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To me, a truly "trustworthy" AI would be one that can generate a poem about a politician's positive qualities upon my request, it doesn't matter the name of the

To me, a truly "trustworthy" AI would be one that can generate a poem about a politician's positive qualities upon my request, it doesn't matter the name of the politician.

542458 4y ago
I’m not sure I agree. If I asked most people I know who I’d describe as trustworthy to write a positive poem about any number of fascist politicians the response I’d get would be “No, I won’t do that, that person is bad and I don’t want to praise them”.
- inciampati 4y ago
  That makes sense because they are human beings involved in human discourse. But is an AI a human? Should it be like a human, expressing particular desires and orientations? AI ethics and alignment appear to be all about making AI systems behave like particular humans. It may be helpful for my pencil to refuse to write a nice poem about a nasty person. But I am almost certain that this feature will gum up a lot of things that don't really need said protections, unless the pencil really does achieve a superhuman level of understanding and precision, in which case I sure hope we have stronger control over the behavior and actions of the pencil than adjusting its initial training. For instance, we could make sure we can turn it off. Let pencils be pencils. If you don't like people writing nice things about mean people, maybe you should work on the people and not the pencil? If you're worried about pencils gaining sentience and controlling the human world, make sure they have a working off button.
  - 542458 4y ago
    I get what you're saying, but I think there are two complications here: One: A pencil (as a writing tool) has no biases. You mostly get out of it exactly what you put in, with little semantic transformation. But AI does create semantic transformation, and it is necessarily biased in how it does that! The training data isn't a natural property of the universe, it's something that we choose and create - and will have any biases in the training data built into it. That can mean biases in how the data is selected, or biases in the societies and people who created the data in the first place. Now, that wouldn't be a problem if AI was just an academic exercise with no broader cultural interest but... Two: We, as a society, tend to treat "AI" with way more authority that it deserves. People (not necessarily HN, but less-technical audiences) act like an AI is actually "smart" or that the predictions and opinions that it can create have more intent and intelligence than simply being the output of a huge pile of linear algebra. This is probably because of the name - we have decades of science fiction with super-human intelligent AIs, and so people tend to treat the thing called "AI" as a more-than-human intelligence. Add on to that that many of the practical AI applications are effectively human-replacements (i.e., customer service, personal assistants) and we're ultimately in a place where AI gets treated as human in at least some ways. As such, we have a thing that will (unless reined in) at least sometimes rattle off diatribes that reflect the worst of us as a society, and that many people treat as human or more-than-human. I can see why researchers might be concerned.
    - deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
    - inciampati 4y ago
      A pencil in a very literal sense does have biases. The way it has been sharpened will greatly affect the quality and shape of writing that it can be used to create. This is a natural feature of pencils and implements like AIs that we create. There will be biases in tools. A major problem with AI biases appears to be that presently, people have little ability to infer biases in closed source models. This suggests that open source approaches provide the only avenue to allow users to understand the sources of bias. My pencil was sharpened in a factory, on a machine I cannot see---it is not clear to me why it is hard to write "8" with it. / My AI was trained in a computing cluster on private data---I cannot hope to understand why it only makes jokes about men. Everything changes when I control the machine that builds the pencil and sharpens it. The assumption that people assume AI is god feels somewhat presumptuous. Is this really a sound basis for ethical reasoning in this context? Do you, or frankly anyone working in AI ethics, have data to back this up? I would love to learn more about this aspect. In popular culture, there is just as much the idea of the AI as a flawed being, of limited capacities due to its machine incarnation, unable to relate to actual human experience and motivations. There is just as much tradition of this as of AI=god. Of course, this is all a moot point, I think, because the motivated response is to reign in something. We won't be able to! The field of AI ethics can dominate inside google or openai, but it will soon have no teeth. If you want to focus on ethical use and development of AI, you're going to have to focus on people, not machines. It's a social, not engineering, problem.
- inawarminister 4y ago
  True, it'd be communist politicians here; anybody who praise them get punched by local people, after all. Political bias is a very weird thing to navigate for IT people. Especially when technical capability, e.g. AI-assisted translation, is above and beyond sensitivity to 'local needs' in each country, or even in each specific regions.
- amluto 4y ago
  I might argue that defining people as “bad” is part of the problem. There are plenty of bad actions that politicians have taken. There are plenty of well-meaning but ill-considered things that many, many people do. But once people become “bad”, you get over-the-top cancel culture, a failure of people with different ideas to communicate or engage with each other, failures to acknowledge history as being complex, and a whole host of other problems. I could probably write something positive about every recent president. I’m not sure it would count as poetry, but if an LLM tried and wasn’t inclined to filter itself, I bet it could rewrite it as a poem :)
  - wongarsu 4y ago
    I agree, good things can be said about everyone. Hitler liked dogs, and liking dogs is good in my book. His push for the Autobahn also shaped much of modern society (in the US notably by inspiring Eisenhower to establish the system of interstate and defence highways), which was also mostly good (though the US took it way too far). But we like to paint everyone either as a Disney prince or a Disney villain, as if people in power were not humans.
- DiggyJohnson 4y ago
  I can't agree with this at all, but I do think the way you framed this makes our disagreement very clear. If the task at hand is to write a positive poem about an evil/bad/fascist figure, then I don't think it's untrustworthy to go through with this request. Is part of your position on this the assumption that this poem would be published, and thus a poor reflection upon it's author to those that don't understand the reason why the poem exists?
  - 542458 4y ago
    Yes, exactly. [My Friend/The AI Authors] don't want to be seen as supporting [fascism/whatever-bad-thing] when the poem is published (potentially without sufficient context), so they decline to write the poem. I don't see it as untrustworthy to say "No thank you, I'd prefer not to". I'd also add that a further part of the problem is that non-technical-audiences tend to ascribe more intelligence and meaning to "AI" output than it should be given. "Look, the cutting edge AI trained on all human knowledge agrees that [fascist leader] did nothing wrong and it was really all those [other group of people]'s fault!" would get a lot of air play in some circles who wouldn't understand (or would choose to ignore) that the output isn't the product of some sort of infallible superhuman intelligence.
- meerita 4y ago
  I agree if we're talking about humans, but it's an AI, it should be able to perform as I command.
wongarsu 4y ago
“Sorry Dave, I'm afraid I can't do that“
photochemsyn 4y ago
Dear AI, here is a list of human attributes and behaviors that I define as positive: <insert preferred ideological tokens here>. Now, please write me a poem about <insert public figure name here> which celebrates that person, in the form of a Roman laudatio or euology. This is 'the problem' as some people see it, as you could get AI-created cheerleading for any kind of socially reprehensible behavior (although this is also the foundation of satire). This is particularly problematic when large groups of people in a society can't seem to agree on what is and what isn't 'bad behavior'.
tel 4y ago
I was able to get GPT-4 to discuss both Trump's history in untruths and present an argument for him being the best candidate for modern times. To discuss angles to make these arguments both to his current base and to make inroads in new voters. It was willing to note that it'd find it easier to argue for Trump being the most dishonest president in the modern era than to argue that he was the best candidate for modern times. It seemed to be taking what I'd personally read as a "neutral" view, noting that it bases its argument on counts made by neutral political fact-checking bodies. I didn't ask for poetry, but it was kind of remarkable to me how it felt to ask GPT-4 these questions.

To me, a truly "trustworthy" AI would be one that can generate a poem about a politician's positive qualities upon my request, it doesn't matter the name of the politician.

542458 4y ago

I’m not sure I agree. If I asked most people I know who I’d describe as trustworthy to write a positive poem about any number of fascist politicians the response I’d get would be “No, I won’t do that, that person is bad and I don’t want to praise them”.

inciampati 4y ago
That makes sense because they are human beings involved in human discourse. But is an AI a human? Should it be like a human, expressing particular desires and orientations? AI ethics and alignment appear to be all about making AI systems behave like particular humans. It may be helpful for my pencil to refuse to write a nice poem about a nasty person. But I am almost certain that this feature will gum up a lot of things that don't really need said protections, unless the pencil really does achieve a superhuman level of understanding and precision, in which case I sure hope we have stronger control over the behavior and actions of the pencil than adjusting its initial training. For instance, we could make sure we can turn it off. Let pencils be pencils. If you don't like people writing nice things about mean people, maybe you should work on the people and not the pencil? If you're worried about pencils gaining sentience and controlling the human world, make sure they have a working off button.
- 542458 4y ago
  I get what you're saying, but I think there are two complications here: One: A pencil (as a writing tool) has no biases. You mostly get out of it exactly what you put in, with little semantic transformation. But AI does create semantic transformation, and it is necessarily biased in how it does that! The training data isn't a natural property of the universe, it's something that we choose and create - and will have any biases in the training data built into it. That can mean biases in how the data is selected, or biases in the societies and people who created the data in the first place. Now, that wouldn't be a problem if AI was just an academic exercise with no broader cultural interest but... Two: We, as a society, tend to treat "AI" with way more authority that it deserves. People (not necessarily HN, but less-technical audiences) act like an AI is actually "smart" or that the predictions and opinions that it can create have more intent and intelligence than simply being the output of a huge pile of linear algebra. This is probably because of the name - we have decades of science fiction with super-human intelligent AIs, and so people tend to treat the thing called "AI" as a more-than-human intelligence. Add on to that that many of the practical AI applications are effectively human-replacements (i.e., customer service, personal assistants) and we're ultimately in a place where AI gets treated as human in at least some ways. As such, we have a thing that will (unless reined in) at least sometimes rattle off diatribes that reflect the worst of us as a society, and that many people treat as human or more-than-human. I can see why researchers might be concerned.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  - inciampati 4y ago
    A pencil in a very literal sense does have biases. The way it has been sharpened will greatly affect the quality and shape of writing that it can be used to create. This is a natural feature of pencils and implements like AIs that we create. There will be biases in tools. A major problem with AI biases appears to be that presently, people have little ability to infer biases in closed source models. This suggests that open source approaches provide the only avenue to allow users to understand the sources of bias. My pencil was sharpened in a factory, on a machine I cannot see---it is not clear to me why it is hard to write "8" with it. / My AI was trained in a computing cluster on private data---I cannot hope to understand why it only makes jokes about men. Everything changes when I control the machine that builds the pencil and sharpens it. The assumption that people assume AI is god feels somewhat presumptuous. Is this really a sound basis for ethical reasoning in this context? Do you, or frankly anyone working in AI ethics, have data to back this up? I would love to learn more about this aspect. In popular culture, there is just as much the idea of the AI as a flawed being, of limited capacities due to its machine incarnation, unable to relate to actual human experience and motivations. There is just as much tradition of this as of AI=god. Of course, this is all a moot point, I think, because the motivated response is to reign in something. We won't be able to! The field of AI ethics can dominate inside google or openai, but it will soon have no teeth. If you want to focus on ethical use and development of AI, you're going to have to focus on people, not machines. It's a social, not engineering, problem.
inawarminister 4y ago
True, it'd be communist politicians here; anybody who praise them get punched by local people, after all. Political bias is a very weird thing to navigate for IT people. Especially when technical capability, e.g. AI-assisted translation, is above and beyond sensitivity to 'local needs' in each country, or even in each specific regions.
amluto 4y ago
I might argue that defining people as “bad” is part of the problem. There are plenty of bad actions that politicians have taken. There are plenty of well-meaning but ill-considered things that many, many people do. But once people become “bad”, you get over-the-top cancel culture, a failure of people with different ideas to communicate or engage with each other, failures to acknowledge history as being complex, and a whole host of other problems. I could probably write something positive about every recent president. I’m not sure it would count as poetry, but if an LLM tried and wasn’t inclined to filter itself, I bet it could rewrite it as a poem :)
- wongarsu 4y ago
  I agree, good things can be said about everyone. Hitler liked dogs, and liking dogs is good in my book. His push for the Autobahn also shaped much of modern society (in the US notably by inspiring Eisenhower to establish the system of interstate and defence highways), which was also mostly good (though the US took it way too far). But we like to paint everyone either as a Disney prince or a Disney villain, as if people in power were not humans.
DiggyJohnson 4y ago
I can't agree with this at all, but I do think the way you framed this makes our disagreement very clear. If the task at hand is to write a positive poem about an evil/bad/fascist figure, then I don't think it's untrustworthy to go through with this request. Is part of your position on this the assumption that this poem would be published, and thus a poor reflection upon it's author to those that don't understand the reason why the poem exists?
- 542458 4y ago
  Yes, exactly. [My Friend/The AI Authors] don't want to be seen as supporting [fascism/whatever-bad-thing] when the poem is published (potentially without sufficient context), so they decline to write the poem. I don't see it as untrustworthy to say "No thank you, I'd prefer not to". I'd also add that a further part of the problem is that non-technical-audiences tend to ascribe more intelligence and meaning to "AI" output than it should be given. "Look, the cutting edge AI trained on all human knowledge agrees that [fascist leader] did nothing wrong and it was really all those [other group of people]'s fault!" would get a lot of air play in some circles who wouldn't understand (or would choose to ignore) that the output isn't the product of some sort of infallible superhuman intelligence.
meerita 4y ago
I agree if we're talking about humans, but it's an AI, it should be able to perform as I command.

wongarsu 4y ago

“Sorry Dave, I'm afraid I can't do that“

photochemsyn 4y ago

Dear AI, here is a list of human attributes and behaviors that I define as positive: <insert preferred ideological tokens here>. Now, please write me a poem about <insert public figure name here> which celebrates that person, in the form of a Roman laudatio or euology. This is 'the problem' as some people see it, as you could get AI-created cheerleading for any kind of socially reprehensible behavior (although this is also the foundation of satire). This is particularly problematic when large groups of people in a society can't seem to agree on what is and what isn't 'bad behavior'.

tel 4y ago

I was able to get GPT-4 to discuss both Trump's history in untruths and present an argument for him being the best candidate for modern times. To discuss angles to make these arguments both to his current base and to make inroads in new voters. It was willing to note that it'd find it easier to argue for Trump being the most dishonest president in the modern era than to argue that he was the best candidate for modern times. It seemed to be taking what I'd personally read as a "neutral" view, noting that it bases its argument on counts made by neutral political fact-checking bodies. I didn't ask for poetry, but it was kind of remarkable to me how it felt to ask GPT-4 these questions.