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The other half of AI safety

personalaisafety.com

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Re: The other half of AI safety

#71

Post by projectazorian »

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.

Yeah, there are forums and subreddits out there that will validate all sorts of delusions and dysfunctional behavior, and nobody talks about banning them.

LLMs are far less toxic by comparison, but people are all about censorship in this case because they don't like the vibes. If lawyers and activists force the frontier labs to completely lock down their models, people will just go to open weights models that have no protections at all. This is already happening to some extent.

It's also interesting that people are always going after GPT when Claude's guardrails are far less strict. 4o caused OpenAI to overcorrect in my opinion. Again goes to the point that these arguments are more founded in vibes than reality.

Re: The other half of AI safety

#72

Post by dang »

b00ty4breakfast wrote: post #37
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.

[flagged]

> the corporate simp arrives.

Can you please make your substantive points without personal attacks? We'd appreciate it.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Re: The other half of AI safety

#73

Post by projectazorian »

Forgeties79 wrote: post #48
fragmede wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> 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.

You know that mental health is a continuum right? There are a lot of problems people have that fall far short of active suicidal ideation. Maybe you think they should just add them to their journal for discussion at their regularly scheduled therapy session, but the world doesn't work that way. The "ruminating at 3am" headspace can be a productive one and is difficult to access in a normal therapy session.

Not to mention that many people who have actually called suicide hotlines will tell you that they aren't terribly helpful. (edit: not saying that they're always unhelpful, but many people have unhelpful experiences, or have eg. social anxiety that stops them from calling)

Re: The other half of AI safety

#74

Post by thaumasiotes »

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…

Is that a problem we didn't already have? How well was HR doing on hiring before?

Re: The other half of AI safety

#76

Post by falcor84 »

simonw wrote: post #67
falcor84 wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 o…

Yeah, no, I absolutely agree with you that TFA is not an examplar of good writing. But would just argue that the problem has little to do with these snowclone patterns or the rule of 3, and a lot more with the actual substance not fitting the form, and arguably not being substantive at all.

I'm all for rejecting bad writing and bad reasoning, but just wouldn't us as a community to get into the habit of rejecting otherwise good writing just because it's AI-ish.

Re: The other half of AI safety

#77

Post by js8 »

busterarm wrote: post #29
autoexec wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I don't buy that chatGPT is actually doing these users any harm. I have zero doubt that chatgpt is doing users harm. I even give chatgpt a pass on giving vulnerable people, including children, instructions and information about how to kill themselves. One place chatgpt goes over the line is actively encouraging them to go through with suicide. I also don't doubt that it feeds into mania and psychosis. While almost…

Another software engineer friend of mine recently shared with me some details of the crazy situation that he's involved in now. Someone who he is friends with, has worked with across multiple jobs for nearly a decade and briefly was roommates with had some mild psychological issues that he knew about. Within a few months of working daily with AI agents at their current job, this person has gone into full blown AI psy…

I agree it is a concern, but what has ADA to do with it?

Re: The other half of AI safety

#78

Post by actapp80 »

SilverElfin wrote: post #22
autoexec wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I don't buy that chatGPT is actually doing these users any harm. I have zero doubt that chatgpt is doing users harm. I even give chatgpt a pass on giving vulnerable people, including children, instructions and information about how to kill themselves. One place chatgpt goes over the line is actively encouraging them to go through with suicide. I also don't doubt that it feeds into mania and psychosis. While almost…

If it wasn’t ChatGPT but a fiction book, would you feel the author is “doing harm”? Or is the reader doing it to themselves?

If it wasn't chatgpt but a psychiatrist doing it to them, would you feel they are "doing harm"? Should they lose their license?

If it was not a licensed professional, but a friend, shouldn't they go to jail?

Re: The other half of AI safety

#79

Post by js8 »

I really enjoyed Dr.K's videos on AI psychosis, namely:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MW6FMgOzklw

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BzsLbHoNXTs

I would suggest to people, run your ideas through other humans at least as much as you do through AI, to stay grounded. I think there is a risk even if you're using AI in strictly professional capacity (to help you with your job).

Re: The other half of AI safety

#80

Post by totetsu »

Gemini told me just this morning that there are three pillars of cognitive decline related to AI use. - Reduced ability to exert cognitive effort resulting from habitual offloading of tasks. - Deminished Meta-cognitive Self-Trust, due to constantly seeking external validation from AI. - Decline in memory Encoding, and less brain effort is spent processing information. In all seriousness however, I think some of the interesting things to observe in this areas are; the reaction against the word 'Safety' as a whole and its replacement with 'Security'. Safety seeming to have it's roots in like the work of Ralph Nader with automobiles, and Security being some thing that can be manifactured and sold. In this sense I wonder how the discourses of 'Personal AI Safety' fit into past discussions of the offloading of risks resulting form choices of corperations onto individuals. But in the case of LLMs .. it really is the case that what makes it useful is what makes it dangerous. And ultimately because, of the high-dimensionality of the language space they are encoding, it seems impossible to make any technical barrier that can completely cut off access to parts of that space that encode for for example encouraging someone to kill themselves. Things can, and are done, it fine-tuning, pre- and post-filtering, etc, to reduce the readiness for a system to share with a user this kind of output, but all it can ever do is reduce it. Then the question is, who's responsibility is it to make sure that these things are done well.
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