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AI Ethics is being narrowed on purpose, like privacy was

nimishg.substack.com

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

#91

Post by pessimizer »

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…

> I have yet to meet a single AI safety person that knows how to rename a file in linux.

I don't know if instead of saying "safety" here you meant to say ethics, or if you're using "safety" in this sentence just to generally refer to "AI ethics, safety, and to a smaller extent privacy."

If either of those are true, that's weird because the only person in AI ethics most people know is Timnit Gebru, because she got fired and it made the papers. She has a BA and MA in electrical engineering, and her father was also an electrical engineer. After that, she went on to a PhD in computer vision with Fei-Fei Li (Imagenet) as her advisor.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timnit_Gebru#Early_life_and_ed...

I guarantee you she knows how to rename a file in Linux.

If, instead, you were referring to "safety" specifically, I'd like to understand how you're making the distinction.

edit:

> Gebru joined Apple as an intern while at Stanford, working in their hardware division making circuitry for audio components, and was offered a full-time position the following year. Of her work as an audio engineer, her manager told Wired she was "fearless", and well-liked by her colleagues. During her tenure at Apple, Gebru became more interested in building software, namely computer vision that could detect human figures. She went on to develop signal processing algorithms for the first iPad. At the time, she said she did not consider the potential use for surveillance, saying "I just found it technically interesting."

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

#92

Post by number6 »

datadrivenangel wrote: post #88
dwohnitmok wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I have yet to meet a single AI safety person that knows how to rename a file in linux. You are meeting very few AI safety people then. A significant fraction of the AI safety people I've run into can build and train an LLM from scratch (without AI assistance FWIW), let alone have a grasp of basic command-line operations.

Where are you running into these unicorn AI safety people?

CEN and CENELEC

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

#93

Post by soiltype »

Workaccount2 wrote: post #70

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.

Yes, safety is a limiter on development velocity one way or another.

I don't know whether "plotting harm" is a critical ability for passing some invisible threshold in not-well-defined intelligence. But building AI to avoid being harmful is incentivized against because it takes resources away from building AI to be more capable.

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

#94

Post by SpicyLemonZest »

bo1024 wrote: post #24
mitthrowaway2 wrote: post #6

It seems to me that this article is the one prevaricating between "ethics" and "safety". The latter is of course a narrow subset of the former, as there are many ethics issues that are not safety issues.

You might not be aware of the context (actually the author of the article might not either). There has in fact been a big push by major AI companies to focus on quote safety unquote while marginalizing (not citing, giving attention to, etc) people focusing on what those companies call quote ethics unquote. For example, from Timnit Gebru: > The fact that they call themselves "AI Safety" and call us "AI Ethics" is very…

There has been a big push by major AI companies to focus on "safety", which they understand to refer to the novel types of harm that a powerful AI model might cause.

It's true that some people are confident there's no such novelty, and it's impossible for an AI system to cause a problem which can't be analyzed within the frameworks we've developed for human misbehavior. Some of those people do say that if you don't agree with them it must be because of "eugenics". But both of these positions make so little sense to me that I'm not sure how to engage with them.

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

#95

Post by BeFlatXIII »

bayindirh wrote: post #3
i_dont_know_ wrote: post #2

I keep seeing "AI ethics" being redefined to focus on fictional problems instead of real-world ones, so I wrote a little post on it.

Great little post. Congrats. Also there's the ethics of scraping the whole internet and claiming that it's all fair use, because the other scenario is a little too inconvenient for all the companies involved. P.S.: I expect a small thread telling me that it's indeed fair use, because models "learn and understand just like humans", and "models are hugely transformative" (even though some licenses say "no derivatives w…

I'm a radicalized intellectual property abolitionist. The ethical issue with scraping is the DDoS-like nature it has on smaller sites and running up the bandwith bill for medium hosts. There's no individual compnay at fault for the flood. Rather, it's an emergent result of each startup attempting to train data that's ever so slightly more up-to-date or broad than its competitors. If they shared a common corpus that updated once per month, scraping traffic would be buried in organic human visitors instead of the other way around. Let them compete on training methodology, not a race for scraping.

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

#96

Post by BeFlatXIII »

bayindirh wrote: post #25
JackFr wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

IP is a pragmatic legal fiction, created to reward developers of creative and innovative thought, so we get more of it. It’s not a natural law. As such fair use is whatever the courts say it is.

Then let's abolish all of them. Patents, copyrights, anything. Let's mail Getty, Elsevier, car manufacturers, chemical plants, software development giants and small startups that everything they have has no protection whatsoever... Let us hear what they think... I'm for the small fish here, people who put things out because of pure enjoyment, waiting nothing but a little respect for the legal documents they attach to…

> Then let's abolish all of them. Patents, copyrights, anything.

This, but without the irony. Let us be like bacteria, freely swapping plasmids.

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

#97

Post by nradov »

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…

If you're concerned about worms (and other malware) then "AI" is a total red herring. If BGP implementations have some kind of security vulnerability then eventually someone will find and exploit it, with or without AI.

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

#98

Post by qcnguy »

pessimizer wrote: post #91
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…

> I have yet to meet a single AI safety person that knows how to rename a file in linux. I don't know if instead of saying "safety" here you meant to say ethics, or if you're using "safety" in this sentence just to generally refer to "AI ethics, safety, and to a smaller extent privacy." If either of those are true, that's weird because the only person in AI ethics most people know is Timnit Gebru, because she got fir…

Gebru didn't do any AI safety work at Google. She wrote stuff about doing social good, wrote the silly stochastic parrots paper that argued AI research was a waste of time, and whose title was proven false immediately (LLMs aren't parrots). The closest she got to "safety" was complaining that AI researchers weren't concerned enough that LLMs might say things Gebru didn't personally like.

Serious safety researchers are doing stuff like understanding neural circuits. Very different.

She surely knows how to use Linux. But she isn't really a safety researcher.

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

#99

Post by qcnguy »

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…

Asimov didn't describe robots programmed using formal logic. All robots in Asimov's stories had "positronic brains" that were described as being quite humanlike and unpredictable. His stories all revolve around this: the 3 laws are intentionally vague and open to interpretation, allowing non-deterministic or surprising outcomes. Not so different to LLMs.

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

#100

Post by pyuser583 »

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…

> I have yet to meet a single AI safety person that knows how to rename a file in linux.

It's funny, because I can tell when I'm dealing with a non-technical, policy person, because they always use language in a way no programmer would. I'd prefer not share the specific tells, but there are some things technical people just don't say, but policy people say all the time.

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