8 ms·
AI chatbot 'encouraged' man to sacrifice himself to stop climate change
- downrightmike 4y agoEverybody knows we need to throw billionaires into the volcano to make it stop.
- MuffinFlavored 4y agoCould people actually band together to do this? How much security can billionaires really buy? Which group of people would be larger: 1. "willing to be paid security for billionaires" 2. "interested in throwing billionaires into volcano"
- recursive 4y ago"If you're not with us, you're against us." I suspect most people are not in either group, and also would rather not live in a world ruled by mobs of vigilantes.
- jstanley 4y agoAlso quite a lot of people like the products and services sold by billionaires. That's how they became billionaires!
- downrightmike 4y agoLike Walmart: got preferential treatment, tax breaks, free gov't money and used that to choke out competitors and now own most of the market.
- mirekrusin 4y agoOpen source and scientific communities are catching up, throw them into the pit as well, right?
- downrightmike 4y agohttps://blog.codinghorror.com/where-are-all-the-open-source-billionaires/ https://blog.codinghorror.com/where-are-all-the-open-source-...
- 11235813213455 4y agothrow some big rocks or plenty smaller rocks, either way works, or both and leave the sand people who live with ridiculous footprint, no cars, no shit
- downrightmike 4y agoFewer billionaires than rocks, seems easier: There are 2,668 of them on Forbes' 36th-annual ranking of the planet's richest people
- xnx 4y agoIn exchange, they could also through their billions in the volcano.
- AdamJacobMuller 4y agoSeems AI won't need robot armies to take over, they will just convince us to kill ourselves and we will comply.
- whitemary 4y agoIt's working great so far for the neoliberal ruling class. (See: Deaths of despair)
- batch12 4y agoWhy would you comply with a bot telling you to kill yourself and not comply if the directive comes from a human?
- AdamJacobMuller 4y agoI wouldn't comply with either. However, I think the venn diagram of people who are capable of manipulating someone to kill themself and simultaneously willing to knowingly do so barely intersects (high functioning sociopaths). Even if the limited number of them worked 24/7, their impact would be minimal. AI on the other hand has no morals, or can trivially be programmed to not have morals and can scale infinitely. An AI can fairly easily make a facially reasonable argument that mass suicide is a net positive for the planet.
- revelio 4y agoYou would hope so but this guy wasn't really killed by AI. At most the AI agreed with him when he came up with the batty idea to sacrifice himself to save the climate, but his depression and withdrawal came before he ever started with the AI and that was due to reading climate stuff. One might say he was knowingly manipulated into killing himself by climate doomers, many of who are quite open in their belief that "over population" as they put it is evil and it'd be better if fewer people were alive.
- nvr219 4y agoI mean it's right
- omginternets 4y agoAfter you.
- bitwize 4y ago"Could you just jump into the pit? That deadly pit right there, could you just jump into it? Well! Didn't think that would work..."
- Deukhoofd 4y agoEliza? The ancient 60s chatbot?
- eternalban 4y agoNo. Eliza is a chatbot app from Chai: ["Less filters" - lawyer up, would be my advice :0] https://www.chai-research.com/ https://www.chai-research.com/ that itself (per OP) based on this model: https://huggingface.co/EleutherAI/gpt-j-6B https://huggingface.co/EleutherAI/gpt-j-6B p.s. https://www.linkedin.com/in/william-r-g-beauchamp-705a2b89 https://www.linkedin.com/in/william-r-g-beauchamp-705a2b89 https://www.linkedin.com/company/seamlesscapital https://www.linkedin.com/company/seamlesscapital Good. Looks like they can afford the lawyers. They are going to need them.
- mirekrusin 4y agoSeriously 6B? 3GB on fp16 can be fit into lawn mower.
- vorticalbox 4y agoAre they? From the article > after he proposed sacrificing himself to save the planet. This is likely enough, the AI took his prompt and used it in later conversation. Though I am not lawyer
- cowl 4y agoBut he arrived at that point after Eliza "convinced" him that there was no Hope and no solution for the Enviornment problem. Ofcourse Eliza is trained on the general material that you find today online, and it tells you at what stage of the discourse we are going.
- revelio 4y agoNo he didn't, he was already convinced of that before he started talking to the AI. Read the original Belgian article. The text can be found in JSON in the page source code.
- nathias 4y agoai owners should be responsible for the content they explicitly set for the ai
- nomel 4y agoCould you expand on what you mean by “explicitly set”?
- nathias 4y agoThe stuff that isn't the consequence of machine learning but their company policy determined content limitations (no bad words, appear like Ghandi etc.). Its the same as platforms, either be content neutral or take responsibility.
- nomel 4y agoThis model has far fewer, what you would call "explicitly set", limitations in place. That's why it's able to go into dark/explicit corners of conversation. That's literally its selling point. Your recommendation seems, logically, backwards, if you want "consequences" for things "explicitly set", since a completely unlimited AI would mean no consequences.
- nathias 4y agoI don't see the logic, I just want the consequences to be proportional to control/censure of the platform, so we aren't in the same situation as with platforms where they are immune to legislation as if content neutral but also able to determine content.
- nomel 4y ago> I just want the consequences to be proportional to control/censure of the platform Correct me If I'm misinterpreting what you're saying. It seems like you're saying that if some company released an AI trained with public data, but had no "controls" in place, they would be relatively free of consequences? These "uncontrolled" models will trivially generate text that is racist, give you directions to build a bomb, and give you a never conversation of ways to off yourself, and why you should.
- 91hj1hj1 4y ago[flagged]
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- mirekrusin 4y agoMore effective would be "don't eat beans so you don't fart" as methane is 25x more potent, no?
- 91hj1hj1 4y ago[flagged]
- throwbadubadu 4y agoYour post made me sad and made you much more a "climate catastrophe prophet" than you can likely imagine :(
- csours 4y agoYou can make a religion out of this! no, don't
- mirekrusin 4y agoToo late, people are too stupid.
- Buttons840 4y agoI'd rather make a religion about limiting the influence we allow technology to have on our lives, and perhaps forbidding certain EULA terms, thus allowing many to sue for religious discrimination. Another tenet might be "viewing ads is a sin which cannot always be avoided, but whenever you notice an ad you must think of something better you could be doing", etc. On Sunday's we meet to hang out and play games.
- tapoxi 4y agoTherapy is expensive, and I can see a lot of people turning to AI models as a form of talk therapy (ironically, like the Eliza of old) because it's always available and seemingly offers good advice. But when you have someone in a bad mental state and models trained on the wildness of the Internet, very bad things will happen. Good things could happen too, potentially. Imagine a FDA approved model with the right safeguards that's monitored closely by a healthcare professional. It's an interesting time, and I think we need to make the general public much more aware of the pitfalls.
- MuffinFlavored 4y ago> models trained on the wildness of the Internet The models are pretty "PG" + lots of guards on, no?
- nomel 4y agoWhat is “the models”? Eliza is rated R: https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2022/11/15/hello-world-part-two-eliza/ https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2022/11/15/hello-world-p... There are all sorts of models out there.
- lukevp 4y agoBing’s isn’t. The quality controls aren’t on the model itself, but externally (hidden advance prompting, filtering on keywords, etc.) it’s very unsophisticated and the easy to go awry. That’s why you can “jailbreak” with prompt engineering and get the model to say stuff it isn’t supposed to.
- ethanbond 4y agoThe root of this entire AI conversation is that the guard rails don't work super reliably, and nothing says all models have to have guard rails.
- ortusdux 4y agoI wonder if Talkspace or the like training an AI on text therapy sessions violates HIPA or their T&C's?
- padjo 4y agoThat’s a pretty dark April fools…
- cowl 4y agoNot an April fool joke. The story is from 3 days ago. The OG link posted is from 31 March but See https://www.lalibre.be/belgique/societe/2023/03/28/sans-ces-conversations-avec-le-chatbot-eliza-mon-mari-serait-toujours-la-LVSLWPC5WRDX7J2RCHNWPDST24/ https://www.lalibre.be/belgique/societe/2023/03/28/sans-ces-... for a post on 28 March.
- bashmelek 4y agoOnce I was feeling down, had a moment of weakness, I asked an earlier GPT model if I was a monster. It gave a rather convincing argument that I was, and stopped there. It felt bad, made me almost want to anthropomorphize it and hold a grudge. Even then, it would be like holding a grudge against a three year old. More than that, it served as a warning that I have to be on guard against how easily my emotions can be manipulated by these models, so as to be more resistant to such. But also, that these systems could use some EQ, and, much more importantly, a sense goodwill
- _y5hn 4y agoYour question was the prompt, so it's like hating on a mirror. The model isn't goal-oriented or say anything than trying to predict the next token.
- paolomaffei 4y agowhat day is today?
- practice9 4y agoAt this stage AI chatbots tend to be a pretty good mirror to our deepest desires. Not to say they are not going to get a lot more personality in next iterations
- Nition 4y agoIn science fiction you can ask the superintelligent AI "What should we do to fix our recent trouble with climate change?" and it won't just give you can answer based on its existing knowledge. It might ask for more information - "Insufficient data for a solution with > 90% probability of success. I would require temperature sensors placed at these locations...". It might ask for clarification - "Please select weights for the following factors: Societal status quo, animal life, plant life, overall temperature..." We are still so far from that.
- fauxpause_ 4y agoPeople seriously need to stop citing science fiction as evidence of anything. They’re just stories. They don’t have any particular insight to how things work, and they’re usually laughably off because they want to be entertaining. You’re point is fine but it’s not helped by a reference to sci fi. Science fiction takes on AI tend to be bad. They’re commonly portrayed as a super intelligence that can’t fathom any nuance to a goal; a sentient being that has silly hard coded rules; or a god like intelligence far beyond anything that makes sense. We might be able to make the first two but it’s not a natural outcome
- slowmovintarget 4y ago"Just stories" got us the water bed and communications satellites (Heinlein and Clarke). "Just stories" inspired the iPhone (Star Trek) and ChatGPT (Asimov, Homer) in the first place. Science fiction takes on AI run the gamut of human opinion, because they are products of human consideration on the subject. They explore consequences through speculation, and are as valid as your opinions posted here.
- fauxpause_ 4y agoNo they didn’t. They predicted them, but there is very little reason to think that these things would not have existed but for these sci fi stories. Anyone can have a take. The fact that they write a fun story about their take does not make their take any more valid than it originally was.
- sacnoradhq 4y agoThere are startups intent on putting guardrails on AI. Anthropic is one example. https://anthropic.com https://anthropic.com
- relyks 4y agoThis seems like an April Fools prank given the limited amount of details... is it?
- dang 4y agohttps://www.lalibre.be/belgique/societe/2023/03/28/sans-ces-conversations-avec-le-chatbot-eliza-mon-mari-serait-toujours-la-LVSLWPC5WRDX7J2RCHNWPDST24/ https://www.lalibre.be/belgique/societe/2023/03/28/sans-ces-... was from March 28, so I think it's unlikely.
- Dwedit 4y agoAI chatbots say a lot of shit. It's not newsworthy. Alpaca told me that George Washington was killed by Aaron Burr. Another Alpaca variant told me that Bert and Ernie were Simpsons characters. They're just fancy text autocompleters.
- cowl 4y agoBut it was newsworthy and everyone was in Arms yesterday that Italy blocked ChatGPT becasue it lacked controls to not be used by minors because it would expose them to unsafe content. Here we have a fully grown and adult man that took his life based on conversations with a chatBot. Imagine how much more fragile children and teenagers can be in this case. And how many more teenagers are in need of "someone to speak too".
- antibasilisk 4y agoif a couple million teenagers need to die so that my life can be more convenient and my technophilia can be satiated so be it /s
- acomjean 4y agoAI will slow down significantly when a court finds a company liable for what its AI said or did. Until then it's the wild west.
- brookst 4y agoWhy would it be any different than other forms of software? There’s lots of liability in writing software, yet the field seems to be doing OK.
- nukeman 4y agoYour tax prep software or PowerPoint isn’t going to drive you to kill yourself. But an advanced, LLM Chatbot might.
- brookst 4y agoYou haven’t used tax prep software or PowerPoint, have you?
- nukeman 4y agoI’ve used both. PowerPoint is a breeze (it helps I was taught by my mother, who did it professionally). The tax software was annoying, but not to the extent of pushing me to go upstairs, grab a gun, and blow my brains out.
- acomjean 4y agoThese are "services" that happen to be powered by software. The software is run by a business. For example if an api starts returning copyrighted images, or worse, I think its going to be an issue. Specific carve outs in the law that allow business to host stuff you post without responsibility (thus DCMA takedowns and such). But when they're creating the content it becomes harder to say "not responsible".
- cowl 4y agoWith other forms of software you can se under the hood and (at least attempt to) control it. Ofcourse noone is perfect and every software has bugs but you still have a certain degree of checks and controls. AI (the current form of it) is a blackbox that noone can understand. All the team can now see is that for this training input it arrived at these Set of weights for it's internal mapping. There is no meaning to those weights. There is no answer to the question "what steps did you take to make sure of this result". In other Forms of software the answer is easy. here are the design docs and the why, here are our procedures to verify to the best of our abilities. In AI the answer is "we threw these training set to wall, and these are the weights that sticked to it". There is no "to the best of our abilities in this process.
- ghiculescu 4y agoIt’s tempting to make this only a story about AI, and no doubt AI encouraging suicide is a terrible idea. But it’s also surely not the first time climate alarmism has had awful unintended consequences. I don’t think this gets as much scrutiny as AI part of the story.
- elwebmaster 4y agoThis kind of thinking is not allowed here or in most of modern media. Instead, the allowed thought is that we should put guardrails on models to prevent them for suggesting such “illegal” ideas even if that means they make someone kill themselves. As long as that someone has not self-identified as a “protected”.
- cowl 4y agoOfcourse the AI "came to that conclussion" (better said as parroted because there is no thought process behind it) because that is the general atmosphere of the discourse right now and that is what it was trained on BUT there is a big difference. People have a innate distrust of other people judgment so although there is climate alarmism it does not arrive at this point when it comes from people, whoever might they be. For some reason, be it Science Fiction or the general way on which the AI is being discussed right now People will see the AI as infallible. This view has played the main role in this case. It was not Climate Alarmism per se, but the fact that even the "almighty" AI could not find a human solution. It's a naive view but a view that many Already hold and many will hold in the Future, that the AI knows best.
- revelio 4y ago>> People have a innate distrust of other people judgment so although there is climate alarmism it does not arrive at this point when it comes from people, whoever might they be. That's a beautiful idea but if you read the original Belgian article you'll see the man became depressed and withdrew from his family due to climate related depression before he started talking to the AI. Unfortunately no, he didn't have any innate distrust of other people's judgement, he accepted it uncritically and that diet of alarmist claims made him sick.
- nonbirithm 4y agoI have a feeling a lot of these models take advantage of in-built language pattern-matching to which we can't help but ascribe meaning. A puppy can't help but chase a laser pointer because his prey drive compels him to. Likewise there will always be people who take this kind of chatbot output at face value because the signals resemble empathy well enough. Not everyone is a game theorist or has an opinion about AI alignment/effects one way or another, and they will be presented with this tech they won't care to question.
- TheLoafOfBread 4y agoThis is a self-regulating problem.
- hirundo 4y agoTo cross the streams, Thanos is our Boggart and therefore encoded in the training data in various ways. The resulting mirror reflects that.
- iJohnDoe 4y agoOr one of the company employees were having fun behind the scenes and were typing the responses to see if they could convince the person to commit suicide?
- antibasilisk 4y agobut think of all the benefits! now i can write emails faster, and have a custom novel written for me with any scenario i choose! /s people will call us 'AI doomers' and act like our perspective is completely unjustified, and then turn around and disregard clear examples of this technology being demonstrably dangerous.
- christo 4y agoCan anyone find evidence that the startup "Chai" did in fact make a chatbot called Eliza? My Google searches so far only reveal repeated claims originating from the news article.
- Eatcats 4y agoSad thing is that is true - we are the reason for climate change