7 ms·

Can we please put off worrying about dangerous AI for a couple hundred years? Chat GPT is a chatbot and not much else.. it is not the harbinger of an era of dan

Can we please put off worrying about dangerous AI for a couple hundred years? Chat GPT is a chatbot and not much else.. it is not the harbinger of an era of dangerous AI

antibasilisk 4y ago
Stable Diffusion was used to produce convincing images of Donald Trump being arrested. A guy used GPT to post comments on 4chan without people noticing. A 'mere chatbot' can do much more damage than you think.
circuit10 4y ago
Hundred years? If the current rate of progress holds we have to start worrying about it in 5 or 10 years, the earlier we can come up with solutions the better because it’s a very hard problem
- AnimalMuppet 4y ago
  Naw, it's simple. We're talking about an AI achieving human abilities, well, we can protect against dangerous AIs just as well as we protect against dangerous humans... Oh. Oh dear.
  - javajosh 4y ago
    Remember that AI work with electrons, and we are of atoms. We should focus on where electrons control atoms, and reduce those points. Of particular concern is that AI may be a very strong investor with the right prompts. AI could also figure out how to use any other software. Which can be used to gain access to any marketplace, including the dark ones. Which means AI can use money (electrons) to pay others to modify the world (atoms). Of course, there is already a problem, as you point out. Humans shouldn't have access to these markets either! But yeah to specifically prevent electron-on-atom violence we need to limit AI physical degrees-of-freedom. by limiting marketplaces. National/global security, not personal morality, should guide these new regulations. We need to end all drive-by-wire automobiles, and electronic locks. Too many services are habituated to act on electronic signals without human confirmation - particularly the police. There needs to be an unbroken verbal chain between the person who saw an event and the person doing the law enforcement. Breaks in the human chain should be treated very seriously -they should be treated as firing offenses, at least. There are many other similar changes we're going to need to make. Some folks aren't gonna like this. Regulations are inherently evil, they say. Maybe the mental model should be more like we're the big bad gorilla in the cage. But now there's a tiger in the cage. Regulation restrains the tiger. Also, some folks aren't gonna like it no matter what change you need. The fact of not liking it doesn't mean we don't need it, and it doesn't mean it won't get done. We have to trust that our leaders don't want to die. And besides, the world will adapt. It always does. AI isn't optional, there's no putting the genie back in the bottle - and personally I don't want to. But I also don't want to be stupid about the stakes. Getting our whole species killed for lack of foresight would be deeply, deeply embarrassing.
    - Loughla 4y ago
      I really like your take, but I do not believe it is realistic to expect the response to advanced technology options to be - use even less technology. In the past, new tech has led to integration of new tech. I believe that is the inevitable outcome of AI, and especially AGI once that's a thing. The tool is too attractive not to use. The tool is too fun not to use. The tool is too dangerous to let out of the box, but that is exactly why we'll do it. We're curious little monkeys, after all. "What do you think will happen" absolutely is a survival strategy for our species. The problem is when we encounter something that is so much more advanced than us, even if that advance portion is just access to multiple systems of our own creation. To summarize: I think you make a good point, but I think we're fucked eventually anyways. I can't wait for the inevitable "does my AI have the right to freedom" case in the supreme court when I'm in my 90's.
      - javajosh 4y ago
        No need to be pessimistic. Humans are quite powerful, we have billions of years of brutal iteration in us. I think we can handle AI, even AGI, if we exercise even a modicum of care. It will probably take some major calamity to convince people to take precautions, I just hope it's not that bad. It probably won't be world-ending, so cheer up!
        blibble 4y ago
        > I think we can handle AI, even AGI, if we exercise even a modicum of care. HN itself has been spammed relentlessly with people hooking it up to everything they can think of in an attempt to get a worthless reward (karma) now imagine there's money, power or territory up for grabs instead we are completely fucked
    - ajmurmann 4y ago
      > There needs to be an unbroken verbal chain between the person who saw an event and the person doing the law enforcement Leaving everything else aside, how would this look in practice? I think these conversations would need to be in person, since voice can already be faked. Would I need to run to the police station when I need help?
- Barrin92 4y ago
  How do people determine the "current rate of progress"? There is absolutely no empirical standard to evaluate the performance of AI systems. How is this anything else but a gut feeling? And how is that feeling different from any other period? Minsky et al famously declared that AGI was away a few months of hard work, and they did it for the same reason, they lived through a period of dynamism in computer science. People definitely said it after Deep Blue beat Kasparov. Progress in AI doesn't imply that we're dangerously close to AGI, just because people at any given time are amazed by individual breakthroughs they witness.
  - ben_w 4y ago
    > There is absolutely no empirical standard to evaluate the performance of AI systems. How is this anything else but a gut feeling? Why do you think this? There are loads of tests of their performance. Common one right now is to give LLMs the same exams we put humans through, leading to e.g. the graph on page 6: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2303.08774.pdf https://arxiv.org/pdf/2303.08774.pdf Are they the best tests? Probably not! But they are definitely empirical.
    - dkjaudyeqooe 4y ago
      But LLMs are good at those tests because they've seen (some version of) the answers on the internet. Give students concurrent access to the internet and I'm sure they can pass all sorts of tests.
      - ben_w 4y ago
        An irrelevant counterargument, IMO. First, students only get good after studying — education is not some magic spell cast by the teacher that only operates on a human's immortal soul. As we should not dismiss what students learn just because we could look it up, it is strange to dismiss what GPT has learned just because it could be looked up. Second, the GPT-3 (and presumably also GPT-4) training set is about 500e9 tokens, which is what? Something like just a few terabytes? We've been able to store that in a pocket for years now without being able to do almost any of the things that GPT can do — arbitrary natural language synthesis let alone arbitrary natural language queries — on a computer, even when we programmed the rules, and in this case the program learned the rules from the content. Even just a few years ago, SOTA NLP was basically just "count up how many good words and bad words are in the text, the sentiment score is total good minus total bad." That difference is what these test scores are showing.
morinoandou 4y ago
While AI is not yet at a level where we need to worry about it harvesting us for batteries, I think there is still reason to worry. It's easy to think of ways that malicious or overly profit-driven actors could misuse AI for great harm. Internet forums are already full of shills and sock puppets, and chatbots seem likely make the problem much, much worse. Things like advertisers masquaraded as regular users subtly pushing for their own products, or even foreign states using AI chatbots to spread misinformation and mistrust among the populace, etc. Chatbots enable such manipulation efforts at previously unseen scales.
- brandon272 4y ago
  Given the technology available as of today it seems like it would be fairly trivial to start deploying LLMs to post context-aware propaganda from entirely manufactured identities on internet forums and communities. At this point I am just assuming that there are parties actively working on this. In fact, I think the hard part of the whole thing would be trying to make the network traffic and source IPs look legitimate to the site owners/admins and it will be interesting to see how the battle unfolds to start authenticating content posted in communities as having come from an actual human.
- SuoDuanDao 4y ago
  If you consider a corporation to be an AI that requires real-time training data from humans, AI is already harvesting us for batteries. I've heard the opinion that that's what the Matrix was actually about.
escapecharacter 4y ago
You are correct about AI not being inherently some spooky dangerous thing. However, human beings will treat it like it is, so you will experience non-sensical happenings like “your new credit score, brought to you by AI”. When you dispute this, the credit score company will shrug and say “you’ll have to speak the AI directly to make a claim, it is objective”. Meanwhile the AI isn’t that much better than ChatGPT now
jiveturkey42 4y ago
Chat GPT is a consumer product and hardly the pinnacle of AI research. We have no clue what is getting developed for million dollar private contracts
- Loughla 4y ago
  Whenever someone states that we are so far off of --insert technology barrier here--, I like to remind them that the F-22 was developed in the early to mid-90's. The F-16 was developed in the 1970's, and the F-15 was developed in the 1960's. We have no idea what is happening behind the curtain, and to assume that private industry or the might of the US military is not decades ahead of what is available for consumers is just naive at best.
rf15 4y ago
For artists Midjourney/StableDiffusion/etc. are already a very real and surprisingly effective threat.
PeterStuer 4y ago
Lesser AI in the hands of ignorant and/or malevolent humans can be pretty dangerous though.
ben_w 4y ago
If we had started taking greenhouse gasses seriously a century sooner, they'd never have built up enough to be a problem.
dkjaudyeqooe 4y ago
It's notable that we've been having AI panics since Eliza. What is it about chatbots that trigger people? Probably the importance and centrality of language in human consciousness, and the manifest credularity of the general population (and many readers of HN). Unfortunately it's unlikely this will stop, and it'll probably get worse. The final irony will be that when some "real AI" is created, no-one will believe it, having been exhausted by 200 years of hype.
qgin 4y ago
Current gpt-level technology already makes personalize psyop campaigns possible.
pixl97 4y ago
"I am a skilled textile worker, the auto-loom will never represent a threat to me" --BigCryo 1760

Can we please put off worrying about dangerous AI for a couple hundred years? Chat GPT is a chatbot and not much else.. it is not the harbinger of an era of dangerous AI

antibasilisk 4y ago

Stable Diffusion was used to produce convincing images of Donald Trump being arrested. A guy used GPT to post comments on 4chan without people noticing. A 'mere chatbot' can do much more damage than you think.

circuit10 4y ago

Hundred years? If the current rate of progress holds we have to start worrying about it in 5 or 10 years, the earlier we can come up with solutions the better because it’s a very hard problem

AnimalMuppet 4y ago
Naw, it's simple. We're talking about an AI achieving human abilities, well, we can protect against dangerous AIs just as well as we protect against dangerous humans... Oh. Oh dear.
- javajosh 4y ago
  Remember that AI work with electrons, and we are of atoms. We should focus on where electrons control atoms, and reduce those points. Of particular concern is that AI may be a very strong investor with the right prompts. AI could also figure out how to use any other software. Which can be used to gain access to any marketplace, including the dark ones. Which means AI can use money (electrons) to pay others to modify the world (atoms). Of course, there is already a problem, as you point out. Humans shouldn't have access to these markets either! But yeah to specifically prevent electron-on-atom violence we need to limit AI physical degrees-of-freedom. by limiting marketplaces. National/global security, not personal morality, should guide these new regulations. We need to end all drive-by-wire automobiles, and electronic locks. Too many services are habituated to act on electronic signals without human confirmation - particularly the police. There needs to be an unbroken verbal chain between the person who saw an event and the person doing the law enforcement. Breaks in the human chain should be treated very seriously -they should be treated as firing offenses, at least. There are many other similar changes we're going to need to make. Some folks aren't gonna like this. Regulations are inherently evil, they say. Maybe the mental model should be more like we're the big bad gorilla in the cage. But now there's a tiger in the cage. Regulation restrains the tiger. Also, some folks aren't gonna like it no matter what change you need. The fact of not liking it doesn't mean we don't need it, and it doesn't mean it won't get done. We have to trust that our leaders don't want to die. And besides, the world will adapt. It always does. AI isn't optional, there's no putting the genie back in the bottle - and personally I don't want to. But I also don't want to be stupid about the stakes. Getting our whole species killed for lack of foresight would be deeply, deeply embarrassing.
  - Loughla 4y ago
    I really like your take, but I do not believe it is realistic to expect the response to advanced technology options to be - use even less technology. In the past, new tech has led to integration of new tech. I believe that is the inevitable outcome of AI, and especially AGI once that's a thing. The tool is too attractive not to use. The tool is too fun not to use. The tool is too dangerous to let out of the box, but that is exactly why we'll do it. We're curious little monkeys, after all. "What do you think will happen" absolutely is a survival strategy for our species. The problem is when we encounter something that is so much more advanced than us, even if that advance portion is just access to multiple systems of our own creation. To summarize: I think you make a good point, but I think we're fucked eventually anyways. I can't wait for the inevitable "does my AI have the right to freedom" case in the supreme court when I'm in my 90's.
    - javajosh 4y ago
      No need to be pessimistic. Humans are quite powerful, we have billions of years of brutal iteration in us. I think we can handle AI, even AGI, if we exercise even a modicum of care. It will probably take some major calamity to convince people to take precautions, I just hope it's not that bad. It probably won't be world-ending, so cheer up!
      - blibble 4y ago
        > I think we can handle AI, even AGI, if we exercise even a modicum of care. HN itself has been spammed relentlessly with people hooking it up to everything they can think of in an attempt to get a worthless reward (karma) now imagine there's money, power or territory up for grabs instead we are completely fucked
  - ajmurmann 4y ago
    > There needs to be an unbroken verbal chain between the person who saw an event and the person doing the law enforcement Leaving everything else aside, how would this look in practice? I think these conversations would need to be in person, since voice can already be faked. Would I need to run to the police station when I need help?
Barrin92 4y ago
How do people determine the "current rate of progress"? There is absolutely no empirical standard to evaluate the performance of AI systems. How is this anything else but a gut feeling? And how is that feeling different from any other period? Minsky et al famously declared that AGI was away a few months of hard work, and they did it for the same reason, they lived through a period of dynamism in computer science. People definitely said it after Deep Blue beat Kasparov. Progress in AI doesn't imply that we're dangerously close to AGI, just because people at any given time are amazed by individual breakthroughs they witness.
- ben_w 4y ago
  > There is absolutely no empirical standard to evaluate the performance of AI systems. How is this anything else but a gut feeling? Why do you think this? There are loads of tests of their performance. Common one right now is to give LLMs the same exams we put humans through, leading to e.g. the graph on page 6: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2303.08774.pdf https://arxiv.org/pdf/2303.08774.pdf Are they the best tests? Probably not! But they are definitely empirical.
  - dkjaudyeqooe 4y ago
    But LLMs are good at those tests because they've seen (some version of) the answers on the internet. Give students concurrent access to the internet and I'm sure they can pass all sorts of tests.
    - ben_w 4y ago
      An irrelevant counterargument, IMO. First, students only get good after studying — education is not some magic spell cast by the teacher that only operates on a human's immortal soul. As we should not dismiss what students learn just because we could look it up, it is strange to dismiss what GPT has learned just because it could be looked up. Second, the GPT-3 (and presumably also GPT-4) training set is about 500e9 tokens, which is what? Something like just a few terabytes? We've been able to store that in a pocket for years now without being able to do almost any of the things that GPT can do — arbitrary natural language synthesis let alone arbitrary natural language queries — on a computer, even when we programmed the rules, and in this case the program learned the rules from the content. Even just a few years ago, SOTA NLP was basically just "count up how many good words and bad words are in the text, the sentiment score is total good minus total bad." That difference is what these test scores are showing.

morinoandou 4y ago

While AI is not yet at a level where we need to worry about it harvesting us for batteries, I think there is still reason to worry. It's easy to think of ways that malicious or overly profit-driven actors could misuse AI for great harm. Internet forums are already full of shills and sock puppets, and chatbots seem likely make the problem much, much worse. Things like advertisers masquaraded as regular users subtly pushing for their own products, or even foreign states using AI chatbots to spread misinformation and mistrust among the populace, etc. Chatbots enable such manipulation efforts at previously unseen scales.

brandon272 4y ago
Given the technology available as of today it seems like it would be fairly trivial to start deploying LLMs to post context-aware propaganda from entirely manufactured identities on internet forums and communities. At this point I am just assuming that there are parties actively working on this. In fact, I think the hard part of the whole thing would be trying to make the network traffic and source IPs look legitimate to the site owners/admins and it will be interesting to see how the battle unfolds to start authenticating content posted in communities as having come from an actual human.
SuoDuanDao 4y ago
If you consider a corporation to be an AI that requires real-time training data from humans, AI is already harvesting us for batteries. I've heard the opinion that that's what the Matrix was actually about.

escapecharacter 4y ago

You are correct about AI not being inherently some spooky dangerous thing. However, human beings will treat it like it is, so you will experience non-sensical happenings like “your new credit score, brought to you by AI”. When you dispute this, the credit score company will shrug and say “you’ll have to speak the AI directly to make a claim, it is objective”. Meanwhile the AI isn’t that much better than ChatGPT now

jiveturkey42 4y ago

Chat GPT is a consumer product and hardly the pinnacle of AI research. We have no clue what is getting developed for million dollar private contracts

Loughla 4y ago
Whenever someone states that we are so far off of --insert technology barrier here--, I like to remind them that the F-22 was developed in the early to mid-90's. The F-16 was developed in the 1970's, and the F-15 was developed in the 1960's. We have no idea what is happening behind the curtain, and to assume that private industry or the might of the US military is not decades ahead of what is available for consumers is just naive at best.

rf15 4y ago

For artists Midjourney/StableDiffusion/etc. are already a very real and surprisingly effective threat.

PeterStuer 4y ago

Lesser AI in the hands of ignorant and/or malevolent humans can be pretty dangerous though.

ben_w 4y ago

If we had started taking greenhouse gasses seriously a century sooner, they'd never have built up enough to be a problem.

dkjaudyeqooe 4y ago

It's notable that we've been having AI panics since Eliza. What is it about chatbots that trigger people? Probably the importance and centrality of language in human consciousness, and the manifest credularity of the general population (and many readers of HN). Unfortunately it's unlikely this will stop, and it'll probably get worse. The final irony will be that when some "real AI" is created, no-one will believe it, having been exhausted by 200 years of hype.

qgin 4y ago

Current gpt-level technology already makes personalize psyop campaigns possible.

pixl97 4y ago

"I am a skilled textile worker, the auto-loom will never represent a threat to me" --BigCryo 1760