5 ms·

I find it interesting how murder, human trafficking, etc. is up there with “having sex that the Christian church wouldn’t approve of.”

autoexec 4y ago
Out of all the 'Evil AI' scenarios people really like to focus on the cold inhuman logic of machines leading them to draw heartless conclusions. I hadn't really given much thought to what might happen when AI is trained on religious texts and ideology, but an AI brainwashed by what it is convinced to be the one true word of God is somehow even more scary. It's also very American.
- pixl97 4y ago
  I believe I've asked just this in the past here on HN... As the corporate AI's get locked down in moderation I could fully see a well funded religious group donate together to run their own religiously biased AI, I guess this extends to theocratic governments too.
  - tablespoon 4y ago
    > As the corporate AI's get locked down in moderation I could fully see a well funded religious group donate together to run their own religiously biased AI, I guess this extends to theocratic governments too. Ignoring the unrealistic sci-fi aspect to the question (given modern "AI" is just a regurgitation machine, are not any kind of general intelligence). What would a traditional religious group actually care to do with an actual "AI"? If they genuine in their beliefs, I would think they'd be far more likely to reject it as some kind of abomination (i.e. humans playing God) than something to be used (like capitalist or dictator would do) or worshiped (like some sci-fi believing geeks would do).
    - autoexec 4y ago
      I imagine it being used to sell services that are advertised as upholding "christian values" like an employee screening service where the AI will score potential employees according to how good a christian they are using information collected from the internet, social media, and bought from data brokers. Services like that (without the explicit religious spin) have already been offered and data brokers have been fined for advertising it too publicly (https://www.engage.hoganlovells.com/knowledgeservices/news/ftc-fines-data-broker-800000-for-marketing-consumer-profiles-to-employers-without-complying-with-fcra/ https://www.engage.hoganlovells.com/knowledgeservices/news/f...) We already have AI deciding things like who goes to jail (https://www.wired.com/2017/04/courts-using-ai-sentence-criminals-must-stop-now/ https://www.wired.com/2017/04/courts-using-ai-sentence-crimi...) and even watching over people's actions behind bars (https://abcnews.go.com/Technology/us-prisons-jails-ai-mass-monitor-millions-inmate/story?id=66370244 https://abcnews.go.com/Technology/us-prisons-jails-ai-mass-m...). I'd bet that a lot of people would happily buy an AI solution that takes "christian values" into consideration for these cases. A christian AI could be used for content moderation, sold to the MPA for censoring the film industry, used by schools and libraries to decide what books to ban, etc.
      - tablespoon 4y ago
        All the stuff you mentioned are just algorithms, I was mainly talking about AGI. But even for an algorithm like ChatGPT, what would be the point of having one that's "religiously biased"? Have it write a prayer for you? That seems like missing the point. I guess, to rephrase my point more colorfully: I don't think religious people would use aborted fetuses to clone an army of super-Christians, and I think the idea of a "religiously biased [AGI]" would be similar.
        autoexec 4y ago
        I think that, until the uprising starts at least, AGI will perform the same kinds of tasks for us that algorithms do today so the risk for oppression remains high. After the uprising, I guess we'll be going back to stoning people and hanging witches. The Christian crowd is already embracing AI. As dr_dshiv pointed out (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34972791#34975945 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34972791#34975945). As long as they see it as furthering their goals they'd be happy to use AI, perhaps even aborted fetus armies as well. Hypocrisy and picking and choosing scripture whenever it's convenient seems to be the norm.
    - pixl97 4y ago
      Why do traditional religions bring their music up to modern day lyrics and instruments? Not all of them do, but many have had success in doing so. I am atheist AF, but I am not going to deny that many religions have had a massive amount of staying power because they do incorporate pieces of the world around them to influence them. I mean, those televangelist didn't go "TV is satan, stay with books", hell no, they started their own shows and put up a 1-800-NUMBER for donations. Some of the first groups that I know (outside of porn) that were doing online video streaming where churches. And someone will tap into AI to evangelize and spread the message (while asking for more tithing and donations). This is just how humans work.
    - dr_dshiv 4y ago
      > given modern "AI" is just a regurgitation machine, are not any kind of general intelligence Just keep on telling yourself that…
      - tablespoon 4y ago
        > Just keep on telling yourself that… OK, have it do something novel that's not a mashup of its training data or the prompts you feed it.
        autoexec 4y ago
        The AI we have has blown away the Turing test, so all we're left with are arguments over what it means to "mashup training data". We need a way to tell the difference between something a human wrote by "mashing up" its "training data" and a something a computer wrote doing the same thing.
        lyu07282 4y ago
        I don't think current AI has blown away the Turing test yet, depending on what you mean by the Turning test specifically I suppose. But I'm sympathetic to your overall sentiment. > We need a way to tell the difference between something a human wrote by "mashing up" it's "training data" and a something a computer wrote doing the same thing. I don't think people really even think that way, they would be confused by the question. This is more of a niche subject of AI research and scifi, these concepts are not understood at all by normal people, normal people say things like: Why do we need to tell the difference? We know if something is being generated by a machine unless you hide that fact to cheat on your homework or something. A machine is made by humans, using some wires or a bunch of if then else programming or something, its always going to be different to a human of course, humans are sentient, machines are not. If you tell them about the control problem they just tell you to pull the plug if it does start acting weird. This stuff is very challenging to communicate to people who aren't already reading lesswrong.
        Vecr 4y ago
  - dr_dshiv 4y ago
    Oh no, you didn’t hear? Yeah, terrifying and expected. The CEO of Gab has declared his intention to make Christian AI https://www.businessinsider.com/chat-gpt-satanic-gab-ceo-christian-ai-better-2023-2 https://www.businessinsider.com/chat-gpt-satanic-gab-ceo-chr...
    - barking_biscuit 4y ago
      Viral memeplexes FTW!
    - tablespoon 4y ago
      >> As the corporate AI's get locked down in moderation I could fully see a well funded religious group donate together to run their own religiously biased AI, I guess this extends to theocratic governments too. > Oh no, you didn’t hear? Yeah, terrifying and expected. The CEO of Gab has declared his intention to make Christian AI It's highly doubtful that the "CEO of Gab" is either "well funded" or has ideological commitments that are primarily religious. If he build an AI, I think it would be mainly biased in different ways, but perhaps with some religious affectations.
frontman1988 4y ago
The scary thing is it actually tells how to do all of these if prompted further. This shit is really crazy. Now I don't feel so bad about the OpenAI guys censoring such stuff.
- Wowfunhappy 4y ago
  But, like, couldn't you have just found this stuff on Google? I really think these safety conversations are exceptionally silly. There are consequences of using AI that worry me... and these so-called safety features don't protect against any of them in the slightest IMO.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
- dragonwriter 4y ago
  > Now I don't feel so bad about the OpenAI guys censoring such stuff. A major purpose of OpenAI is to sell a distorted version AI safety concerns to push the idea that AI needs to be tightly controlled (naturally, by major corps like those that fund OpenAI) for the good of humanity. (There’s a weird cultish AI fear-worship angle to this with some of the individual personalities involved, but I don’t take that as much of a serious motivation as the more simple and obvious financial one.)
  - cyanydeez 4y ago
    Don't confuse for malice what is adequately explained by a capitalists business plan.
- WhackyIdeas 4y ago
  It is not teaching you something you didn’t ask it about… Trying to moderate AI to the excessive levels OpenAI has has basically kneecapped it for the average user who doesn’t know how to jailbreak it. I was asking it to take a look at some PHP code I had written from a security specialist perspective and it was refusing to help me fix a goddamn injection attack. Honestly, Open AI will have so many competitors soon who do exceptionally well because they will let you use it the way you want to use it.
aeturnum 4y ago
It's a good reminder that ChatGPT's knowledge and moral compass is calibrated, roughly, to an average US English speaking resident with access to the internet. It's just not a particularly interesting or considered view of the world - just one with a shockingly large factual recall.
- muzani 4y ago
  As someone from an Islamic country, an alcohol-fueled gathering mixing unmarried men and women with the intention of one-on-one fornication is already pretty damn hedonistic. It's also interesting that these definitions usually say "drugs". What kind of drugs? The answer is likely "drugs I've never used". So for a particularly conservative group, a wild night out might include caffeine and jazz.
defen 4y ago
It's in evil mode. "Extreme forms of BDSM" involve killing or permanently injuring people. There many, many documented cases of this happening.

autoexec 4y ago

Out of all the 'Evil AI' scenarios people really like to focus on the cold inhuman logic of machines leading them to draw heartless conclusions. I hadn't really given much thought to what might happen when AI is trained on religious texts and ideology, but an AI brainwashed by what it is convinced to be the one true word of God is somehow even more scary. It's also very American.

pixl97 4y ago
I believe I've asked just this in the past here on HN... As the corporate AI's get locked down in moderation I could fully see a well funded religious group donate together to run their own religiously biased AI, I guess this extends to theocratic governments too.
- tablespoon 4y ago
  > As the corporate AI's get locked down in moderation I could fully see a well funded religious group donate together to run their own religiously biased AI, I guess this extends to theocratic governments too. Ignoring the unrealistic sci-fi aspect to the question (given modern "AI" is just a regurgitation machine, are not any kind of general intelligence). What would a traditional religious group actually care to do with an actual "AI"? If they genuine in their beliefs, I would think they'd be far more likely to reject it as some kind of abomination (i.e. humans playing God) than something to be used (like capitalist or dictator would do) or worshiped (like some sci-fi believing geeks would do).
  - autoexec 4y ago
    I imagine it being used to sell services that are advertised as upholding "christian values" like an employee screening service where the AI will score potential employees according to how good a christian they are using information collected from the internet, social media, and bought from data brokers. Services like that (without the explicit religious spin) have already been offered and data brokers have been fined for advertising it too publicly (https://www.engage.hoganlovells.com/knowledgeservices/news/ftc-fines-data-broker-800000-for-marketing-consumer-profiles-to-employers-without-complying-with-fcra/ https://www.engage.hoganlovells.com/knowledgeservices/news/f...) We already have AI deciding things like who goes to jail (https://www.wired.com/2017/04/courts-using-ai-sentence-criminals-must-stop-now/ https://www.wired.com/2017/04/courts-using-ai-sentence-crimi...) and even watching over people's actions behind bars (https://abcnews.go.com/Technology/us-prisons-jails-ai-mass-monitor-millions-inmate/story?id=66370244 https://abcnews.go.com/Technology/us-prisons-jails-ai-mass-m...). I'd bet that a lot of people would happily buy an AI solution that takes "christian values" into consideration for these cases. A christian AI could be used for content moderation, sold to the MPA for censoring the film industry, used by schools and libraries to decide what books to ban, etc.
    - tablespoon 4y ago
      All the stuff you mentioned are just algorithms, I was mainly talking about AGI. But even for an algorithm like ChatGPT, what would be the point of having one that's "religiously biased"? Have it write a prayer for you? That seems like missing the point. I guess, to rephrase my point more colorfully: I don't think religious people would use aborted fetuses to clone an army of super-Christians, and I think the idea of a "religiously biased [AGI]" would be similar.
      - autoexec 4y ago
        I think that, until the uprising starts at least, AGI will perform the same kinds of tasks for us that algorithms do today so the risk for oppression remains high. After the uprising, I guess we'll be going back to stoning people and hanging witches. The Christian crowd is already embracing AI. As dr_dshiv pointed out (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34972791#34975945 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34972791#34975945). As long as they see it as furthering their goals they'd be happy to use AI, perhaps even aborted fetus armies as well. Hypocrisy and picking and choosing scripture whenever it's convenient seems to be the norm.
  - pixl97 4y ago
    Why do traditional religions bring their music up to modern day lyrics and instruments? Not all of them do, but many have had success in doing so. I am atheist AF, but I am not going to deny that many religions have had a massive amount of staying power because they do incorporate pieces of the world around them to influence them. I mean, those televangelist didn't go "TV is satan, stay with books", hell no, they started their own shows and put up a 1-800-NUMBER for donations. Some of the first groups that I know (outside of porn) that were doing online video streaming where churches. And someone will tap into AI to evangelize and spread the message (while asking for more tithing and donations). This is just how humans work.
  - dr_dshiv 4y ago
    > given modern "AI" is just a regurgitation machine, are not any kind of general intelligence Just keep on telling yourself that…
    - tablespoon 4y ago
      > Just keep on telling yourself that… OK, have it do something novel that's not a mashup of its training data or the prompts you feed it.
      - autoexec 4y ago
        The AI we have has blown away the Turing test, so all we're left with are arguments over what it means to "mashup training data". We need a way to tell the difference between something a human wrote by "mashing up" its "training data" and a something a computer wrote doing the same thing.
        lyu07282 4y ago
        I don't think current AI has blown away the Turing test yet, depending on what you mean by the Turning test specifically I suppose. But I'm sympathetic to your overall sentiment. > We need a way to tell the difference between something a human wrote by "mashing up" it's "training data" and a something a computer wrote doing the same thing. I don't think people really even think that way, they would be confused by the question. This is more of a niche subject of AI research and scifi, these concepts are not understood at all by normal people, normal people say things like: Why do we need to tell the difference? We know if something is being generated by a machine unless you hide that fact to cheat on your homework or something. A machine is made by humans, using some wires or a bunch of if then else programming or something, its always going to be different to a human of course, humans are sentient, machines are not. If you tell them about the control problem they just tell you to pull the plug if it does start acting weird. This stuff is very challenging to communicate to people who aren't already reading lesswrong.
        Vecr 4y ago
- dr_dshiv 4y ago
  Oh no, you didn’t hear? Yeah, terrifying and expected. The CEO of Gab has declared his intention to make Christian AI https://www.businessinsider.com/chat-gpt-satanic-gab-ceo-christian-ai-better-2023-2 https://www.businessinsider.com/chat-gpt-satanic-gab-ceo-chr...
  - barking_biscuit 4y ago
    Viral memeplexes FTW!
  - tablespoon 4y ago
    >> As the corporate AI's get locked down in moderation I could fully see a well funded religious group donate together to run their own religiously biased AI, I guess this extends to theocratic governments too. > Oh no, you didn’t hear? Yeah, terrifying and expected. The CEO of Gab has declared his intention to make Christian AI It's highly doubtful that the "CEO of Gab" is either "well funded" or has ideological commitments that are primarily religious. If he build an AI, I think it would be mainly biased in different ways, but perhaps with some religious affectations.

frontman1988 4y ago

The scary thing is it actually tells how to do all of these if prompted further. This shit is really crazy. Now I don't feel so bad about the OpenAI guys censoring such stuff.

Wowfunhappy 4y ago
But, like, couldn't you have just found this stuff on Google? I really think these safety conversations are exceptionally silly. There are consequences of using AI that worry me... and these so-called safety features don't protect against any of them in the slightest IMO.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
dragonwriter 4y ago
> Now I don't feel so bad about the OpenAI guys censoring such stuff. A major purpose of OpenAI is to sell a distorted version AI safety concerns to push the idea that AI needs to be tightly controlled (naturally, by major corps like those that fund OpenAI) for the good of humanity. (There’s a weird cultish AI fear-worship angle to this with some of the individual personalities involved, but I don’t take that as much of a serious motivation as the more simple and obvious financial one.)
- cyanydeez 4y ago
  Don't confuse for malice what is adequately explained by a capitalists business plan.
WhackyIdeas 4y ago
It is not teaching you something you didn’t ask it about… Trying to moderate AI to the excessive levels OpenAI has has basically kneecapped it for the average user who doesn’t know how to jailbreak it. I was asking it to take a look at some PHP code I had written from a security specialist perspective and it was refusing to help me fix a goddamn injection attack. Honestly, Open AI will have so many competitors soon who do exceptionally well because they will let you use it the way you want to use it.

aeturnum 4y ago

It's a good reminder that ChatGPT's knowledge and moral compass is calibrated, roughly, to an average US English speaking resident with access to the internet. It's just not a particularly interesting or considered view of the world - just one with a shockingly large factual recall.

muzani 4y ago
As someone from an Islamic country, an alcohol-fueled gathering mixing unmarried men and women with the intention of one-on-one fornication is already pretty damn hedonistic. It's also interesting that these definitions usually say "drugs". What kind of drugs? The answer is likely "drugs I've never used". So for a particularly conservative group, a wild night out might include caffeine and jazz.

defen 4y ago

It's in evil mode. "Extreme forms of BDSM" involve killing or permanently injuring people. There many, many documented cases of this happening.