4 ms·

It seems odd to me that you're complaining that Google experts are not seeing the bigger picture, when from what I see they are the ones taking ethical concerns

It seems odd to me that you're complaining that Google experts are not seeing the bigger picture, when from what I see they are the ones taking ethical concerns seriously. If solving health and safety risks is "not realistic for the current crop of LLMs", maybe they in fact should not be in the wild? LLM's already have a body count [1], so child safety doesn't sound like an unreasonable thing to ask about. Dumping the responsibility on parents does not actually mitigate the ethical concerns; its just a way of ignoring the "larger picture". [1] E.g., https://www.brusselstimes.com/belgium/430098/belgian-man-commits-suicide-following-exchanges-with-chatgpt https://www.brusselstimes.com/belgium/430098/belgian-man-com...

yazzku 4y ago
How are they taking ethical concerns seriously? They launched the thing despite the internal employees' feedback that the thing lies and says things that would lead to injury or death.
- wpietri 4y ago
  Sorry, I am speaking of the employees taking concerns seriously, not Google itself. I'll edit to clarify.
  - kalium-xyz 4y ago
    What is googles but a sum of its employees?
    - wpietri 4y ago
      Do you think Google is some sort of... democracy? Like they all get together and build consensus for a particular course of action?
BoorishBears 4y ago
You're showing off a perfect example of understanding your domain vs understanding the bigger picture. In your mind not having "100% child safety" is apparently equivalent to "not solving health and safety risks". Unfortunately that's not a take that's compatible with the reality on the ground. The internet is not 100% child safe and if we had locked it up until it was, there'd be no internet. What people fail to understand is that sometimes settling for something strictly worse in domain terms results in a much better overall outcome. — For example, who's having more impact on the future of safety and alignment in LLMs: - Someone working on ethics at OpenAI; who settled for Google's "80%" on all topics including child safety and is therefore empowered to actually achieve that (with a massive head start on learning how alignment is being broken in the real world) - Or someone working on ethics at Google; who was stuck on 100% until their project stalled and their entire opinion got discarded and they get laid off and the thing goes out with an "experiment" label and significantly less testing? You can't steer the ship if it sinks. Some companies are currently at a place where everyone has their hand on the rudder pulling in their own direction as the ship runs into an iceberg because everyone is certain that their direction is correct, and the other direction is certain doom for humanity. At the end of the day you need to learn to discard that sort of extremism, the world is not that black and white.
- worrycue 4y ago
  Seems people have different opinions on what’s acceptable. Many people seem quite happy with ChatGPT despite its tendency to hallucinate with no warning of any kind. Then there are people like me who feel that its unreliability significantly decrease its usefulness - and it’s probably completely useless as a “primary source” of information; it’s at best equivalent to a stack overflow post except without the community feedback to detect bad posts. Like with any stack overflow provided solution, it’s wise to double check with a “primary source” like the official documentation to make sure it does what you think it does. I can understand why some at Google might be hesitant. The information provided by Bard would be seen as coming from Google and if it’s incorrect, Google will be blamed.
  - BoorishBears 4y ago
    The level of irony in saying the world is not black and white... then getting a reply that equates being happy with ChatGPT to not understanding unreliability's effect on a tool's usefulness. Usefulness is not a binary value. One of the biggest advancements of 4 over 3.5 is that it's more reliable: that has made it significantly more useful. — I will say having to explain the relationship being reliability and usefulness tracks with why certain ethical voices just get ignored. At some point you need to be able to have some reasonable shared level of understanding to have a productive conversation. When one side of the conversation thinks others are just so completely lost that they can't understand how something being unreliable makes it less useful... there's just not much productive conversation to be had.
  - nullc 4y ago
    > Many people seem quite happy with ChatGPT despite its tendency to hallucinate with no warning of any kind. > Then there are people like me who feel that its unreliability Depends on what you're using it for, if you're using it for creative purposes the made up information is usually great. If you're using it instead of stack overflow... yeah, then made up stuff can be a problem. ... except sometimes the made up stuff turns out to be correct. :)
- wpietri 4y ago
nullc 4y ago
It's my view that "ethical concerns" in this context are confused at best, worthless virtue signaling frequently, and at worse it as an absurdly _unethical_ effort to use state power to block research and inquiry in order to protect oligopoly profits. As a bonus side effect they get used as an excuse to train in discriminatory biases, with whatever negative effects those will have-- probably mostly just undermining trust in the involved institutions. Offer the system to consenting adults, make them aware that the output is frequently garbage, TEACH them how produce garbage to help them to recognize some of the most obvious failure modes. Done. At that point the result would be generally safer than the URL bar in user's browsers which can take them to all manner of harmful things, including potentially other LLMs -- or the most dangerous of intelligences: contact with other human beings. Mentally ill people, violent people, etc. will always do unfortunate things involving whatever things are in proximity to them. The internet isn't "safe", libraries aren't "safe", the _world_ isn't "safe". But even if the world itself were safe people would still manage harm themselves and others with it with it, because people aren't safe. No one bothers writing about people who committed suicide after losing a game of chess to a child or watching sad movies, but those things happen too. It's a big world and so you name it, someone has probably killed themselves over it or with it or killed someone else because of it. Go look at the mobile 'games' offered in the play store. Can you look at google raking in tons turning children into click-a-holics and tell me seriously that you think "safe" was ever a significant objective? It's only big in the context of ML because there is a socially well connected apocalypse cult ( https://archive.is/eqZx2 https://archive.is/eqZx2 ) pushing the idea that today's ML are materially unsafe in ways that other things aren't and it's a commercially convenient narrative to protect oligopolies.
- wpietri 4y ago
  I guess your view is that if a new thing is approximately as terrible as an existing thing, then it's fine. Mine is that new things are a rare opportunity to make the world less terrible, so we should take a swing at it.
  - BoorishBears 4y ago
    You seem to be going around to everyone who replied to you yesterday and responding in anger. If you're having a bad day, it might be better to not reply.

yazzku 4y ago

How are they taking ethical concerns seriously? They launched the thing despite the internal employees' feedback that the thing lies and says things that would lead to injury or death.

wpietri 4y ago
Sorry, I am speaking of the employees taking concerns seriously, not Google itself. I'll edit to clarify.
- kalium-xyz 4y ago
  What is googles but a sum of its employees?
  - wpietri 4y ago
    Do you think Google is some sort of... democracy? Like they all get together and build consensus for a particular course of action?

BoorishBears 4y ago

You're showing off a perfect example of understanding your domain vs understanding the bigger picture. In your mind not having "100% child safety" is apparently equivalent to "not solving health and safety risks". Unfortunately that's not a take that's compatible with the reality on the ground. The internet is not 100% child safe and if we had locked it up until it was, there'd be no internet. What people fail to understand is that sometimes settling for something strictly worse in domain terms results in a much better overall outcome. — For example, who's having more impact on the future of safety and alignment in LLMs: - Someone working on ethics at OpenAI; who settled for Google's "80%" on all topics including child safety and is therefore empowered to actually achieve that (with a massive head start on learning how alignment is being broken in the real world) - Or someone working on ethics at Google; who was stuck on 100% until their project stalled and their entire opinion got discarded and they get laid off and the thing goes out with an "experiment" label and significantly less testing? You can't steer the ship if it sinks. Some companies are currently at a place where everyone has their hand on the rudder pulling in their own direction as the ship runs into an iceberg because everyone is certain that their direction is correct, and the other direction is certain doom for humanity. At the end of the day you need to learn to discard that sort of extremism, the world is not that black and white.

worrycue 4y ago
Seems people have different opinions on what’s acceptable. Many people seem quite happy with ChatGPT despite its tendency to hallucinate with no warning of any kind. Then there are people like me who feel that its unreliability significantly decrease its usefulness - and it’s probably completely useless as a “primary source” of information; it’s at best equivalent to a stack overflow post except without the community feedback to detect bad posts. Like with any stack overflow provided solution, it’s wise to double check with a “primary source” like the official documentation to make sure it does what you think it does. I can understand why some at Google might be hesitant. The information provided by Bard would be seen as coming from Google and if it’s incorrect, Google will be blamed.
- BoorishBears 4y ago
  The level of irony in saying the world is not black and white... then getting a reply that equates being happy with ChatGPT to not understanding unreliability's effect on a tool's usefulness. Usefulness is not a binary value. One of the biggest advancements of 4 over 3.5 is that it's more reliable: that has made it significantly more useful. — I will say having to explain the relationship being reliability and usefulness tracks with why certain ethical voices just get ignored. At some point you need to be able to have some reasonable shared level of understanding to have a productive conversation. When one side of the conversation thinks others are just so completely lost that they can't understand how something being unreliable makes it less useful... there's just not much productive conversation to be had.
- nullc 4y ago
  > Many people seem quite happy with ChatGPT despite its tendency to hallucinate with no warning of any kind. > Then there are people like me who feel that its unreliability Depends on what you're using it for, if you're using it for creative purposes the made up information is usually great. If you're using it instead of stack overflow... yeah, then made up stuff can be a problem. ... except sometimes the made up stuff turns out to be correct. :)
wpietri 4y ago

nullc 4y ago

It's my view that "ethical concerns" in this context are confused at best, worthless virtue signaling frequently, and at worse it as an absurdly _unethical_ effort to use state power to block research and inquiry in order to protect oligopoly profits. As a bonus side effect they get used as an excuse to train in discriminatory biases, with whatever negative effects those will have-- probably mostly just undermining trust in the involved institutions. Offer the system to consenting adults, make them aware that the output is frequently garbage, TEACH them how produce garbage to help them to recognize some of the most obvious failure modes. Done. At that point the result would be generally safer than the URL bar in user's browsers which can take them to all manner of harmful things, including potentially other LLMs -- or the most dangerous of intelligences: contact with other human beings. Mentally ill people, violent people, etc. will always do unfortunate things involving whatever things are in proximity to them. The internet isn't "safe", libraries aren't "safe", the _world_ isn't "safe". But even if the world itself were safe people would still manage harm themselves and others with it with it, because people aren't safe. No one bothers writing about people who committed suicide after losing a game of chess to a child or watching sad movies, but those things happen too. It's a big world and so you name it, someone has probably killed themselves over it or with it or killed someone else because of it. Go look at the mobile 'games' offered in the play store. Can you look at google raking in tons turning children into click-a-holics and tell me seriously that you think "safe" was ever a significant objective? It's only big in the context of ML because there is a socially well connected apocalypse cult ( https://archive.is/eqZx2 https://archive.is/eqZx2 ) pushing the idea that today's ML are materially unsafe in ways that other things aren't and it's a commercially convenient narrative to protect oligopolies.

wpietri 4y ago
I guess your view is that if a new thing is approximately as terrible as an existing thing, then it's fine. Mine is that new things are a rare opportunity to make the world less terrible, so we should take a swing at it.
- BoorishBears 4y ago
  You seem to be going around to everyone who replied to you yesterday and responding in anger. If you're having a bad day, it might be better to not reply.