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AI Ethics is being narrowed on purpose, like privacy was

nimishg.substack.com

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Re: AI Ethics is being narrowed on purpose, like privacy was

#51

Post by diggan »

morsecodist wrote: post #49
qualeed wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a pretty good example of what parent comment was referencing, I think. You say " Asimov’s three laws are not a good framework. ", then don't present any arguments to why it is not a good framework. Instead you bring up something separate: the framework can facilitate story writing. It could be good for story writing and a good framework. Those two aren't mutually exclusive things. (I'm not arguing that it is…

I think it's fair to point out that they were never intended to be a good framework for aligning robots and humans. Even in his own stories they lead to problems. They were created precisely to make the point that encoding these things in rules is hard. As for practical problems they are extremely vague. What counts as harm? Could a robot serve me a burger and fries if that isn't good for my health? By the rules they…

> I think it's fair to point out that they were never intended to be a good framework for aligning robots and humans. Even in his own stories they lead to problems. They were created precisely to make the point that encoding these things in rules is hard.

That seems like the biggest point missed here. They're intended to be able to lend themselves to "surprising" conclusions, which is exactly what we don't want, so it seems obvious to me that those laws aren't good enough? That's how I remember the stories at least.

Re: AI Ethics is being narrowed on purpose, like privacy was

#52

Post by tsumnia »

myrmidon wrote: post #18
Isamu wrote: post #8

This has been happening for a long time. I first noticed this with the hand waving dismissals of older concepts like Asimov’s laws. Not a carefully reasoned argument why “not causing harm to a human” is outmoded, but just pushing it aside. I would love to see a good reasoned argument there. No, instead there is Avoiding talking about harm to humans. Just because harm is broad doesn’t get you out of having to talk abo…

I think a big factor in Asimov's laws specifically being sidelined is that the whole process of building AI looks very different from what we pictured back then. Instead of us programming the AIs by feeding it lots of explicit hand-crafted rules/instructions, we're feeding the things with plain data instead, and the resulting behavior is much more black-box, less predictable and less controllable than anticipated. Tr…

All I know is when I asked Grok, Claude, ChatGPT, and Gemini if it believed in the Hogfather, only ChatGPT and Claude said yes.

We gotta work on getting the other models to agree.

Re: AI Ethics is being narrowed on purpose, like privacy was

#53

Post by Sharlin »

qualeed wrote: post #39
Sharlin wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The burden of proof is obviously on anyone who wants to argue that the three laws are, in fact, a good solid framework for robot ethics. It's pretty astonishing that the three laws are taken by anyone as being some sort of canonical default framework. Asimov was not in the "try to come with a good framework for robot ethics" business. He was in the business of trying to come up with some simple, intuitive idea that d…

> The burden of proof is [...] Sometimes we can just talk about things without having to pretend we're in a court of law or defending our phd thesis. Original commenter wasn't asking for anyone to prove anything, or trying to prove anything themselves. They just observed that some conversations are hand-waved away.

Given the total vagueness of the three laws idea and how Asimov came up with the idea because he wanted something easily broken to be used as a plot device, the perfectly reasonable stance is to not take them seriously a priori. Anyone is totally within their rights to think about them more and present for discussion some more solid ethical framework based on them. But I'd rather AI ethicists focused on frameworks that had some finite probability of actually working.

Given that we've been thinking about ethics for thousands of years, and haven't really made much progress, I think it's pretty clear that anything that can be condensed into three sentences is not a workable model.

Re: AI Ethics is being narrowed on purpose, like privacy was

#54

Post by mathiaspoint »

akakajzbzbbx wrote: post #44

Humans can’t agree on what is ethical / safe, so I don’t get people trying to apply it to AI. Am I missing something big here? Anytime I see discussion framed as “ethics” my brain swaps ethics with “rules I think are good”.

Yeah a lot of people who are either malicious or just bad at philosophy got involved and now everyone thinks AI ethics/AI safety is a joke at best. These kinds of people are surprisingly bad at learning from mistakes like this and will probably double down, turning both the public and industry against them.

Re: AI Ethics is being narrowed on purpose, like privacy was

#55

Post by nancyminusone »

Isamu wrote: post #8

This has been happening for a long time. I first noticed this with the hand waving dismissals of older concepts like Asimov’s laws. Not a carefully reasoned argument why “not causing harm to a human” is outmoded, but just pushing it aside. I would love to see a good reasoned argument there. No, instead there is Avoiding talking about harm to humans. Just because harm is broad doesn’t get you out of having to talk abo…

[flagged]

Re: AI Ethics is being narrowed on purpose, like privacy was

#56

Post by nisten »

The problem with AI ethics, safety and to a smaller extent, privacy groups is that the priority of the work/message is not placed on the practicality of solving the problem, or i.e. calculating improving affordability of food/housing, but is placed,as evident on this article too, on the lack of "governance structures".

In other words the priority of the work is to get these types of people into positions where they don't do any work.

At least with privacy groups you do get here and there some practical advice on using ublock origin or more rarely on how to install a blocklist from https://someonewhocares.org/hosts/, but with AI ethics & safety orgs... well lets put it this way.

I have yet to meet a single AI safety person that knows how to rename a file in linux.

God forbid we have a rogue AI-worm shutting down all servers & BGP routers while these types of people were in charge of safety, they'll be in the way of anyone even fixing it. They can't even get a simple safety benchmark working on lm_eval-harness. They're great at lecturing you why they shouldn't need that.

And this is the key issue with AI Ethics. It's the refusal to work at the problem constructively, and get the most skilled people possible to actually make the damn benchmarks to work, to rank models on the understanding of human rights, to list every current violation and abuse of humans in every single country without exception and to make practical plans on what to do when systems go rogue. Even if they're not technical they could be making the dataset in a csv in excel for that and making it public domain accessible.

Instead we get the most depressed, leechy-office-worker types complaining about how it's all over.

Now back to work, move it.

Re: AI Ethics is being narrowed on purpose, like privacy was

#57

Post by bayindirh »

dale_glass wrote: post #34
bayindirh wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Personal styles are dime a dozen and of far lesser importance than you think. Try imitating Mickey Mouse, Dilbert, Star Wars, Hello Kitty, XKCD, you name it. Randall will possibly laugh at you, but a legal company which happens to draw cartoons won't be amused and come after you in any way they can. > Professionals will draw in any style... Yep, after calling and getting permission and possibly paying some fees to…

> Try imitating Mickey Mouse, Dilbert, Star Wars, Hello Kitty, XKCD, you name it. Those are not styles, they're characters for the most part. You absolutely can draw heavy inspiration from existing properties, mostly so long you avoid touching the actual characters. Like D&D has a lot of Tolkien in it, and I believe the estate is quite litigious. You can't put Elrond in a D&D game, but you absolutely can have "Elf" a…

> Those are not styles, they're characters for the most part. (Emphasis mine)

While I know that styles are not copyrightable for good-faith reasons, massive abuse of good-faith is a good siren for regulation in that area.

> You absolutely can draw heavy inspiration from existing properties, mostly so long you avoid touching the actual characters.

From what I understood, it's mostly allowed for homage and (un)intentional narrowing of creative landscape. Not for ripping people off.

> For style imitation, it's long been a thing to make more anime-ish animation in the west, and anime itself came from Disney.

But all are done in tradition of cross-pollination, there was no ill-intentions, until now.

After OpenAI ripped Studio Ghibli, and things got blurred. It's not my interpretation, either [0] [1].

Then there's Universal and Disney's lawsuits against Midjourney.While these are framed as character-copying, when you read between the lines, style appropriation is also something being strongly balked at [2].

So things are not as clear cut as before, because a company stepped on the toes of another one. Small fish might get some benefits as a side-effect.

Addenda: Even OpenAI power-walked away from mocking Studio Ghibli to "maybe we shouldn't do that" [3].

[0]: https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2025/05/opena...

[1]: https://futurism.com/lawyer-studio-ghibli-legal-action-opena...

[2]: https://variety.com/vip/how-the-midjourney-lawsuit-impacts-g...

[3]: https://www.eweek.com/news/openai-studio-ghibli-ai-art-copyr...

Re: AI Ethics is being narrowed on purpose, like privacy was

#58

Post by Sharlin »

jordanb wrote: post #35
danaris wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Asimov's Three Laws of Robotics were explicitly designed to be a good basis for fiction that shows how Asimov's Three Laws of Robotics break down . Suggesting they be used as a basis for actual AI ethics is...well, it's not quite to the level of creating the Torment Nexus from acclaimed sci-fi novel "Don't Create the Torment Nexus", but it's pretty darn close.

It's kinda hilarious that people are explicitly trying to build a future based on (mostly dystopian) scifi, which was the point of the torment nexus thing. But then when scifi argues for constraints on technology the argument is "those are just stories."

If you think Asimov proposed the three laws as anything like a workable constraint framework of some sort, you're hilariously mistaken and probably haven't read a single Robot book in your life. Asimov came up with them BECAUSE they were a) simple, b) vague, and c) broken. BECAUSE he wanted to write stories about all the specific ways they were broken.

Re: AI Ethics is being narrowed on purpose, like privacy was

#59

Post by pjc50 »

nisten wrote: post #56

The problem with AI ethics, safety and to a smaller extent, privacy groups is that the priority of the work/message is not placed on the practicality of solving the problem, or i.e. calculating improving affordability of food/housing, but is placed,as evident on this article too, on the lack of "governance structures". In other words the priority of the work is to get these types of people into positions where they d…

> to list every current violation and abuse of humans in every single country without exception

Couldn't you just ask the model that?

Joking of course, but this is in and of itself an intractable problem. Do you mean "restate the principles of human rights", which is a pretty small subset of law which is in turn a small subset of ethics, or do you mean actually get out there and enumerate and name every single person having their human rights violated? Not only is that an absurd amount of work it's politically impossible.

Re: AI Ethics is being narrowed on purpose, like privacy was

#60

Post by financetechbro »

real_marcfawzi wrote: post #27

[dead]

Thanks for sharing. I think it’s really cool what you’re building. I saw the roadmap but curious about when you expect to hit Phase 3 & 4, and what the future looks like for the business (I.e. do you plan to raise $ or future prod expansions)
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