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Joint Statement on AI Safety and Openness

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Re: Joint Statement on AI Safety and Openness

#71

Post by smokel »

pdonis wrote: post #41
skybrian wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I disagree entirely. We shouldn't be hoping for a complex ecosystem of small, shady companies nobody ever heard of, like happened with ad networks [1]. Or worse, a scam-filled ecosystem like cryptocurrency. Or worse, an underground ecosystem like the criminals who share cracked passwords and credit card numbers. Big companies are easier to regulate. [1] https://lumapartners.com/lumascapes/

> Big companies are easier to regulate. But the problem isn't regulating the big companies, or the smaller companies, or underground entities. The problem is state-level adversaries like China who might misuse a technology, whether it's AI or anything else. Such adversaries can't be regulated by laws or executive orders or UN declarations; they have proven that many times in the past. The only way to control them is…

One could also try to be friendly towards strangers, and not have them be their adversaries in the first place.

Re: Joint Statement on AI Safety and Openness

#72

Post by tsurba »

hyeonwho22 wrote: post #29
CamperBob2 wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

AI is no different than proliferating nuclear weapons I mean, once the discussion goes THIS far off the rails of reality, where do we go from here?

Why not? It has already been shown that AI can be (mis)used to identify good candidates for chemical weapons. [1] Next in the pipeline is obviously some religious nut (who would not otherwise have the capability) using it to design a virus which doesn't set off alarms at the gene synthesis / custom construct companies, and then learning to transfect it. More banally, state actors can already use open source models to…

Essentially you are advocating against information being more efficiently available. Come on.

It’s true we are fucked if bioweapons become easy to make, but that is not a question of ”AI”.

Re: Joint Statement on AI Safety and Openness

#73

Post by chasd00 »

mrangle wrote: post #57

Statements to the effect that AI will be controlled for safety are pretentious. As well as being a characteristic of only this early time. The premise of AI danger, in the real sense of the word, has always been rooted in the seemingly accurate logic that it won't be controllable. If anything, restrictions on any scale only allow for compeitition to catch up to an surpass it on that scale. Restrict an AI to be polite…

>Statements to the effect that AI will be controlled for safety are pretentious.

and "safety" is such a loaded term these days. What exactly do they mean by safety? Prevention of launching ICBMs or prevention of not using the gender neutral pronoun "they"?

Re: Joint Statement on AI Safety and Openness

#74

Post by mrangle »

chasd00 wrote: post #73
mrangle wrote: post #57

Statements to the effect that AI will be controlled for safety are pretentious. As well as being a characteristic of only this early time. The premise of AI danger, in the real sense of the word, has always been rooted in the seemingly accurate logic that it won't be controllable. If anything, restrictions on any scale only allow for compeitition to catch up to an surpass it on that scale. Restrict an AI to be polite…

>Statements to the effect that AI will be controlled for safety are pretentious. and "safety" is such a loaded term these days. What exactly do they mean by safety? Prevention of launching ICBMs or prevention of not using the gender neutral pronoun "they"?

I think they mean to borrow from the fear of the former in order to apply it to the latter in practice, when using the term in the abstract. At least when speaking to the public.

But not to worry. For better or worse, in short time these concerns will seem like they were a foolish delusion. If not because of their questionable morality, then because they were so wildly unrealistic in application.

That's not to say that AI safety won't be a topic for decades to come or longer, simply because it confers political and harassment power. Even if ineffective in terms of AI in practice.

Re: Joint Statement on AI Safety and Openness

#75

Post by chasd00 »

Mistletoe wrote: post #27
CamperBob2 wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

AI is no different than proliferating nuclear weapons I mean, once the discussion goes THIS far off the rails of reality, where do we go from here?

Can someone outline how AI could actually harm us directly? I don’t believe for a second sci-fi novel nonsense about self-replicating robots that we can’t unplug. My Roomba can’t even do its very simple task without getting caught on the rug. I don’t know of any complicated computing cluster or machine that exists that wouldn’t implode without human intervention on an almost daily level. If we are talking about AI st…

> Can someone outline how AI could actually harm us directly?

at best, maybe it adds a new level of sophistication to phishing attacks. That's all i can think of. Terminators walking the streets murdering grandma? I just don't see it.

what I think is most likely is a handful of companies trying to sell enterprise on ML which has been going on since forever. YouTubers making even funnier "Presidents discuss anime" vids and 4chan doing what 4chan does but faster.

Re: Joint Statement on AI Safety and Openness

#76

Post by chasd00 »

dtx1 wrote: post #17
Pannoniae wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"bad" AI? you mean.... not overcensored AI? the "mainstream" offerings are utterly restricted, you can't even generate porn with it. channers play an important part in driving innovation and keeping the thought police in check...

[flagged]

aside from simulated child porn which has already been proven illegal.. i think. what exactly is the problem? If you're asking bigtech to be the morality police it's not going to work. Actually, i would love to seem them attempt this. A unified moral code for all AI globally. If they pull that off i'd ask them for a unified global religion next.

Re: Joint Statement on AI Safety and Openness

#78

Post by kenan_warren »

sillysaurusx wrote: post #24
mwint wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Genuine question - does it seem plausible that a few GB of content could truly be wiped off the Internet? I’m not in the piracy scene, but my impression was they routinely pass full res movies around the Internet without much barrier to discovering and downloading them, at least to technically competent users. Is that still true?

The Pile was. It’s still available but no one will touch it, mostly due to books3. The difference is that a few people with lots of resources take on legal risk. In the piracy example many people with few resources take on risk, which works out since no one wants to sue people with no money.

The Pile is still used to train LLMs and it's still very much available on the net. I agree it's a risk to train your models on the dataset until the legal implications are worked out, but it doesn't seem to be stopping people.

Re: Joint Statement on AI Safety and Openness

#79

Post by ayakang31415 »

I still don't have any sense of urgency to create and to regulate AI safety protocols. AI that we call is just software with tuned parameters. You input data into it, and it does some computation on chips, and it spits out data. That is all it needs. My sense is that no harm can come from it, but some harm can be inflicted by people who use it.

Re: Joint Statement on AI Safety and Openness

#80

Post by jay_kyburz »

chakalakasp wrote: post #70
jay_kyburz wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Furthermore, there is little or no defense against a full scale nuclear attack, but a benevolent AI should be sufficient defense against a hostile AI. I think the true fear is that in an AI age, humans are not "useful" and the market and economy will look very different. With AI growing our food, clothing us, building us houses, and entertaining us, humans don't really have anything to do all day.

In what other sphere of tech does that apply? "Hackers aren't a problem because we have cybersecurity engineers". And yet somehow entire enterprises and governments are occasionally taken down. What prevents issues in redteam/blueteam is having teams invested in the survivability of the people their organization is working for. That breaks down a bit when all it takes is one biomedical researcher whose wife just left…

Yes, but the AI that is watching what every Biomedical researcher is doing will alert the AI counselors and support robots and they will take the flawed human into care. Perhaps pair them up with a nice new wife.

Can you imagine how much harder it would be to protect against hackers if the only cybersecurity engineers were employed by the government.

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