6 ms·

What the article barely touches upon is that all currently available AIs-as-a-service - permit themselves to store and use your inputs essentially as they see

by p-e-w 3y ago

What the article barely touches upon is that all currently available AIs-as-a-service - permit themselves to store and use your inputs essentially as they see fit, for essentially any purpose - have mechanisms designed to "prevent abuse", without defining what that actually means - are engineered to "keep you safe", without stating clearly what they want to keep you safe from, and without any option to disable those so-called safeguards - have been carefully tuned to align their outputs with the Upper Middle Class U.S. West Coast Tech Scene political zeitgeist of the day, and that is what you'll get from them, even if it is completely inappropriate in your own cultural environment. Caveat emptor.

BoorishBears 3y ago
[flagged]
- dr_dshiv 3y ago
  Not sure why you are downvoted— seems well written and well described.
- esperent 3y ago
  > GPT 4 understands the list of disclaimers it was trained on and will spit them out In my experience this is not the case. If you can get it to do that, can you share the output here?
- ben_w 3y ago
  While it is true that every AI > will always have an alignment, it's trivial to ground them in a different alignment though provided what you want to do isn't so egregious The problem is that "egregious" is defined with respect to > the Upper Middle Class U.S. West Coast Tech Scene political zeitgeist of the day […] even if it is completely inappropriate in your own cultural environment It's easier to see where this goes wrong from the outside, as we all like to think of our social and political zeitgeist as the highest peak of refinement, far better than everyone else including our own past. So, sexuality. I live in Berlin; the KitKatClub isn't far from my current workplace, and I pass several billboards (some spinning cubes, some stationary) for Dildo King on the way to work, and what looked like an ad for a brothel on the way to a previous workplace, topless calendars are sold in full public display in normal shopping malls, and there is a neon statue of Leda and the Swan. The cultural zeitgeist of Silicon Valley is an Overton Window (all zeitgeists are, it's not just voting), and that window includes Apple preventing me from connecting to adult content groups on Telegram and Discord even if I expressly say that is what I want to do. (In a different direction, when I first visited the USA, a few years before the pandemic, I was shocked to find for sale in the supermarket an entire section of father-daughter valentines' cards, as I'm used to that day being just for couples). Or consider alcohol. The US doesn't have a single attitude to alcohol (see map on https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dry_county https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dry_county), but I can say my workplace kitchen has beer, rum, vodka, and sake, while some places in the world consider all alcohol to be illegal. Or beef: steaks are part of my stereotype of American culture, eating it will get you lynched in parts of India. This kind of thing happens often, with a great many taboos in one place being common in another. And, barring an AI taking over and crystallising culture into only one form, it will happen again — many things currently forbidden will be allowed, and many things currently allowed will be forbidden, when Gen Z become the most common grandparents.
- foverzar 3y ago
  [flagged]
  - BoorishBears 3y ago
    [flagged]
sebzim4500 3y ago
Agree with most of this, but your first point is not true of OpenAI. Their terms of service forbid them from training on API inputs unless you explicitly opt in.
- esperent 3y ago
  That's totally false, and you can't even save a chat history on ChatGPT unless you leave this option set to on.
  - actualwitch 3y ago
    Whole point of ChatGPT is to collect data to do reinforcement learning, gp is talking about API access which has different terms (and wasn't banned in eu because of that).
    - esperent 3y ago
      > Whole point of ChatGPT is to collect data to do reinforcement learning No, the point of ChatGPT is to provide a UI to chat with GPT models. Taking the data generated by users and using it for commercial purposes without consent is very likely to be illegal in the EU. Unfortunately they often take years to tackle this kind of stuff.
      - daveguy 3y ago
        It does comply with EU GDPR laws -- EU users are allowed to opt out of training. This was after regulators in Italy shut it down. The US FTC is investigating too. https://www.reuters.com/technology/us-ftc-opens-investigation-into-openai-washington-post-2023-07-13/ https://www.reuters.com/technology/us-ftc-opens-investigatio...
        esperent 3y ago
        To comply with GDPR it has to be opt in, and choosing not to opt in has to not affect the app's functionality. Currently, it's opt-out, and doing so destroys your chat history. They did manage to satisfy Italian regulators but I expect they'll get called out on this more thoroughly in the future. Or maybe they just changed the way this works for Italy?
IG_Semmelweiss 3y ago
What is a casual or nontechnical poweruser to do if the user wants to use LLM for work or education , without worry of the many points you mention?
- raincole 3y ago
  Simple. Just stop worrying them. They're non-issues for average "casual or nontechnical powerusers".
  - jstarfish 3y ago
    Nah. Give it 10 years and it'll be the Robinhood fiasco all over again. Instead of anticipated trades, all these nontechnical power users with novel ideas will make the mistake of telling them to an AI-- and had their ideas stolen and rushed to market by whoever paid for access to mine the logs companies told us they weren't collecting. We already don't trust cloud providers not to spy on our infrastructure. There is little consequence in lying to us. AI will bring us IP theft at scale. Don't discuss anything sensitive or groundbreaking with cloud LLMs. No Google Collab, no OpenAI, nothing. Make do with a local LLM in the form of a Vicuna 13/30B GGML. And even there, you have to watch out for backdoors in Gradio/posthog or weird models that insist on you enabling remote code execution. This domain is unbelievably shady and I can only assume it's because of the low-level access it provides to our collective stream of consciousness. This is going to turn out to be bad news long term. Don't trust cloud LLMs.
roseway4 3y ago
Caveat emptor indeed. LLM-as-a-Service vendors know their customer and this customer’s needs. It’s not you. They’re selling an API to companies for whom safety and governance are part of the value proposition. As others have mentioned, the data retention aspect is specifically /not/ an issue with OpenAI (and other vendors’) APIs. I don’t really get the saltiness so many on this site have towards LLM vendors. It just sounds entitled.
- swyx 3y ago
  there is a particular type of person, who, when presented with a marvelous new thing (idea, product, person), focuses on its flaws rather than its unique merits. we need them to ensure an equitable and sustainable world, but they do not drive progress. i bet they are also as a group far less successful and happy throughout their miserable lives. most will just impotently fart their misery unto others, and only a rare few will actually do something about it… …at which point they wrap around back to becoming makers of imperfect things for the next round of criticism.
- sebzim4500 3y ago
  It's sort of frustrating to know that OpenAI has a better model that wouldn't cost them anything to release, but they don't do it for PR/whatever reasons.
  - roseway4 3y ago
    What “better model”? If you’re referring to whatever LLM GPT-4 was before RLHF, by what measure might this model be better? As I pointed out above, what OpenAI is selling is “best” for their customers.
aagha 3y ago
If it's free, you're the product.

by p-e-w 3y ago

BoorishBears 3y ago

[flagged]

dr_dshiv 3y ago
Not sure why you are downvoted— seems well written and well described.
esperent 3y ago
> GPT 4 understands the list of disclaimers it was trained on and will spit them out In my experience this is not the case. If you can get it to do that, can you share the output here?
ben_w 3y ago
While it is true that every AI > will always have an alignment, it's trivial to ground them in a different alignment though provided what you want to do isn't so egregious The problem is that "egregious" is defined with respect to > the Upper Middle Class U.S. West Coast Tech Scene political zeitgeist of the day […] even if it is completely inappropriate in your own cultural environment It's easier to see where this goes wrong from the outside, as we all like to think of our social and political zeitgeist as the highest peak of refinement, far better than everyone else including our own past. So, sexuality. I live in Berlin; the KitKatClub isn't far from my current workplace, and I pass several billboards (some spinning cubes, some stationary) for Dildo King on the way to work, and what looked like an ad for a brothel on the way to a previous workplace, topless calendars are sold in full public display in normal shopping malls, and there is a neon statue of Leda and the Swan. The cultural zeitgeist of Silicon Valley is an Overton Window (all zeitgeists are, it's not just voting), and that window includes Apple preventing me from connecting to adult content groups on Telegram and Discord even if I expressly say that is what I want to do. (In a different direction, when I first visited the USA, a few years before the pandemic, I was shocked to find for sale in the supermarket an entire section of father-daughter valentines' cards, as I'm used to that day being just for couples). Or consider alcohol. The US doesn't have a single attitude to alcohol (see map on https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dry_county https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dry_county), but I can say my workplace kitchen has beer, rum, vodka, and sake, while some places in the world consider all alcohol to be illegal. Or beef: steaks are part of my stereotype of American culture, eating it will get you lynched in parts of India. This kind of thing happens often, with a great many taboos in one place being common in another. And, barring an AI taking over and crystallising culture into only one form, it will happen again — many things currently forbidden will be allowed, and many things currently allowed will be forbidden, when Gen Z become the most common grandparents.
foverzar 3y ago
[flagged]
- BoorishBears 3y ago
  [flagged]

sebzim4500 3y ago

Agree with most of this, but your first point is not true of OpenAI. Their terms of service forbid them from training on API inputs unless you explicitly opt in.

esperent 3y ago
That's totally false, and you can't even save a chat history on ChatGPT unless you leave this option set to on.
- actualwitch 3y ago
  Whole point of ChatGPT is to collect data to do reinforcement learning, gp is talking about API access which has different terms (and wasn't banned in eu because of that).
  - esperent 3y ago
    > Whole point of ChatGPT is to collect data to do reinforcement learning No, the point of ChatGPT is to provide a UI to chat with GPT models. Taking the data generated by users and using it for commercial purposes without consent is very likely to be illegal in the EU. Unfortunately they often take years to tackle this kind of stuff.
    - daveguy 3y ago
      It does comply with EU GDPR laws -- EU users are allowed to opt out of training. This was after regulators in Italy shut it down. The US FTC is investigating too. https://www.reuters.com/technology/us-ftc-opens-investigation-into-openai-washington-post-2023-07-13/ https://www.reuters.com/technology/us-ftc-opens-investigatio...
      - esperent 3y ago
        To comply with GDPR it has to be opt in, and choosing not to opt in has to not affect the app's functionality. Currently, it's opt-out, and doing so destroys your chat history. They did manage to satisfy Italian regulators but I expect they'll get called out on this more thoroughly in the future. Or maybe they just changed the way this works for Italy?

IG_Semmelweiss 3y ago

What is a casual or nontechnical poweruser to do if the user wants to use LLM for work or education , without worry of the many points you mention?

raincole 3y ago
Simple. Just stop worrying them. They're non-issues for average "casual or nontechnical powerusers".
- jstarfish 3y ago
  Nah. Give it 10 years and it'll be the Robinhood fiasco all over again. Instead of anticipated trades, all these nontechnical power users with novel ideas will make the mistake of telling them to an AI-- and had their ideas stolen and rushed to market by whoever paid for access to mine the logs companies told us they weren't collecting. We already don't trust cloud providers not to spy on our infrastructure. There is little consequence in lying to us. AI will bring us IP theft at scale. Don't discuss anything sensitive or groundbreaking with cloud LLMs. No Google Collab, no OpenAI, nothing. Make do with a local LLM in the form of a Vicuna 13/30B GGML. And even there, you have to watch out for backdoors in Gradio/posthog or weird models that insist on you enabling remote code execution. This domain is unbelievably shady and I can only assume it's because of the low-level access it provides to our collective stream of consciousness. This is going to turn out to be bad news long term. Don't trust cloud LLMs.

roseway4 3y ago

Caveat emptor indeed. LLM-as-a-Service vendors know their customer and this customer’s needs. It’s not you. They’re selling an API to companies for whom safety and governance are part of the value proposition. As others have mentioned, the data retention aspect is specifically /not/ an issue with OpenAI (and other vendors’) APIs. I don’t really get the saltiness so many on this site have towards LLM vendors. It just sounds entitled.

swyx 3y ago
there is a particular type of person, who, when presented with a marvelous new thing (idea, product, person), focuses on its flaws rather than its unique merits. we need them to ensure an equitable and sustainable world, but they do not drive progress. i bet they are also as a group far less successful and happy throughout their miserable lives. most will just impotently fart their misery unto others, and only a rare few will actually do something about it… …at which point they wrap around back to becoming makers of imperfect things for the next round of criticism.
sebzim4500 3y ago
It's sort of frustrating to know that OpenAI has a better model that wouldn't cost them anything to release, but they don't do it for PR/whatever reasons.
- roseway4 3y ago
  What “better model”? If you’re referring to whatever LLM GPT-4 was before RLHF, by what measure might this model be better? As I pointed out above, what OpenAI is selling is “best” for their customers.

aagha 3y ago

If it's free, you're the product.