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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

#391

Post by ghaff »

ifwinterco wrote: post #387
ghaff wrote: post #361

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My sense is that many companies spun up various roles in part to be seen as doing something about various things. With the pullback in tech, even if the people in those roles weren't actively pushed out, the smarter ones probably saw which way the wind was blowing.

If you’re OpenAI you have to have an ethics department even if you don’t care at all, because otherwise it looks bad (“they don’t even have a head of ethics!”). So it’s entirely possible you end up in a situation where you have a highly paid, fairly prominent head of ethics whose actual job is mostly just saying they’re the head of ethics, with little actual power or influence. Ambitious people won’t tolerate that fo…

Totally agree. I could name (but won't) a couple other areas where the same sort of thing has tended to happen. It ends up cheaper and more PR-friendly to hire someone into a senior position that handles such-and-such than to have to answer questions about why you don't have a senior person handling such-and-such. At some point, the heat around the issue cools down and you can go back to business as usual.

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

#392

Post by SubiculumCode »

areoform wrote: post #369
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 have a perspective on this that will read as unkind to these people, but that's not my intention. I respect and even admire what they're trying to do. I just think the effort is maladaptive and misplaced. Without directly touching one of the many, many third rails that are present here, I'd like to present this section from Google's Gemma paper on how they did their CBRN review; > In addition to our internal evalua…

You didn't actually say what you found wrong

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

#393

Post by SubiculumCode »

Alive-in-2025 wrote: post #296
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 goal of an ethics team will be to provide cover for problems created by decisions or suggestions of an llm. They will need to be able to say "We trained it to consider ethical considerations by " . We tested by . They will use "industry standard practices", they will have tested it somehow, and will be sure to be on the board of some group that is building toothless "ai ethical tests" for llms.

I think that you are being overly cynical. Yes, we are aware of the kinds of things you mean, like all the trainings we have to go through at work these days in order to insulate themselves from lawsuits. But just because something can serve that purpose does not mean that is the only goal or purpose that it is meant to achieve.

Even from a purely profit-motive stance, if a company's model helps a terrorist develop and deliver a bioweapon, no amount of lawer-driven tests will provide enough protection to prevent that company from getting gutted ruthlessly from government on down

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

#394

Post by transcriptase »

guelo wrote: post #328
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.

They are bullshit jobs.

If you want to evaluate danger in a certain domain, hire or contract people in that domain to evaluate.

If you want someone to push their own ideological leanings onto a model, hire a self proclaimed ethicist.

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

#395

Post by onion2k »

sph wrote: post #227
onion2k wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd accept a few hundred grand to reply to emails with "No, the torment nexus is a net benefit.."

That’s exactly the situation they found themselves in, and you are admitting you have no more spine and moral compass than them. Or are you telling us in the hope someone makes you such an offer?

[dead]

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

#396

Post by forestrywat »

bmitc wrote: post #167
RobotToaster wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you ever feel like your job is useless, remember that raytheon has an ethics team.

Isn't that a good thing? You would prefer they didn't?

It'd be more honest for a start.

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

#397

Post by tommica »

bravetraveler wrote: post #380
slg wrote: post #363

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Which is only possible if people give it the keys. Skynet didn’t hijack the nuclear arsenal, control was given to it intentionally.

Third crack commandment: never trust nobody; your moms'll set that ass up, properly gassed up Applies every-which-way; the chat bot, the provider, the consumer.

Is this written by AI? It sounds nonsensical

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

#398

Post by scott_w »

romanows wrote: post #368
zem wrote: post #356

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think in this case it was more a plea to have his judgement valued when he said "dude, if the qa team has found this many bugs this is only going to harm our reputation with the client, and we are going to be the ones doing emergency bugfixes at midnight". but also the company had a pretty toxic culture where the CEO knew how to manipulate people to get his way. he definitely managed to guilt trip me into working o…

I wonder if the better approach would have been to lead engineering with a similar reliance on bending rules and "what you can get away with". This is where multiplying estimates by PI comes in, I think. And possibly some creative division of responsibilities to make it harder for a CEO to officially bully engineering. Totally different job than most engineers would (or could) want to perform- the guy probably wouldn…

Doubtful. I suspect the CEO was the one doing the estimating, so any number you give him is ignored in favour of what he provides instead.

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

#399

Post by seanhunter »

Organisationally it never works to have a group whose only job is to say no to some other group. The incentives are diametrically opposed and as a structure it can’t last.

If you had an AI company and want it to be ethical you have to find a way to make ethics everyone’s responsibility, and have the consequences of poor ethics bite the people who make those bad decisions. If you just outsource it to the ethics group what happens is

1)everyone else thinks they don’t need to worry about ethics

2)the ethics group need to justify their existence so introduce a bunch of guidelines that everyone initially thinks are reasonable but over time people think are increasingly out of touch

3) The ethics group start to “make difficult calls” and say no to things. Initially everyone supports this and feels like the system is working as it should but over time everyone starts to just see them as an obstacle to work around

4)everyone else starts to try to work around what the ethics group says

5)The ethics group grows powerless and disconnected. The people who work around them “get things done” so get promoted etc whereas they only visibly put roadblocks in peoples’ way, so they get sidelined.

6)Eventually they get disbanded with some corporate announcement thanking them for their hard work, thought leadership etc. All that has been achieved is a lot of wasted time and bad blood.

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