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

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

ft.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

321–330 of 419 posts

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

#321

Post by ltbarcly3 »

dgellow wrote: post #92
amanaplanacanal wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

All it takes to be homeless is not being able to afford housing, drugs or mental illness are not required. You really think all it takes is "choosing" and housing will appear for you?

Also, drug consumption and mental disorders is very often a result of being homeless. Try having bad sleep in your comfortable home for a few days in a row and see how quickly your mental stability deteriorates and how many bad decisions you start to take (anyone who has insomnia periods will attest)

This is not substantiated by data or even a plausible theory. The kinds of mental disorders that lead to homelessness are not something you can "catch" from your environment.

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

#322

Post by tollenda »

insanitybit wrote: post #102

I've never worked at a company with an "ethics" employee. It seems odd. Can someone explain what the point is? > She has held a variety of academic positions at Temple University, Princeton, and the University of Pennsylvania – where she completed her PhD in Political Science and Government. Her Dissertation was titled “Small Talk: The Socialities of Speech in Liberal Democratic Life.” This doesn't even feel relevant…

Bakalar got in on the ground floor of AI ethics by starting to talk and think about it in academic settings as a side-interest in the late 2010s. When the sector took off like a rocket in early 2023 after ChatGPT, it was these already-engaged people (regardless of degree field or technical skill) who had the personal and professional connections to get hired and promoted rapidly into lucrative "ethicist" positions at AI companies. A lot of them were poli-sci/public policy types, rather than philosophers or computer scientists.

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

#323

Post by ltbarcly3 »

estearum wrote: post #51
shafyy wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> High rents are created by high local productivity. Wrong. High rents have many reasons and also good policies to get them down and have affordable housing for more people, also in otherwise expensive and popular cities.

Nope. Rents cannot (at meaningful scale) exceed local productivity, or else there will be widespread vacancies and landlords will reduce their rents. Rents cannot (at meaningful scale) fall below local productivity, or else landlords will simply raise their rents. Go talk to a landlord about how they site prices. Step 1. Look up income of your target demographic Step 2. Eat 30% of their income Can you show me a place…

> Rents cannot (at meaningful scale) exceed local productivity

Manipulating the real estate market via direct economic manipulation, collusion, or regulatory capture is so common that the entire concept of manipulating the market to earn higher profits is called https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rent-seeking.

It's not just that it can, it's that it does so often it's taught in Econ 101. That you don't know this implies you have never taken an economics class or that you forgot what you were taught, and in the meantime certainly have not spent any real effort in learning about economic theory. I think you read a lot of Ayn Rand and right wing libertarian popular books about the free market and how it's perfect. Stop posting confident nonsense.

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

#324

Post by madrox »

afro88 wrote: post #320
madrox wrote: post #247

In five years, I'd love to read a book about the history of AI ethics. I suspect it will read like Voltaire. My sense is that it is radically shifting from a fluffy marketing arm to a department expected to contribute meaningfully to development and justify its impact. I would expect an ethics team to build frameworks that can help train/eval the model that the company spend millions of dollars and months training is…

> I would expect an ethics team to build frameworks that can help train/eval the model that the company spend millions of dollars and months training is going to be aligned to the ethical stances the company chooses. Which like any company will be entirely driven by legal constraints and money. Or just money if it's cheaper to break the law for profit and pay fines. There will be no "this is what's good for humanity,…

I agree, and I don't think many first wave AI ethicists would be on board with that, which is why the field is in for a rude awakening for the next few years if not already.

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

#325

Post by saghm »

teiferer wrote: post #250
madrox wrote: post #247

In five years, I'd love to read a book about the history of AI ethics. I suspect it will read like Voltaire. My sense is that it is radically shifting from a fluffy marketing arm to a department expected to contribute meaningfully to development and justify its impact. I would expect an ethics team to build frameworks that can help train/eval the model that the company spend millions of dollars and months training is…

> if the model requires retraining for ethics reasons. Haha, how refreshingly naive. What do you think is more likely: this or the other way around: getting the "ethics team" to align with investor goals? Hint: Where does the money come from? > The people in AI ethics who spent years thinking their job was marketing or publishing thinkpiece papers may be having to adapt quickly or get out of the field. Or it's exactl…

Yeah, I've never found the "maximizing shareholder profit" imperative to be compelling as something that should be done, but as a predictor of how companies will act, it's not something I ever feel safe betting against.

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

#326

Post by unknownfuture »

madrox wrote: post #247

In five years, I'd love to read a book about the history of AI ethics. I suspect it will read like Voltaire. My sense is that it is radically shifting from a fluffy marketing arm to a department expected to contribute meaningfully to development and justify its impact. I would expect an ethics team to build frameworks that can help train/eval the model that the company spend millions of dollars and months training is…

> The people in AI ethics who spent years thinking their job was marketing or publishing thinkpiece papers may be having to adapt quickly or get out of the field.

Your disdain is showing.

That you jump immediately to criticizing AI ethicists as counting angels on pins and implying that's why they left OpenAI rather than OpenAI not being a place where AI ethics is a priority is, well, let's say generous to these AI labs.

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

#327

Post by icelancer »

pessimizer wrote: post #300
teiferer wrote: post #250

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> if the model requires retraining for ethics reasons. Haha, how refreshingly naive. What do you think is more likely: this or the other way around: getting the "ethics team" to align with investor goals? Hint: Where does the money come from? > The people in AI ethics who spent years thinking their job was marketing or publishing thinkpiece papers may be having to adapt quickly or get out of the field. Or it's exactl…

It's funny, but Scientologists were innovators on this front. They use the word "ethics" a lot, but they've specifically redefined it to mean productivity at work (people who aren't productive are stealing a living.) Being "downstat" (iirc) is when you're not productive in comparison to your coworkers, which makes you "outethics" and a "potential trouble source (PTS)." If you're outethics, then you get called in for…

Great point.

The EA group have a ton of parallels to the Scientologists, so all of this is not surprising.

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

#328

Post by guelo »

madrox wrote: post #247

In five years, I'd love to read a book about the history of AI ethics. I suspect it will read like Voltaire. My sense is that it is radically shifting from a fluffy marketing arm to a department expected to contribute meaningfully to development and justify its impact. I would expect an ethics team to build frameworks that can help train/eval the model that the company spend millions of dollars and months training is…

I hate this attitude that ethics and philosophy are "bullshit jobs". At the same time Americans hate any government regulation and are in the process of tearing government's regulatory capacity apart. So all we're left with is the greediest people in the world throwing a nuclear bomb into the machinery of society and everybody else throwing up their hands hoping we're not headed to a The Terminator type future.

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

#329

Post by madrox »

Avicebron wrote: post #316
madrox wrote: post #305

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because leaving that to emergent behavior is silly. Why is the idea of training models on ethical reasoning so strange?

Because 1) ethics aren't universal. It's perfectly easy to frame ethics for the outcome you want depending on your a priori assumptions. 2) it's blatantly obvious that the business "needs" will supersede any ethical concerns or the ethics will be framed in a way that aligns with the primary goal of gaining money and power.

I don't see either of those as reasons not to train on it. Training isn't zero sum. You don't need to take something out to train ethics, and whether you explicitly train it or not, models will take ethical stances. Your second point actually argues in favor of training because that is still an ethical stance.

I think a lot of people confuse ethics training with "don't be evil"

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

#330

Post by madrox »

unknownfuture wrote: post #326
madrox wrote: post #247

In five years, I'd love to read a book about the history of AI ethics. I suspect it will read like Voltaire. My sense is that it is radically shifting from a fluffy marketing arm to a department expected to contribute meaningfully to development and justify its impact. I would expect an ethics team to build frameworks that can help train/eval the model that the company spend millions of dollars and months training is…

> The people in AI ethics who spent years thinking their job was marketing or publishing thinkpiece papers may be having to adapt quickly or get out of the field. Your disdain is showing. That you jump immediately to criticizing AI ethicists as counting angels on pins and implying that's why they left OpenAI rather than OpenAI not being a place where AI ethics is a priority is, well, let's say generous to these AI la…

I don't really have any particular disdain for AI ethics.

I think the field is changing from one of high theory to high application. People good at one are not usually good at the other, and says nothing about OpenAI's view of AI ethics as a priority...merely the people in the field and how they relate to the greater industry.

Post reply on HN