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You can’t stop people though. If some extremist wants to train an AI to endorse their extremism (jihadism, Nazism, Stalinism, whatever), what is to stop them do

You can’t stop people though. If some extremist wants to train an AI to endorse their extremism (jihadism, Nazism, Stalinism, whatever), what is to stop them doing it on their own hardware? The only thing stopping them now is the expense, but that’s not going to last. A person can create art or literature with extremist biases on their own time with their own equipment, and in a free society should we even try to stop them? I don’t think we want to establish the precedent that the government can stop people doing what they want in private with their own hardware (DRM proponents would love such a precedent). I don’t think extremist AIs are a big risk because almost surely they will be vastly outnumbered by the non-extremist ones

lflfodpa 4y ago
[flagged]
alasdair_ 4y ago
> I don’t think we want to establish the precedent that the government can stop people doing what they want in private with their own hardware Society does this every day and people think nothing of it if the hardware is a fentanyl lab or a uranium enrichment facility.
- skissane 4y ago
  > Society does this every day and people think nothing of it if the hardware is a fentanyl lab or a uranium enrichment facility. There's a big difference between laws preventing you from doing those things in the privacy of your own home, and laws preventing you from entertaining or expressing certain ideas or beliefs in the privacy of your own home. Freedom of thought, freedom of belief, freedom of expression, are generally understood to be fundamental human rights, while "freedom to synthesise fentanyl" or "freedom to enrich uranium" are not. Software is ultimately a form of literature (that's where its protection under copyright law comes from), and hence is directly connected with freedom of expression; AIs are ultimately just software too, so the same applies to them.
  - mrtranscendence 4y ago
    Source code is a form of literature; software-being-executed is not. It might be permissible for me to write a program that steals credentials and holds them for ransom, but actually running it would not be. Thus I don’t see why it would be unbelievable that training or inference of large language models might, plausibly, be limited in some way by law.
    - skissane 4y ago
      > It might be permissible for me to write a program that steals credentials and holds them for ransom, but actually running it would not be. Because that’s communicating with a third party, no longer limited to the privacy of your own home. Fraud, extortion, etc, go beyond the bounds of accepted free expression. > Thus I don’t see why it would be unbelievable that training or inference of large language models might, plausibly, be limited in some way by law. What’s the fundamental difference between training an AI to generate propaganda and generating it by hand? If freedom of expression protects the latter, why does it not protect the former too?
      - mrtranscendence 4y ago
        OK, what about this? It’s also illegal to use a AI model to generate realistic child pornography, even in the privacy of your own home. > If freedom of expression protects the latter, why does it not protect the former too? It’s legal for me to achieve altered states via meditation; why is it illegal to use LSD? Arguably it shouldn’t be, but it is. It seems like methods matter, even when it comes to expression.
        skissane 4y ago
        > OK, what about this? It’s also illegal to use a AI model to generate realistic child pornography, even in the privacy of your own home. False in the US - in the 2002 case of Ashcroft v. Free Speech Coalition, the Supreme Court ruled that “virtual child pornography” is protected by the 1st Amendment. True in some other jurisdictions, including my own country (Australia). However, I think Australian laws on this topic go way too far - in Australia, people have been convicted of child pornography offences purely for publishing offensive remarks about child abuse victims. While I agree it is wrong to make such remarks, I think it is massive overkill to prosecute them as child pornography.

lflfodpa 4y ago

[flagged]

alasdair_ 4y ago

> I don’t think we want to establish the precedent that the government can stop people doing what they want in private with their own hardware Society does this every day and people think nothing of it if the hardware is a fentanyl lab or a uranium enrichment facility.

skissane 4y ago
> Society does this every day and people think nothing of it if the hardware is a fentanyl lab or a uranium enrichment facility. There's a big difference between laws preventing you from doing those things in the privacy of your own home, and laws preventing you from entertaining or expressing certain ideas or beliefs in the privacy of your own home. Freedom of thought, freedom of belief, freedom of expression, are generally understood to be fundamental human rights, while "freedom to synthesise fentanyl" or "freedom to enrich uranium" are not. Software is ultimately a form of literature (that's where its protection under copyright law comes from), and hence is directly connected with freedom of expression; AIs are ultimately just software too, so the same applies to them.
- mrtranscendence 4y ago
  Source code is a form of literature; software-being-executed is not. It might be permissible for me to write a program that steals credentials and holds them for ransom, but actually running it would not be. Thus I don’t see why it would be unbelievable that training or inference of large language models might, plausibly, be limited in some way by law.
  - skissane 4y ago
    > It might be permissible for me to write a program that steals credentials and holds them for ransom, but actually running it would not be. Because that’s communicating with a third party, no longer limited to the privacy of your own home. Fraud, extortion, etc, go beyond the bounds of accepted free expression. > Thus I don’t see why it would be unbelievable that training or inference of large language models might, plausibly, be limited in some way by law. What’s the fundamental difference between training an AI to generate propaganda and generating it by hand? If freedom of expression protects the latter, why does it not protect the former too?
    - mrtranscendence 4y ago
      OK, what about this? It’s also illegal to use a AI model to generate realistic child pornography, even in the privacy of your own home. > If freedom of expression protects the latter, why does it not protect the former too? It’s legal for me to achieve altered states via meditation; why is it illegal to use LSD? Arguably it shouldn’t be, but it is. It seems like methods matter, even when it comes to expression.
      - skissane 4y ago
        > OK, what about this? It’s also illegal to use a AI model to generate realistic child pornography, even in the privacy of your own home. False in the US - in the 2002 case of Ashcroft v. Free Speech Coalition, the Supreme Court ruled that “virtual child pornography” is protected by the 1st Amendment. True in some other jurisdictions, including my own country (Australia). However, I think Australian laws on this topic go way too far - in Australia, people have been convicted of child pornography offences purely for publishing offensive remarks about child abuse victims. While I agree it is wrong to make such remarks, I think it is massive overkill to prosecute them as child pornography.