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The other half of AI safety

personalaisafety.com

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Re: The other half of AI safety

#91

Post by Animats »

"AI safety", as defined here, has most of the problem that "fact checking" for social media had. Many of the same problems the "woke" concern about "microagressions" had. Most of the techniques used in advertising. Much of what passes for political discourse today has the same problems. It's somewhat convincing bullshit.

Should AIs be held to a higher standard than X/Twitter? Than Reddit? Than Fox News? What censorship is appropriate? And, yes, alignment is censorship.

Then there's the big problem of chatbots telling you what you seem to want to hear. This is an old problem. "Happy Talk", from South Pacific", is the entertainment version. "Wartime" by Paul Fussell, is the serious version.

As the article points out, a small percentage of the population is very vulnerable to certain types of misinformation. It may be the same fraction of the population that's vulnerable to cults. But maybe not. Cults have a group self-reinforcing mechanism and an agenda. Chatbots have neither. Worth studying.

The point here is that restrictions on chatbots strong enough to protect the vulnerable would close off most political and social discourse.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JXgmQDFhPjo

Re: The other half of AI safety

#92

Post by lazystar »

Animats wrote: post #91

"AI safety", as defined here, has most of the problem that "fact checking" for social media had. Many of the same problems the "woke" concern about "microagressions" had. Most of the techniques used in advertising. Much of what passes for political discourse today has the same problems. It's somewhat convincing bullshit. Should AIs be held to a higher standard than X/Twitter? Than Reddit? Than Fox News? What censorsh…

the counterpoint is that allowing unlimited discourse places an enourmous amount pf power in the hands of the chatbot owner, who has access to all logs and input from each user. this prevents one chatbot owner from advertising "you can say anything here!!" then using the logs as blackmail down the road.

Re: The other half of AI safety

#93

Post by ianbutler »

Yokohiii wrote: post #70
ianbutler wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

ChatGPT is the name of their in web chat product. So no enterprise, no api.

Re: The other half of AI safety

#94

Post by scared_together »

totetsu wrote: post #90
achierius wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Based on what? This seems like speculation.

Which part?

The entire thing.

If you want a specific example: where do those three pillars at the start come from? Why three and not four? Are all those three of equal importance, to the point where all three are pillars?

Furthermore, why are you offloading the task of understanding AI risk to an AI? That’s ironic to the point of self-parody.

Re: The other half of AI safety

#95

Post by DarkNova6 »

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 openAI is doing the best they reasonably can to make people depend on their product and chase as much money and power as they possibly could.

Re: The other half of AI safety

#96

Post by scared_together »

Animats wrote: post #91

"AI safety", as defined here, has most of the problem that "fact checking" for social media had. Many of the same problems the "woke" concern about "microagressions" had. Most of the techniques used in advertising. Much of what passes for political discourse today has the same problems. It's somewhat convincing bullshit. Should AIs be held to a higher standard than X/Twitter? Than Reddit? Than Fox News? What censorsh…

> Should AIs be held to a higher standard than X/Twitter? Than Reddit? Than Fox News? What censorship is appropriate? And, yes, alignment is censorship.

Yes, a thousand times yes. Freedom of speech/expression should be a freedom granted to humans. We extend it to corporations based on the practical reality that human speech often requires corporate support to be hosted and published.

But as far as I know, AI vendors haven’t claimed that their models represent the views of their founders, employees or any people at all. If we censor AI, which human voice are we censoring?

Re: The other half of AI safety

#97

Post by GardenLetter27 »

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…

And what will a human do better? Why will the human care? Who will pay the human?

Re: The other half of AI safety

#98

Post by xg15 »

I find it somewhat telling that most (not all) of this thread doesn't even attempt to find an answer to the questions posed by the OP but flatly denies the problem of psychological harm exists at all.

I feel this is an example of the two larger narratives about AI that currently seem to be forming:

For one side, AI is basically every harmful technology ever invented rolled into one: It's harmful to the environment (via waste of energy and resources), it's harmful to the information space (through polluting everything with slop and devaluing human expression), it's harmful to society (by encouraging ever more badly done and unreliable products, by taking away jobs and by replacing human-to-human interaction, by normalizing a mode of development where not even the developers understand what is going on) and it's harmful to whoever uses it personally (by causing ever-growing dependence on AI, either only by skills or even emotionally or psychically, up to the point of AI psychosis and preferring AI agents to other humans).

For the other side, AI is the future, the next industrial revolution, the thing that you have to adapt or will be left behind, possibly even the next stage of evolution.

Right now, I feel every side is digging in and trying ever harder to ignore the other side.

(The AI labs acknowledge "AI risks" in theory - but, as the article pointed out, the risks they perceive and ostensibly work against are so abstract and removed from the everyday use of AI that they more make the point of AI proponents)

I feel the end result of this growing tension is the Molotov cocktail in Sam Altmann's home.

I'd really like to know more what the tech community at large is trying to do about this rift.

Re: The other half of AI safety

#99

Post by totetsu »

scared_together wrote: post #94
totetsu wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Which part?

The entire thing. If you want a specific example: where do those three pillars at the start come from? Why three and not four? Are all those three of equal importance, to the point where all three are pillars? Furthermore, why are you offloading the task of understanding AI risk to an AI? That’s ironic to the point of self-parody.

The first part was an attempt at ironic humor, by repeating Gemini about the topic of offloading thinking to AI, not to be taken seriously as speculation or not.

As for the name changes..That is a fact you can look up, aswell as much analysis. It is my opinion that the move from framing this area from one of "saftey" to one of "national security", is interesting, and related to geopolitical movements towards "great-power", and ideological points of view that elevate "personal responsibility" and "reduced regulation" and is similar to long ongoing discussion in society like that about automobiles. I don't know if you call analysis speculation?

As for the part about Dimensionality. It is just my intuition — and so i suppose speculation — from some things like for instance the SolidGoldMagikarp glitch in early openai models.. How we understand all the way that there might be trigger certain outputs from a vastly large model? When those things can be completely opaque to human reason. Observability and Understandability are areas of research. I haven't seen anyone claiming that generative models outputs can be concretely controlled, thats why there is so many pre and post hoc work arounds.

So when a risk cant be eliminated, the question is how to manage it, and who's responsibility is that..

https://www.aisi.gov.uk/blog/our-first-year https://www.gov.uk/government/news/tackling-ai-security-risk... https://www.commerce.gov/news/press-releases/2025/06/stateme...

https://www.bryanbraun.com/2025/10/28/SolidGoldMagikarp/

Re: The other half of AI safety

#100

Post by tasuki »

Yokohiii wrote: post #57
ngruhn wrote: post #4

The bad cases make headlines. But I think it's quite possible that AI is helping a lot of people in distress. Many people are uncomfortable opening up to humans, or have no one to talk to, or can't afford to fork over whatever-hourly-rate a therapist takes.

Pure speculation. It's impossible to gather data that states the opposite. A chat that won't end up in self harm thoughts is just another chat.

I think you're kind of supporting the person you're replying to? A chat that won't end up in self-harm is just another chat. Even if the user entered the chat planning to self-harm. A chat that leads to self-harm will make the headlines. Therefore, we hear about the bad cases.
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