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The other half of AI safety

personalaisafety.com

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Re: The other half of AI safety

#61

Post by godelski »

api wrote: post #15
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.

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.

There are very few things in the world that are 100% good or 100% bad. Everything is a billion shades of gray. Even that is too simple because there's so many dimensions to every problem. I think you're simplifying beyond the state of usefulness. I'm not suggesting you shouldn't simplify, but it is just as easy to over simplify as it is to over complexify.

Re: The other half of AI safety

#62

Post by Rekindle8090 »

vkou wrote: post #14
ianbutler wrote: post #8

OpenAI has 900 million weekly active users. So around 0.01% are having problems. That's actually way less than population level measures for the same symptoms on a bigger percentage of people relative to the US on just suicidal ideation alone. https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/74/wr/mm7412a4.htm

I'm pretty sure that ~100% of those 700 million people will have a bad, utterly dehumanizing experience when they will next be looking for a job, because OpenAI is heavily used by HR. That's the problem with AI safety. Not in voluntary usage, but in involuntary usage, where someone with power over you will use it against you, it does something incredibly stupid and you have no recourse, no appeal, no awareness of wha…

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Re: The other half of AI safety

#63

Post by godelski »

stingraycharles wrote: post #10
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.

I think this is the right take, and this is genuinely something that we as a society as a whole need to find a way to deal with. I don’t know where AI is going to stand compared to the invention of, say, the Internet, but it’s going to cause a lot of change in society, in so many ways. As always, it’s usually the people themselves that are the problem. For me, I’m personally more terrified what deepfakes and politica…

  > For me, I’m personally more terrified what deepfakes and political manipulation / misinformation is going to do
Isn't this a significant part of what creates AI induced psychosis? I'm not sure why you treat these as orthogonal rather than coupled. Just look how often people use Grok to validate or confirm misinformation on Twitter. That's happening with other AI and other social media too, just not as visibly.

Re: The other half of AI safety

#64

Post by The_Blade »

swatcoder wrote: post #51
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…

Well, then maybe you can't scale it as a free service with self-serve signups. Maybe you need to gate who you allow to use it and pace how intensely they can engage. Or maybe you need to look for other solutions. Yielding to "not feasible at scale" is exactly how we ended up with a lot of today's most pressing and almost intractible problems, from social media's ills to person and society straight through to enshitti…

> ...straight through to enshittification and non-repairability.

funny as "enshittification" was the topic of a 99% Invisible pod just a few days ago and I also was listening to the new Stewart Brand book that Stripe published. i fixed a Norwegian desk I bought a decade ago on Valencia. happily not feasible at scale but neither was how i broke it :)

Re: The other half of AI safety

#65

Post by Yokohiii »

avazhi wrote: post #43

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 probl…

I agree that society has to stand up for it. But big tech is doing well to mitigate it.

Re: The other half of AI safety

#66

Post by Yokohiii »

simonw wrote: post #25
falcor84 wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why is it a red flag? How is it different from any other purely stylistic rules such as Strunk and White's prohibitions against split infinitives and the passive voice, which we've left far behind us? Why shouldn't people just write however feels natural to them as long as the message is clear?

Because LLMs use it constantly , to the point that it sets my teeth on edge and instantly makes me question if reading the piece is worth my time.

Idk, I remember that writing pattern from GPT, but not from Gemini.

Re: The other half of AI safety

#67

Post by simonw »

falcor84 wrote: post #58
simonw wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because LLMs use it constantly , to the point that it sets my teeth on edge and instantly makes me question if reading the piece is worth my time.

But LLMs were literally evolved via RLHF to write in a way that humans find agreeable. Can't we just move past this aversion and accept "writing like an LLM" as generally good writing style advice?

The reason this particular quirk annoys me so much is that it isn't good writing advice.

Consider the two examples from this article (which may well have been human-written for all I know):

"These numbers come from OpenAI itself. There is no independent audit, no time series, no disclosed methodology, so we have no idea..."

No time series? That's non-sensical to me, it feels like that's there just to fill the quota of three things. Plus why would we assume an "independent audit" until told otherwise?

Then in the weird table, for "Institutional infrastructure" against "Personal AI safety":

"Scattered across psychology, HCI, education, and clinical informatics departments. No dedicated institute, no named fellowship, no equivalent job board."

Again, "no X" in a pattern or 3. And non-sensical - why would the fellowship be named?

It's word salad, there to fill a three-nos quota.

Re: The other half of AI safety

#68

Post by godelski »

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…

  > is not feasible at that scale
I want to use an analogy here. The same arguments are often made about cleaning up environmental damage. So either make the companies doing the polluting pay for the costs themselves or if we care so much about them being profitable then we subsidize them by paying for those cleanup efforts out of taxes. Doing nothing is a worse form of subsidy as it not only costs more (in literal dollars) but shoulders that costs onto the people with the least ability to pay for it. The problem is you're treating "doing nothing" as having no cost. It has a high cost, but the cost is also highly distributed.

So if it is not scalable, then why subsidize them? This is literally a tragedy of the commons situation. Personally, I'm in favor of making the people who make a mess clean up that mess. I really don't understand why this is such a contentious opinion.

Re: The other half of AI safety

#69

Post by ianbutler »

Yokohiii wrote: post #60
ianbutler wrote: post #8

OpenAI has 900 million weekly active users. So around 0.01% are having problems. That's actually way less than population level measures for the same symptoms on a bigger percentage of people relative to the US on just suicidal ideation alone. https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/74/wr/mm7412a4.htm

The numbers are inflated considering the topic. There is a lot of anon, api and enterprise traffic that doesn't play any role in this. If you also account for "better search experience" users, then the numbers will probably drop massively. So the question is how many users engage in intimate conversations at all.

https://openai.com/index/scaling-ai-for-everyone/

Nope that number is strictly about ChatGPT

"ChatGPT is where people start with AI, with more than 900M weekly active users, and we now have more than 50 million consumer subscribers."

People who go there and chat with gpt for search are definitely normal users. Just because you don't like the numbers doesn't mean you get to torture them.

Re: The other half of AI safety

#70

Post by Yokohiii »

ianbutler wrote: post #69
Yokohiii wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The numbers are inflated considering the topic. There is a lot of anon, api and enterprise traffic that doesn't play any role in this. If you also account for "better search experience" users, then the numbers will probably drop massively. So the question is how many users engage in intimate conversations at all.

https://openai.com/index/scaling-ai-for-everyone/ Nope that number is strictly about ChatGPT "ChatGPT is where people start with AI, with more than 900M weekly active users, and we now have more than 50 million consumer subscribers." People who go there and chat with gpt for search are definitely normal users. Just because you don't like the numbers doesn't mean you get to torture them.

I did not say they are not about GPT.
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