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The other half of AI safety

personalaisafety.com

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Re: The other half of AI safety

#41

Post by swatcoder »

Legend2440 wrote: post #7

I don't buy that chatGPT is actually doing these users any harm. I think openAI is doing the best they reasonably can with a very difficult class of users, whose problems are neither their fault nor within their power to fix.

Why?

Why do you not buy it and why do you think OpenAI is doing the best they reasonably can? Do you have reasons, or is that just something your gut tells you?

They're a new, fast-moving company exploring a completely new technology domain. They're facing existential competition and a ticking clock to make good against unprecedented investment. They have a countless competing priorities and are still discovering the capabilities and consequences of their research, product, and business choices every day.

How do you get from there to "the best they reasonably can" and "nor within their power to fix"? Those feel like very conclusive answers for a field, and business, that's about as far on the frontier as anything we've seen in decades.

Re: The other half of AI safety

#42

Post by CobrastanJorji »

Gigachad wrote: post #34
nojs wrote: post #28

> Every week, somewhere between 1.2 and 3 million ChatGPT users, roughly the population of a small country, show signals of psychosis, mania, suicidal planning, or unhealthy emotional dependence on the model. > Why is mental-health crisis not a gating category, the kind where the conversation stops, full stop, and the user is routed to a human? Well, obviously “routing to a human” is not feasible at that scale. And c…

Tech companies will pull trillions of dollars out of their asses when the problem is boosting ad revenue or automating people out of a job. But when asked to deal with the crisis they invented and dumped on society the answer is “that’s impossible, doesn’t scale”

Figure a "mental health crisis" human conversation takes 30 minutes. Three million incidents per week would require 37,500 qualified mental health counselors on the phones working a 40 hour shift that week. Figure they make $75k/year each. You're now spending $3 billion per year on crisis response, and you're employing like 10% of all of the health counselors in the US. And all you're providing is 30 minute chats.

Re: The other half of AI safety

#43

Post by avazhi »

If you are using LLMs for emotional support or social interactions, you’ve got personal problems and that isn’t on the LLM provider to babysit. Same with people who unironically pay for OnlyFans or whatever.

I don’t even work in tech and I detest the Facebook/Zuckerbergs of the world but it’s obnoxious and trite seeing tech companies get scapegoated for what are ultimately social and societal problems, not tech problems.

As a solution it’d prob make sense to start with how disconnected most modern families are in terms of support and accountability.

From ChatGPT to Instagram, tech companies follow the contours of how society already operates.

Re: The other half of AI safety

#44

Post by gAI »

zdragnar wrote: post #31
api wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If anything, my use of AI (admittedly not as a companion or a psychologist) suggests that it is on the whole significantly less toxic than the seething cess pit of social media. AI is positively affirming by comparison.

That's why it is dangerous to some- it is an enabler, and will feed things that should not be fed. Social media is like this too. They can both be bad.

“What you focus on grows, what you think about expands, and what you dwell upon determines your destiny.” - Robin Sharma

Social media became the attention economy, and the transformer automated attention.

Re: The other half of AI safety

#45

Post by b65e8bee43c2ed0 »

the big labs could crank up their (brand) safety dials to the point where their chatbots give GOODY-2 responses to everything beyond PG13, and guess what? there are a hundred other services available, built upon Chinese models 5-10% behind Western SOTA.

it is no longer 2023. let go of whatever delusions you might hold about unopenining this Pandora's box.

Re: The other half of AI safety

#46

Post by fragmede »

asdff wrote: post #33
ngruhn wrote: post #4

The bad cases make headlines. But I think it's quite possible that AI is helping a lot of people in distress. Many people are uncomfortable opening up to humans, or have no one to talk to, or can't afford to fork over whatever-hourly-rate a therapist takes.

Therapy is cheap (as in like $10)/free with insurance. However there are still 10 states that have not expanded medicaid after the ACA, mostly in the south. But also, to suggest these people are not receiving therapy is not always the case. Talk therapy is just that, talking to someone on ones problems to learn about them, their triggers, determining coping mechanisms to move forward with one's life. People might ins…

ChatGPT it's available at 3am when you're in crisis and you don't have to fit into its busy schedule.

Re: The other half of AI safety

#47

Post by fourthark »

timf34 wrote: post #13

I sympathize with the piece, evaluating how LLMs interact with mentally vulnerable users is something I've been actively working on: https://vigil-eval.com/ The biggest observation so far is that the latest models are night and day from LLMs from even 6 months ago (from OpenAI + Anthropic, Google is still very poor!)

Interesting use of evals.

Might help interpretation to say on the front page that it's a five point scale with 0 (or 1?) being the safest score. This can be picked up from colors and the bars in the individual reports, but it takes a minute to figure it out.

Re: The other half of AI safety

#48

Post by Forgeties79 »

fragmede wrote: post #46
asdff wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Therapy is cheap (as in like $10)/free with insurance. However there are still 10 states that have not expanded medicaid after the ACA, mostly in the south. But also, to suggest these people are not receiving therapy is not always the case. Talk therapy is just that, talking to someone on ones problems to learn about them, their triggers, determining coping mechanisms to move forward with one's life. People might ins…

ChatGPT it's available at 3am when you're in crisis and you don't have to fit into its busy schedule.

ChatGPT is not a human being, let alone a licensed therapist. You don’t call a therapist at 3 in the morning. You go to a hospital. If you are literally about to kill yourself Sam Altman is not your answer.

Hell call a crisis hotline. Talk to a person. Not a potential (bot) enabler.

Re: The other half of AI safety

#49

Post by Gigachad »

CobrastanJorji wrote: post #42
Gigachad wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Tech companies will pull trillions of dollars out of their asses when the problem is boosting ad revenue or automating people out of a job. But when asked to deal with the crisis they invented and dumped on society the answer is “that’s impossible, doesn’t scale”

Figure a "mental health crisis" human conversation takes 30 minutes. Three million incidents per week would require 37,500 qualified mental health counselors on the phones working a 40 hour shift that week. Figure they make $75k/year each. You're now spending $3 billion per year on crisis response, and you're employing like 10% of all of the health counselors in the US. And all you're providing is 30 minute chats.

Mark Zuckerberg can spend $80B on the failed metaverse experiment, but can't spare some relative pocket change on solving the psychosis issue his products caused.

Re: The other half of AI safety

#50

Post by mbgerring »

“AI safety” as it’s understood today is an entire faith-based belief system, incubated in a cult-like community with a high propensity for drug abuse and mental illness, over more than a decade.

The reason that real-world harms caused by AI can’t get a hearing in what is now the mainstream AI safety community is that these harms were never part of the core tenets of the cult.

Best of luck to anyone working on reality-based AI harm reduction, you have many hard battles in front of you.

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