AI Ethics is being narrowed on purpose, like privacy was • Hacker News Board

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

#61

Post by pjc50 » Thu, Aug 07, 2025, 2:03 PM UTC

scotty79 wrote: post #22

myrmidon wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

It might make a comeback when we finally get good at teachning AI what's real and what's imagined and also logical reasoining. I think it does moral evaluation of actions mostly well already (bacause humans are not great at it anyways). Then a rule like "don't harm humans" might suffice.

The AI has a huge problem with knowledge of the real because, unlike humans struggling with the question of whether the universe might be a simulation or we might be a brain in a jar dreaming that we're human, the AI is a simulation and it is a brain in a jar. It cannot prod the real universe to determine what's real.

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

#62

Post by micromacrofoot » Thu, Aug 07, 2025, 2:05 PM UTC

Unfortunately I think it is too late. The time to make any sort of rules around AI ethics has already passed, the US has AI so embedded into its economy now that any legislation with teeth is practically impossible. Companies and people running them are not on our side, or even humanity's side, they're on their own.

It's staggering how quickly this has happened.

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

#63

Post by pjc50 » Thu, Aug 07, 2025, 2:06 PM UTC

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”.

The "human alignment problem" has not been solved and is probably unsolveable.

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

#64

Post by dale_glass » Thu, Aug 07, 2025, 2:11 PM UTC

bayindirh wrote: post #57

dale_glass wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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)intenti…

> 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.

Nothing having to do with "good faith", but that style isn't really definable. There's thousands of artists that produce very similar outputs.

Also it'd be very stupid, because suddenly it'd turn out that if there's two people that draw nearly identically, one could sue the other even if that happened by chance.

> After OpenAI ripped Studio Ghibli, and things got blurred.

Nothing blurry about it. OpenAI is within full legal right to do it. It's kinda in bad taste, that's about it. Anyone can do it. Disney could make a Ghibli style movie if they ever wanted to.

I'm not sure why all the drama, because who even cares? The reason why I watched Ghibli movies wasn't ever about the particular looks.

> 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

You better hope it stays at characters, or we're going to have a mess of lawsuits of people and organizations suing each other because they draw eyebrows this particular way. I fail to see why is that at all desirable.

And of course the big corporations will come on top of that.

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

#65

Post by sensanaty » Thu, Aug 07, 2025, 2:12 PM UTC

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…

Isn't this worse, though? You said it yourself, it's an even blacker black box that nobody truly understands. And we even have an attempt at setting rules for these things akin to Asimov's laws, those "system prompts" that people are fascinated by are testament to that and they tend to be THOUSANDS of statements long (and they're not very good at following them).

People often misunderstand Asimov's laws, the entire point of the laws and the stories they're set in was that you can't just throw a simple "Don't hurt people" clause at a black box like AI and expect good results. You first have to define "Don't", then you have to define "hurt" and perhaps the hardest of all is you have to define "people". And I mean really define it, to the smallest most minute detail of what exactly all those words mean. Otherwise you very quickly run into funny, tragic and even contradictory situations, and those situations are endlessly unique.

Is feeding grossly unhealthy food to a starving person harm? Perhaps not, you can argue it's better to eat something unhealthy than to starve. What about feeding someone on the brink of a cardiac arrest that same meal? Now what about all the other gray areas involved here, you have to define every single possible situation in which an unhealthy meal might affect someone.

It's kinda funny, because it really is almost prophetic considering it's a story written quite a long time before we were even close to it being a reality...

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

#66

Post by johnecheck » Thu, Aug 07, 2025, 2:14 PM UTC

nancyminusone wrote: post #55

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]

Don't speak for us all. Just because something is difficult to quantify doesn't mean that it's not worth talking about and studying.

While I agree that the fields of sociology and psychology have real flaws, implying that we'd be better off if everyone in those fields were flipping burgers is absurd.

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

#67

Post by kyoob » Thu, Aug 07, 2025, 2:17 PM UTC

Starts so strong with "governance structures, accountability, how their data is used, jobs being lost, etc," refutes that what we mean is some sci-fi scenario when we ask about ethics, and then ends with a sci-fi scenario: "...how do we know it will do what we want it to, and not try to subvert us and… take over the world? How do we know it will stay on humanity’s side?"

Wait, go back to the jobs! What was that about accountability?

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

#68

Post by matusp » Thu, Aug 07, 2025, 2:18 PM UTC

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…

There are tons of highly technical papers being published about this topic. Yeah, there are some people without tech knowledge working on this as well, but I would expect them to be a minority, although they are probably very visible.

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

#69

Post by nisten » Thu, Aug 07, 2025, 2:20 PM UTC

pjc50 wrote: post #59

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…

Sure yes that too, all of it. Why not. Labs process datasets with trillions of tokens.

The whole point was that these people just complain and make smartass excuses instead of getting any actual work done.

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

#70

Post by Workaccount2 » Thu, Aug 07, 2025, 2:28 PM UTC

I have wondered for a while now if it happens to be that the less safe guards and thought policing you do, the more capable and generalizable the model becomes. Like "bad" parameters are actually critical for forming the whole picture necessary for ingenuity and advancement.

Effectively making it so that whoever has the lowest safeguards has the most capable model.