult to use information when you want to. "Information wants to be free." It's wild to see the about face. Now it's: > If [companies] can’t source training data ethically, then I see absolutely no reason why any website operator should make it easy for them to st…
This claim of contradiction has never worked for me. Let say person A wants everyone to be rich. Person B plots a plan to make themself rich and everyone else poorer. One can make an argument that any action by A is now a contradiction. If they work with B, it makes a lot of people poorer and not richer. If they work against B, B do not get rich. However this is not a contradiction. If a company use training data in…
> If copyright can no longer protect the distribution of the work they produce, who will invest immense sums to create films or any other creative material of the kind we now take for granted? Do the thieves really expect new music and movies to continue pouring forth if the artists and companies behind them are not paid for their work?
--Jack Valenti, Motion Picture Association of America, 2000 (https://archive.is/PBy7C)
It sounds remarkably similar to what people concerned about AI say today. How do we make sure that artists get paid?
I don't think many hackers found the argument compelling at the time.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I feel as though you are confusing AI use in scraping by random companies and actual AI companies scraping. The AI companies seem to see value in walled garden sources like Reddit, Stack Overflow, etc. However, I don't think there has been any major instance of a major American AI company doing aggressive online website scraping and not respecting robot.txt.
Per https://thelibre.news/foss-infrastructure-is-under-attack-by... , all of the major American AI companies are not respecting robot.txt and participating in the AI-fueled DDoS of the internet.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> If humanity goes extinct in the next few years because of unaligned superintelligence, I've seen people claiming that this could happen, but I've yet to read any plausible scenario where this might be the case. Maybe I lack the imagination, could you enlighten me?
- AI smarter than any human. - AI dominated the physical world. Robots, factories, etc. - AI decides humans aren't contributing and/or wasting resources it feels should go somewhere else. I mean not unlike humans causing extinction of other species?
Factories, even fully robotic ones, heavily rely on humans to set up and maintain them. Moreover, the safety culture means there are tons of "disable" controls which can be triggered by any human and no machine can override.
Robots look impressive, but they cannot function without the humans either. Military kill-bots are likely the worst, but machines cannot repair or refuel them.
None of this is going to change in the "next few years".