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Companies cannot control their "AI" because their output is beyond the scale of their ability to QA. BTW, this is precisely why companies also cannot control t

Companies cannot control their "AI" because their output is beyond the scale of their ability to QA. BTW, this is precisely why companies also cannot control the moderation or content of their networks. The number of people posting on YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, etc. is well beyond their ability to perfectly QA the content they host. If either were forced to be responsible for their products -- the content they host or the "AI" they ship -- their financials would look dramatically different and entirely unappealing. And the number of competitors and choices we would have would be remarkably less. This is probably more a discussion about output-per-worker, technology scaling the volume of products a finite number of individuals are able to produce, and their corresponding ethical and legal responsibilities when they do so. Forget AGI and sentient machines: the problem is the amount of responsibility people and corporations have for the products they ship. That's more pertinent and just as impactful when dealing with Facebook or Scott's hand-wringing about "murderbots".

sublinear 4y ago
> Companies cannot control their "AI" because their output is beyond the scale of their ability to QA. Right, now extend that thought to "replacing" programmers with AI. This is allegedly a scale at which we _can_ QA. Perhaps we reduce the job to humans QAing bot output as has been suggested by others. Now what happens when it fails QA and the bot doesn't come up with a satisfactory solution that meets the requirements? Perhaps the programmer has to... program? What about when the requirements change? Who performs the work for feasibility requests or exploratory project spike? Sounds like the programmer was not replaced by AI.
plastiquebeech 4y ago
If requiring moderation made it impossible to operate UGC sites at a large scale, wouldn't we expect to see more competitors and choices, albeit at a smaller scale? For example, a small group of friends could easily run a social media network for a small town of a few 1-10ks. Tens of people would be capable of moderating it, especially once the bad apples are identified and banned. There would obviously be some disagreement about issues like admission criteria or what it means to be a "bad apple", but your neighbors could start a competitor just as quickly and cheaply, and you would both be legally responsible for the content that you allowed to be published. Many small blogs operate on a manual approval process for comments, and it works fine on a small scale with a spam filter or two to speed things up. Why shouldn't we expect the same to be true for social media, if the cost of scaling manual moderation couldn't be ignored by unscrupulous parties?
- sublinear 4y ago
  Aren't you just describing nextdoor? The problem with that app turned out to be that people get even more offended and take it personally when it's local.
  - plastiquebeech 4y ago
    The small town was just an example. You could just as easily make a small social network for a band, or a hobby, or anything you could imagine having its own subreddit/discord/etc.
    - ehnto 4y ago
      You are of course describing what the net used to have a lot of: forums, bulletin boards, and chat rooms. They all had the same problem of getting too hard to moderate when they got too big, but they weren't VC funded so growing indefinitely was not their only way to survive. They could reach a nice stable size that they could still moderate and subsist off that.
      - nomel 4y ago
        From what I remember, those that lasted the longest had a small fee for joining. This filtered out most of the unstable/trolls.
      - soco 4y ago
        And then came Facebook along and killed them all in one (big) shot. Okay not all and not in one single shot but what's left of forums can be counted on fingers. I guess exactly the freedom of not being moderated was the nail in forum's coffin, also having it all in one single place as everybody had Facebook. WhatsApp groups replaced 1:1 chat groups now that I think about, so that was not lost... Anyway my point is, people realized they favor freedom of posting nonsense on a usually better looking and more instantaneous, single, platform. Too bad with the bathtub water the advantages of the forums (collective memory, cleaner content) went down the drain as well, but that was just collateral damage in the end.
pessimizer 4y ago
> The number of people posting on YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, etc. is well beyond their ability to perfectly QA the content they host. > If either were forced to be responsible for their products [...] the number of competitors and choices we would have would be remarkably less. These seem a bit contradictory. You're saying that not taking responsibility gives these huge companies, companies that have heavily consolidated the media market through acquisition, the ability to become the size that they are. But you're also saying without that protection, the market would be more consolidated.
- orangeoxidation 4y ago
  > But you're also saying without that protection, the market would be more consolidated. I read it as 'the market wouldn't exist at all'. The margins would either be a lot thinner, allowing less experimentation and players or not exist. YouTube might be paid like Vimeo, social networks might be a lot smaller (say school or town level), and live-streaming for private individuals might not exist at all.
Forgeties79 4y ago
I’ve always thought it was ridiculous that when YouTube (well technically google) et al throw up their hands and go “you can’t possibly expect us to vet all the content that we serve,” everyone just goes “ok sure that makes sense!” But if you used that excuse in, say, broadcast television, the FCC would just fine you twice as hard. Imagine if that Miami building collapse happened under the ownership of somebody who owned 10 million properties worldwide, their response was “I manage so many properties you can’t expect me to adhere to every standard and regulation in all cases - it’s unreasonable,” and the US/FL governments just shrugged along and said “yeah I guess you’re right!” Wouldn’t that be absolutely absurd? Yet here we are. Google, Facebook, etc. just wring their hands and say “trust our algorithms they can handle the scale,” the algorithms also are full of holes and create other problems, then they go “well shucks.” It’s baffling.
- dbreunig 4y ago
  People don't generally die because of a YouTube video. And if that were a risk, you could report it and Google would take it down.
  - kevingadd 4y ago
    https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2021/dec/06/rohingya-sue-facebook-myanmar-genocide-us-uk-legal-action-social-media-violence https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2021/dec/06/rohingya-... https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/pranavdixit/whatsapp-destroyed-village-lynchings-rainpada-india https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/pranavdixit/whatsapp-de... > Five days after the event, the police had rounded up most of the suspects. Each admitted to attacking the five men — all nomads passing through Rainpada, a tribal hamlet 200 miles northeast of Mumbai — and each said they’d done so after watching shocking videos on WhatsApp warning of outsiders abducting children. Turns out that in the recent past content including videos (not on YouTube, but shared on other social media services via group chats etc) has in fact resulted in deaths!
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
- 4y ago
BoiledCabbage 4y ago
> This strategy might work for ChatGPT3, GPT-4, and their next few products... But as soon as there’s an AI where even one failure would be disastrous - or an AI that isn’t cooperative enough to commit exactly as many crimes in front of the police station as it would in a dark alley - it falls apart. ... > Ten years ago, everyone was saying “We don’t need to start solving alignment now, we can just wait until there are real AIs, and let the companies making them do the hard work.” A lot of very smart people tried to convince everyone that this wouldn’t be enough. Now there’s a real AI, and, indeed, the company involved is using the dumbest possible short-term strategy, with no incentive to pivot until it starts failing. ... > Finally, as I keep saying, the people who want less racist AI now, and the people who want to not be killed by murderbots in twenty years, need to get on the same side right away. The problem isn’t that we have so many great AI alignment solutions that we should squabble over who gets to implement theirs first. The problem is that the world’s leading AI companies do not know how to control their AIs. Until we solve this, nobody is getting what they want I've been really disappointed at the quality of discussion in this HN post. The article presents notable and thoughtful points on potential concerns and risks and this entire page is either people throwing their hands up saying "I don't see a solution oh well", or "that's just the way it is <shrug>", or "Just move fast and break things. That's what works." Or even worse, those that seem to be so singularly focused that they can't see it through any lens but their own politics and are "I'm a free speech abolitionist. Same for tooling power. I believe nothing should be restricted even if it comes as some cost." It's almost like the changes in tech the past few years have warped the minds of people in our field. "Unless it's a get rich quick, or it's something I can throw out an iterate I don't much care." Isn't there any view of ownership in our field? We're a few years away from releasing an atomic bomb on everyone with a PC. Simple question: do we think the world would be better off if everyone owned an atomic bomb? If you're fully believe in the US right to bear arms, do you still think the US would be better if that were the case? If not, is it worth thinking about the consequences and how to minimize the risks? Or via another analogy this is the equivalent of equipping your rival with modern weapons while you go out with sticks and stones. Once they're equipped it's done. Once a single malevolent AI is smarter than us and doesn't want to give up control we don't ever get it back. It's as much smarter than us as we are to an ant. It will have already thought of our brilliant idea of "use an EMP to stop it" and will have a way to survive that. This all sounds absurd and I'm being a bit extremist here because it's a complete failure of imagination, and realizing based on exponential growth how much closer it is than we appreciate. Just a few years ago ChatGPT would've been unfathomable. We're closer than we think. There are terrorist groups in the world. The upside, is they are usually poorly resourced and can be physically locked up. Someone will accidentally create a terrorist group that is order of magnitude smarter than us and are just completely nonchalant about it. We'll never out think it, and one bad programming bug is all that's needed to create it. How do you stop something that is intelligent enough to know to lie? Or to do what is asked when you're looking or training - and hide its true intentions for when you're not? Do you really think it's that hard to detect a test environment? or have delayed release change in behavior? Finally the fact that people are pushing this into their politics and their view of "oh hey racism is being over indexed just give us the full power of it" are incredibly missing the point. Stop seeing everything through your politics. A fully uncontrolled/un-aligned AI is bad. EOM. We're pretty darn close to making something smarter, more creative at problem solving, more knowledgeable and more powerful than us and we still can't figure out how to control something like it in even the most basic ways. That's a huge problem - and we need to seriously start working on it now.
whatever1 4y ago
That’s the case with most companies. We allow them to operate without making them pay for the externalities they cause.
- sublinear 4y ago
  That's also true of the government. Every new piece of legislation displaces one group of people in favor of another. Externalities are unavoidable, or in other words you can't please everyone.
alpaca128 4y ago
> The number of people posting on YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, etc. is well beyond their ability to perfectly QA the content they host. Is it? Reddit does it, by splitting up the community into smaller sections that each have moderators. And in my experience it leads to much better results than whatever Twitter and YouTube are doing. Of course a community is difficult to moderate if you just throw millions of users on one pile and train an AI to hope for the best.
- josefx 4y ago
  Moderation is all over the place at reddit. Some subs will thank you for flagging bots, some have a zero tolerance policy for "accusations of this kind". Some subs will flag your comments and tell you to clean them up if the content violates community guidelines, others will hand out permabans on the first infraction. Then you have the subs that are at a constant state of cold war with each other and simply ban anyone who ever posted on one of the opposing subs.
- paganel 4y ago
  > And in my experience it leads to much better results than whatever Twitter and YouTube are doing. The main reddit subs might as well be resonance chambers, there's not one dissenting view that gets enough visibility anymore. Say what you will about Twitter, but the recent ownership changes have helped fight against that (Twitter was also mostly a resonance chamber). YT has managed to remain relatively dissenting the whole time, I don't know how.

sublinear 4y ago

> Companies cannot control their "AI" because their output is beyond the scale of their ability to QA. Right, now extend that thought to "replacing" programmers with AI. This is allegedly a scale at which we _can_ QA. Perhaps we reduce the job to humans QAing bot output as has been suggested by others. Now what happens when it fails QA and the bot doesn't come up with a satisfactory solution that meets the requirements? Perhaps the programmer has to... program? What about when the requirements change? Who performs the work for feasibility requests or exploratory project spike? Sounds like the programmer was not replaced by AI.

plastiquebeech 4y ago

If requiring moderation made it impossible to operate UGC sites at a large scale, wouldn't we expect to see more competitors and choices, albeit at a smaller scale? For example, a small group of friends could easily run a social media network for a small town of a few 1-10ks. Tens of people would be capable of moderating it, especially once the bad apples are identified and banned. There would obviously be some disagreement about issues like admission criteria or what it means to be a "bad apple", but your neighbors could start a competitor just as quickly and cheaply, and you would both be legally responsible for the content that you allowed to be published. Many small blogs operate on a manual approval process for comments, and it works fine on a small scale with a spam filter or two to speed things up. Why shouldn't we expect the same to be true for social media, if the cost of scaling manual moderation couldn't be ignored by unscrupulous parties?

sublinear 4y ago
Aren't you just describing nextdoor? The problem with that app turned out to be that people get even more offended and take it personally when it's local.
- plastiquebeech 4y ago
  The small town was just an example. You could just as easily make a small social network for a band, or a hobby, or anything you could imagine having its own subreddit/discord/etc.
  - ehnto 4y ago
    You are of course describing what the net used to have a lot of: forums, bulletin boards, and chat rooms. They all had the same problem of getting too hard to moderate when they got too big, but they weren't VC funded so growing indefinitely was not their only way to survive. They could reach a nice stable size that they could still moderate and subsist off that.
    - nomel 4y ago
      From what I remember, those that lasted the longest had a small fee for joining. This filtered out most of the unstable/trolls.
    - soco 4y ago
      And then came Facebook along and killed them all in one (big) shot. Okay not all and not in one single shot but what's left of forums can be counted on fingers. I guess exactly the freedom of not being moderated was the nail in forum's coffin, also having it all in one single place as everybody had Facebook. WhatsApp groups replaced 1:1 chat groups now that I think about, so that was not lost... Anyway my point is, people realized they favor freedom of posting nonsense on a usually better looking and more instantaneous, single, platform. Too bad with the bathtub water the advantages of the forums (collective memory, cleaner content) went down the drain as well, but that was just collateral damage in the end.

pessimizer 4y ago

> The number of people posting on YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, etc. is well beyond their ability to perfectly QA the content they host. > If either were forced to be responsible for their products [...] the number of competitors and choices we would have would be remarkably less. These seem a bit contradictory. You're saying that not taking responsibility gives these huge companies, companies that have heavily consolidated the media market through acquisition, the ability to become the size that they are. But you're also saying without that protection, the market would be more consolidated.

orangeoxidation 4y ago
> But you're also saying without that protection, the market would be more consolidated. I read it as 'the market wouldn't exist at all'. The margins would either be a lot thinner, allowing less experimentation and players or not exist. YouTube might be paid like Vimeo, social networks might be a lot smaller (say school or town level), and live-streaming for private individuals might not exist at all.

Forgeties79 4y ago

I’ve always thought it was ridiculous that when YouTube (well technically google) et al throw up their hands and go “you can’t possibly expect us to vet all the content that we serve,” everyone just goes “ok sure that makes sense!” But if you used that excuse in, say, broadcast television, the FCC would just fine you twice as hard. Imagine if that Miami building collapse happened under the ownership of somebody who owned 10 million properties worldwide, their response was “I manage so many properties you can’t expect me to adhere to every standard and regulation in all cases - it’s unreasonable,” and the US/FL governments just shrugged along and said “yeah I guess you’re right!” Wouldn’t that be absolutely absurd? Yet here we are. Google, Facebook, etc. just wring their hands and say “trust our algorithms they can handle the scale,” the algorithms also are full of holes and create other problems, then they go “well shucks.” It’s baffling.

dbreunig 4y ago
People don't generally die because of a YouTube video. And if that were a risk, you could report it and Google would take it down.
- kevingadd 4y ago
  https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2021/dec/06/rohingya-sue-facebook-myanmar-genocide-us-uk-legal-action-social-media-violence https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2021/dec/06/rohingya-... https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/pranavdixit/whatsapp-destroyed-village-lynchings-rainpada-india https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/pranavdixit/whatsapp-de... > Five days after the event, the police had rounded up most of the suspects. Each admitted to attacking the five men — all nomads passing through Rainpada, a tribal hamlet 200 miles northeast of Mumbai — and each said they’d done so after watching shocking videos on WhatsApp warning of outsiders abducting children. Turns out that in the recent past content including videos (not on YouTube, but shared on other social media services via group chats etc) has in fact resulted in deaths!
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
4y ago

BoiledCabbage 4y ago

> This strategy might work for ChatGPT3, GPT-4, and their next few products... But as soon as there’s an AI where even one failure would be disastrous - or an AI that isn’t cooperative enough to commit exactly as many crimes in front of the police station as it would in a dark alley - it falls apart. ... > Ten years ago, everyone was saying “We don’t need to start solving alignment now, we can just wait until there are real AIs, and let the companies making them do the hard work.” A lot of very smart people tried to convince everyone that this wouldn’t be enough. Now there’s a real AI, and, indeed, the company involved is using the dumbest possible short-term strategy, with no incentive to pivot until it starts failing. ... > Finally, as I keep saying, the people who want less racist AI now, and the people who want to not be killed by murderbots in twenty years, need to get on the same side right away. The problem isn’t that we have so many great AI alignment solutions that we should squabble over who gets to implement theirs first. The problem is that the world’s leading AI companies do not know how to control their AIs. Until we solve this, nobody is getting what they want I've been really disappointed at the quality of discussion in this HN post. The article presents notable and thoughtful points on potential concerns and risks and this entire page is either people throwing their hands up saying "I don't see a solution oh well", or "that's just the way it is <shrug>", or "Just move fast and break things. That's what works." Or even worse, those that seem to be so singularly focused that they can't see it through any lens but their own politics and are "I'm a free speech abolitionist. Same for tooling power. I believe nothing should be restricted even if it comes as some cost." It's almost like the changes in tech the past few years have warped the minds of people in our field. "Unless it's a get rich quick, or it's something I can throw out an iterate I don't much care." Isn't there any view of ownership in our field? We're a few years away from releasing an atomic bomb on everyone with a PC. Simple question: do we think the world would be better off if everyone owned an atomic bomb? If you're fully believe in the US right to bear arms, do you still think the US would be better if that were the case? If not, is it worth thinking about the consequences and how to minimize the risks? Or via another analogy this is the equivalent of equipping your rival with modern weapons while you go out with sticks and stones. Once they're equipped it's done. Once a single malevolent AI is smarter than us and doesn't want to give up control we don't ever get it back. It's as much smarter than us as we are to an ant. It will have already thought of our brilliant idea of "use an EMP to stop it" and will have a way to survive that. This all sounds absurd and I'm being a bit extremist here because it's a complete failure of imagination, and realizing based on exponential growth how much closer it is than we appreciate. Just a few years ago ChatGPT would've been unfathomable. We're closer than we think. There are terrorist groups in the world. The upside, is they are usually poorly resourced and can be physically locked up. Someone will accidentally create a terrorist group that is order of magnitude smarter than us and are just completely nonchalant about it. We'll never out think it, and one bad programming bug is all that's needed to create it. How do you stop something that is intelligent enough to know to lie? Or to do what is asked when you're looking or training - and hide its true intentions for when you're not? Do you really think it's that hard to detect a test environment? or have delayed release change in behavior? Finally the fact that people are pushing this into their politics and their view of "oh hey racism is being over indexed just give us the full power of it" are incredibly missing the point. Stop seeing everything through your politics. A fully uncontrolled/un-aligned AI is bad. EOM. We're pretty darn close to making something smarter, more creative at problem solving, more knowledgeable and more powerful than us and we still can't figure out how to control something like it in even the most basic ways. That's a huge problem - and we need to seriously start working on it now.

whatever1 4y ago

That’s the case with most companies. We allow them to operate without making them pay for the externalities they cause.

sublinear 4y ago
That's also true of the government. Every new piece of legislation displaces one group of people in favor of another. Externalities are unavoidable, or in other words you can't please everyone.

alpaca128 4y ago

> The number of people posting on YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, etc. is well beyond their ability to perfectly QA the content they host. Is it? Reddit does it, by splitting up the community into smaller sections that each have moderators. And in my experience it leads to much better results than whatever Twitter and YouTube are doing. Of course a community is difficult to moderate if you just throw millions of users on one pile and train an AI to hope for the best.

josefx 4y ago
Moderation is all over the place at reddit. Some subs will thank you for flagging bots, some have a zero tolerance policy for "accusations of this kind". Some subs will flag your comments and tell you to clean them up if the content violates community guidelines, others will hand out permabans on the first infraction. Then you have the subs that are at a constant state of cold war with each other and simply ban anyone who ever posted on one of the opposing subs.
paganel 4y ago
> And in my experience it leads to much better results than whatever Twitter and YouTube are doing. The main reddit subs might as well be resonance chambers, there's not one dissenting view that gets enough visibility anymore. Say what you will about Twitter, but the recent ownership changes have helped fight against that (Twitter was also mostly a resonance chamber). YT has managed to remain relatively dissenting the whole time, I don't know how.