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Joint Statement on AI Safety and Openness

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Re: Joint Statement on AI Safety and Openness

#91

Post by hackinthebochs »

jay_kyburz wrote: post #55
jph00 wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is not at all true that "AI is no different than proliferating nuclear weapons". The project manager for the Nuclear Information Project said ( https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/2023/7/3/23779794/artific... ) : """ But what we are seeing too often is a calorie-free media panic where prominent individuals — including scientists and experts we deeply admire — keep showing up in our push alerts because they vaguely…

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.

>but a benevolent AI should be sufficient defense against a hostile AI.

What on earth could this possibly mean in practice? Two elephants fighting is not at all good for the mice below.

Re: Joint Statement on AI Safety and Openness

#92

Post by [deleted] »

mwint wrote: post #19
seydor wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Let's not be so hasty. I m glad to see that MistralAI is signing this letter. their small model is truly amazing, the most useful open source model i ve tried so far. But this can change tomorrow, they may be deemed illegal and disappear from public view, it has happened before. So i'm downloading and saving whatever model i think is great.

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?

[deleted]

Re: Joint Statement on AI Safety and Openness

#93

Post by slowmovintarget »

jmfldn wrote: post #21
jeanloolz wrote: post #12

Leaving AI to a handful of companies is in my opinion the fastest route for inequality and power concentration/centralisation, and this is in a way an AI disaster we should be worrisome. Power corrupts, great power greatly corrupts, this is not entirely new. From where I stand, it looks like the pandora box has already been opened anyway. The era of hugginface and/or Llama2 models is only going to grow from there.

True but there is a really difficult trade off here between a big tech monopoly and decentralised open source anarchy. I say this as a Linux-using FOSS lover, but we need to open this up as much as possible without allowing superpowers to escape into the wrong hands. I guess strong regulation is the key but I'm just handwaving here really. I don't know how the tradeoff should be made. I see great dangers in hyper-pow…

The fallacy you're falling for is that this is "hyper-powerful tech."

All of the AI danger propaganda being spread (see [1], for example) has the purpose of regulatory capture. You could have said all the same things about PageRank if it had come out in 2020. A malicious AI tool is harder to assemble than straight up cracking. The people who can do it are highly-trained professional criminals taking in millions of dollars. Those people aren't going to be stopped because the source is closed. (I'm thinking of that criminal enterprise based in Israel that could manipulate elections, blackmail any politician anywhere in the world... etc. They were using ML tools two years ago to do this.)

The ML tools are already in the wrong hands. The already powerful are trying to create a "moat" for themselves. We need these models and weights to spread far and wide because the people who can't run them will become the have-nots.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38117930

Re: Joint Statement on AI Safety and Openness

#94

Post by hackinthebochs »

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…

I don't need to know how a chess computer will beat me to know that it will beat me. If the only way you will entertain x-risk is to have a specific scenario described to you that you personally find plausible, you will never see any risk coming that isn't just a variation of what you are already familiar with. Do not constrain yourself to considering only that which can be thought up by your limited imagination.

Re: Joint Statement on AI Safety and Openness

#96

Post by PumpkinSpice »

mwint wrote: post #19
seydor wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Let's not be so hasty. I m glad to see that MistralAI is signing this letter. their small model is truly amazing, the most useful open source model i ve tried so far. But this can change tomorrow, they may be deemed illegal and disappear from public view, it has happened before. So i'm downloading and saving whatever model i think is great.

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?

This is really not about an engineer keeping a bootleg model in your basement. It's about the barrier for entry for commercial products. Or the ability to curate improved open-source implementations in the long haul, for that matter - as past a certain scale, this entails creating a non-profit of some sort to pay your bills.

Plus, while it's definitely the case that with sustained interest, old data tends to linger around... the moment the interest wanes, it's gone. I've been on the internet for a while and there are so many hobby sites, forums, and software projects from the early days that are simply gone for good (and not on archive.org).

Re: Joint Statement on AI Safety and Openness

#97

Post by arsome »

ayakang31415 wrote: post #79

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.

Yeah - this stupidity with regulating AI goes hand in hand with regulating cryptography - illegal math is simply not feasible.

Re: Joint Statement on AI Safety and Openness

#98

Post by JW_00000 »

ayakang31415 wrote: post #84
izzydata wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think there is any possibility of the current "AI" suddenly doing anything damaging on its own or anything at all on its own. The worst that I can see happening which is probably already happening is people using it to assist them with various crimes. Such as social engineering using convincing generated voices and photos or even just fake information.

To deal with such case, we already have existing laws to deal with it. My qualms with AI regulation is "why do we need separate AI safety agencies and laws?"

While I agree in a general sense, it might make sense to regulate the tools themselves.

An analogy is gun control laws. Murder is a crime, whether it happens with a gun or without, so in theory there would be no need to regulate guns ("guns don't kill people etc."). But in most countries in the world we still regulate them.

Maybe it makes sense to regulate AI similarly? Requiring that some guardrails are built in to prevent it being used to generate fake information or information that helps to commit crimes. Making sure that it does not leak private information (and being able to prove this somehow). Regulating if and how it can be used as a therapist.

Although I wonder if it isn't too soon still for such regulation.

Re: Joint Statement on AI Safety and Openness

#99

Post by JW_00000 »

chasd00 wrote: post #76
dtx1 wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[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.

I think fake nudes could also be illegal (because you're using someone's image without their consent).

Re: Joint Statement on AI Safety and Openness

#100

Post by superkuh »

mwint wrote: post #19
seydor wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Let's not be so hasty. I m glad to see that MistralAI is signing this letter. their small model is truly amazing, the most useful open source model i ve tried so far. But this can change tomorrow, they may be deemed illegal and disappear from public view, it has happened before. So i'm downloading and saving whatever model i think is great.

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 purpose of regulations like these are not to prevent a thing from happening. They're so that normal behavior is criminalized but not enforced unless you happen to rock the boat some day.
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