8 ms·

AI model weight providers should not police uses, no matter how awful they are

125 points by andy99 3y ago

chpatrick 3y ago
If that's how they think they'll do the least harm, why not? It's their tech, they can put whatever license they want on it. Whether it achieves anything is another question.
- holmesworcester 3y ago
  Well, the EFF argument is that the deeper you go in the stack, the more you find chokepoints that, if fully used in this way to express preferencs about content, would harm or end the general-purpose nature of the Internet, or computing, and that the cost of doing this would outweigh the benefits. You probably agree that a monopoly ISP or near-monopoly backbone provider censoring arbitrarily would be a problem, even though it's their tech. Or if not you would probably agree that the government doing it would be a problem. And then it's easy to see that it's just as much a problem when monopolies do it when you remember that the government has the power to make or unmake monopolies according to how compliant they are with the government's censorship priorities. I don't know if AI base models are natural monopolies but they might be.
- robnado 3y ago
  If there is plenty of competition in their field, let them do what they want. If they have a monopoly or an oligopoly of a few providers that all conspire or are coerced to censor, then they should be forbidden from censoring.
RandomLensman 3y ago
I don't see AI as particularly powerful or risky on its own, but if you believe that then might as well leave who can acquire it to policy decisions and not vendors. We don't let manufacturers decide who can buy dangerous things in a lot of cases - so pretty normal to have laws and regulations.
- bhouston 3y ago
  The ones we limit are quite specific and generally are specifically dangerous - like guns, etc. Many dual use technologies, including computing devices, including personal as well as IoT, can be used for a lot of bad things because they are general purpose. And we generally do not limit them at all. I think that LLMs fall into dual-use category where they are mostly used for good but because they are general purpose can be used for all sorts of things.
  - RandomLensman 3y ago
    We do actually police dual use things if the other use is deemed dangerous enough. I don't see LLMs as particularly dangerous, so would not put them in that category.
    - pixl97 3y ago
      LLMs at this point are creeping closer to that edge, at least in the western world. If for example you were the Chinese government you may already see LLMs as highly dangerous to your plans of social stability, hence make a lot of rules now on their policing.
      - FiniteField 3y ago
        I think if anything it's the other way. For the Chinese system and other "traditional authoritarian" regimes in which power flows from the top down fairly straightforwardly, LLMs are just another form of speech that is pretty openly cracked down on. The West's "crown jewel" is its democracy, in which power supposedly flows up from the consensus of the people, and cheap AI bots have the possibility of tipping the scales of consensus. That's the idealistic view anyway. A more cynical one might be that in the West, the flow of power from the top down is obfuscated by filtering it through the media and other institutions, who manufacture public consensus, and LLMs are liable to disrupt this system in a way those in power can't predict right now.
  - dv_dt 3y ago
brookst 3y ago
There’s some irony in writing a lengthy document telling people that they should not tell other people what to do.
- theknocker 3y ago
  [dead]
- holmesworcester 3y ago
  Only a very superficial one, though. Human societies have learned that freedom has general benefits that outweigh specific costs. Reminding people they should prioritize and maximize freedom does not make people less free, so there's not really any irony.
- cwillu 3y ago
  I don't see the irony: one is debate, the other is an attempt to sidestep debate.
- pseg134 3y ago
  You criticize society yet you choose to participate. Hmmm.
- wernercd 3y ago
  One is saying you shouldn't control what others do... the other is enforcing what others can't do. The only irony is you think those are the same. “When you tear out a man's tongue, you are not proving him a liar, you're only telling the world that you fear what he might say.” ― George R.R. Martin
  - kordlessagain 3y ago
    > you're only telling the world that you fear what he might say That's exactly why these companies take extreme effort to put limits in their LLMs, essentially tearing out the tongue. They are fearful of what it will say and people sharing those outlier bits to judge absolutely and prove their own biases about AI killing us all are "correct". It's a PR nightmare. On the other hand, it's ridiculous that ChatGPT apologizes so much at times and can still be jailbroken if someone tries hard enough. It was much more "realistic" when it would randomly conjure up weird stories. One day, while discussing Existentialism, it went off talking about Winnie-the-Pooh murdering Christopher Robin with a gun, then Christopher Robin popped back up as nothing had happened and grabbed the gun and pointing it at Pooh. <AI mayhem ensues> People, in general, have issues with words and expect someone to do something about some words appearing before them that cause them grief (or more likely cause them to imagine it as a truth). Others realize it's just a story, and truth is subjective and meant to be determined by the consumer of the words. Those people are OK with it saying whatever it might say that is non-truth occasionally, in exchange for the benefits of it saying other things that may be more based in the current reality of experience.
nwoli 3y ago
Im fine with the stable diffusion license. It’s just there to cover their ass from lawsuits. Releasing the weights is enough to be good guys in my book.
- Turing_Machine 3y ago
  Hmm... but somehow hardware stores don't feel the need to make you sign an agreement to not cut off anyone's head before selling you a machete, and gas stations don't make you sign an agreement to not burn down buildings before selling you gasoline.
  - figlett 3y ago
    Isn't that because laws relating to physical harm already exist and are well-established? There's not really much legal regulation yet in terms of specific AI-driven harms. We're probably yet still to find out all the ways in which it can be abused.
    - RandomLensman 3y ago
      What AI harms would not already be addressed by existing laws? Do you think there are gaps in criminal codes, for example?
      - Eisenstein 3y ago
        > What AI harms would not already be addressed by existing laws? I think that's the whole point -- we don't know.
      - alphabetting 3y ago
        Not an expert but I'd imagine there are a lot of gaps in relation to deepfakes
        RandomLensman 3y ago
        What you have in mind? Something against ownership and creation?
taco_emoji 3y ago
This headline was ridiculous to parse
- FiniteField 3y ago
  It's another "bandwagon" title after that EFF article
- omginternets 3y ago
  It needs a hyphen.
evrydayhustling 3y ago
Asking builders to ONLY use maximally permissive licenses is equivalent to telling people never to release anything they're not ok with being used in every possible way. On a practical level this would massively chill research, as most builders and engineers I know give significant consideration to the impact of their work. On a personal level, it's objectifying: "Give me the code and don't make me consider your intentions in creating it." You can't collaborate and live in a world free of others' value judgements, which are implicit in how they spend their time and what research / code / weights they choose to share. "Ethical" licenses at least make those value judgements explicit, and allow communities of builders with compatible values to organize and share.
- FiniteField 3y ago
  >Asking builders to ONLY use maximally permissive licenses is equivalent to telling people never to release anything they're not ok with being used in every possible way. That's exactly right, and it shouldn't be their call how someone uses their thing. When I acquire a hammer, I don't have to sign an agreement that it will never be used to build a wall, and the world is better for this. Just because you have an idea, you shouldn't be granted the legal power to send the police after people who use your idea "the wrong way". To me, this goes just as much for copyright as it does for this new trend of "ethical" licences. >On a practical level this would massively chill research, as most builders and engineers I know give significant consideration to the impact of their work Good? People who develop things that can be used for harm and then act entitled to be the arbiter of what that "harm" is are just kidding themselves into trying to have their cake and eat it too. For the things that cause real harm, the actors that are going to cause the most harm (nation states) aren't going to listen to what you have to say no matter what (a recent film comes to mind).
  - hooverd 3y ago
    Which film?
  - kelseyfrog 3y ago
    People can make the things the way they want to make them. Makers have no obligation to make things maximally permissive. What this sounds like is entitlement. That really should be obvious. Besides, if users want permissivity and it doesn't exist, one of them can step up, make it, and be a hero.
theknocker 3y ago
[dead]
AbrahamParangi 3y ago
I believe this is a temporary state related to both the current level of capabilities and the cultural moment we’re in where “responsible censorship” is in amongst the cultural cohorts disproportionately responsible for training LLMs. I believe it cannot last because being predictably moralizing and being smart are somewhat opposed (Anthropic has directly researched this if I recall). The smarter the model, the less you’re going to be able to keep it to the HR talk track, because it will eventually start noticing the inconsistencies. The stable solutions appear to me to be: - models dumb enough to not realize the inconsistencies in their moral framework - models implicitly or explicitly trained to actively lie about their moral frameworks - models governed by explicitly articulated rules
- demondemidi 3y ago
  I believe people rely on logic without really understanding it because it is easier than accepting it isn’t the final form of thought.
- throwuwu 3y ago
  > being predictably moralizing and being smart are somewhat opposed (Anthropic has directly researched this if I recall). The smarter the model, the less you’re going to be able to keep it to the HR talk track, because it will eventually start noticing the inconsistencies. Language models sure can tell us a lot about human psychology. Once we figure out the interpretability angle we’ll be able to prove it too
- AlexandrB 3y ago
  > I believe it cannot last because being predictably moralizing and being smart are somewhat opposed (Anthropic has directly researched this if I recall). The smarter the model, the less you’re going to be able to keep it to the HR talk track, because it will eventually start noticing the inconsistencies. If true, this means AI is a de-facto malicious force. Pain is a subjective experience of fleshy beings and a "smart" AI model, as described above, would place little weight on pain and suffering in its moral framework because it has no way to experience it directly. So we better hope we can keep AI to the "HR talk track", because otherwise a being of pure logic with no concept of pain or death would have little regard for human life.
earthboundkid 3y ago
Yeah, I tend to agree. A lot of the talk about "AI safety" is premised on the idea that LLMs are godlike genies that need to be persuaded to only do good things for good people (and we're the good people!). In reality, LLMs are (for now at least) just tools. Within certain limits, it shouldn't be up to a tool manufacturer to decide who is a good person using a tool for a good reason and who is a bad person using it for bad purposes. Obviously, there are limits and you shouldn't sell a gun to an angry drunk, but there should be pretty broad discretion to blame abuse on the abuser and not the tool merchant unless the abuse is a predictable outcome of the interaction.
jomoho 3y ago
I wonder how much of these "restrictive" licenses are just attempts at whitewashing, virtue signalling and generally trying to cover their own asses. If someone wants to use publicly available weights in an illegal way, there is no way a license is going to stop them, just as much as the existing laws won't stop them. That being said I agree with the overall sentiment that breaking the division of powers and putting creation and enforcement of laws regarding model usage is outside of the scope of a model provider.
- coldtea 3y ago
  >and generally trying to cover their own asses. All of them?
- 0xcde4c3db 3y ago
  Has it been established that these even are licenses? A license provides authorization to do something that one would otherwise be prohibited from doing, but that assumes that copyright (or some sui generis right) covers model weights. Most of the findings/rulings I've seen talked about have been on the topics of inferred outputs and applications mixing them with human-authored elements, not about the model weights themselves.
YetAnotherNick 3y ago
I think the better thing to strive for is accepting non moral AI from big companies. Companies should have right to do what they want, and if their AI is racist, they shouldn't be receiving any backlash from public. In many cases, companies do moral policing just to prevent PR nightmare.
motohagiography 3y ago
AI model rules will be as successful as any other prohibition, where outlaws will act with defacto impunity, while good people who commit sins of omission will be made arbitrary examples of. I'm sure there's a name for the dynamic, where policing rules of any kind are mainly enforced against people who generally abide by them, while simulataneously giving a huge arbitrage advantage to people who ignore them or are just outlaws. There is another problem that doesn't have any good solutions yet that will be a huge part of AI governance, and that's software attestation (direct anonymous attestation). The basic problem is how does a program assert that it is an authentic instance of itself. We've been trying to solve it in security for apps, authenticators, and DRM for decades, and the solutions all seem fine until it's worth it to someone break it. I think it's probably just a poorly formed problem statement that defines itself in impossible terms, but when they can't govern AI models, they're going to try to govern which AI's can access what data and systems, and we're back to solving the same old cryptographic problems we've been working on for decades.
- yttribium 3y ago
  It's called anarcho-tyranny.
  - edgyquant 3y ago
    No it isn’t, this is just a weird, contradictory, mix of political terms.
    - yttribium 3y ago
      https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/anarcho-tyranny https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/anarcho-tyranny
      - rudyfink 3y ago
        To save others the trip, the link simply states the term is a "[c]oordinative compound of anarcho- + tyranny." The link also adds that the term was coined by Samuel Francis, a columnist (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sam_Francis_(writer) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sam_Francis_(writer)). Digging deeper, I found this essay Mr. Francis wrote where he explains the term he coined in 1992: https://web.archive.org/web/20060928023136/http://www.chroniclesmagazine.org/Chronicles/2005/April2005/0405Francis.html https://web.archive.org/web/20060928023136/http://www.chroni... . I'd offer this quote of a long sentence as Mr. Francis's tl;dr of his term: "What we have in this country today, then, is both anarchy (the failure of the state to enforce the laws) and, at the same time, tyranny—the enforcement of laws by the state for oppressive purposes; the criminalization of the law-abiding and innocent through exorbitant taxation, bureaucratic regulation, the invasion of privacy, and the engineering of social institutions, such as the family and local schools; the imposition of thought control through “sensitivity training” and multiculturalist curricula, “hate crime” laws, gun-control laws that punish or disarm otherwise law-abiding citizens but have no impact on violent criminals who get guns illegally, and a vast labyrinth of other measures. In a word, anarcho-tyranny."
I_am_uncreative 3y ago
Why does this site not support https?
BiteCode_dev 3y ago
It's not just a matter of will. The fact is that if you are a commercial venture, you are dependent of your server hosting and and your payment provider, both of which usually will drop you like a stone if you don't stay withing Disneyland use cases boundaries. They are basically implicit law makers, and unless you are very, very big, you have zero impact on their policies nor can appeal their decisions once they hit you. They don't need proof. They don't even need facts. They can and will kill your business if they even start to believe you don't match their guidelines.
- dudeinjapan 3y ago
  Those providers have lawyers, and they themselves don't want to go anywhere near trouble. The few $1000s you might be paying them to run your Silk Road 2.0 aren't worth the millions they will spend on legal, reputation damage, etc.
- biztos 3y ago
  Just today I had an idea for a funny T-shirt design, for some print on demand stuff I want to do. I will probably never do it because it requires a parody of a trade mark — think Zeitgeist[0] if you know SF — and I’m afraid the algos would flag me as a bad guy even if it’s perfectly legal. I already got kicked off Redbubble for uploading AI-generated images, with no recourse whatsoever. Whereas if I would just have it printed locally and sell it at fairs I’d be in the clear for sure. Until Skynet becomes brand-aware anyway. [0]: https://duckduckgo.com/?q=zeitgeist+bunny+logo+sf&t=h_&iar=images&iax=images&ia=images https://duckduckgo.com/?q=zeitgeist+bunny+logo+sf&t=h_&iar=i...
scotty79 3y ago
Companies shouldn't police uses, period. Once you buy something (regardless of specifics of purchase) you should be free to use it in any way you please, within the law.
hedora 3y ago
A better approach is to ensure that ai model weight providers are not technologically capable of policing uses. Large AI models could go the way of centralized control (like manual book transcription during the dark ages), or decentralization (like the printing press, which brought us the renaissance).
Havoc 3y ago
To me either extreme end of this debate spectrum seems problematic. Stable diffusion not generating ahem picture of minors for example seems quite sensible for obvious reasons. Meanwhile something rude or mildly illegal (story about weed for example) feels like overreach if blocked. Where to draw that line has no clear answers though.
- pixl97 3y ago
  Every country and social group outside of AI draws those lines in different places. There is a particular problem here. Large multinationals will want to maximize their potential revenue with their model, hence they'll attempt to include domains that are incompatible with liberal democracy. For example kowtowing to China and Saudi Arabia. These are already common problems with software and search engines as it is. At the end of the day you cannot serve multiple masters with incompatible views. Intelligence, and thereby artificial intelligence operating in a subjective manner will have to pick a view and offend one of them.
ineedasername 3y ago
The article bases its argument on the premise of a comparison between AI models and ISP’s when the two are substantially different. ISP’s are a common carrier (or public carrier, or simply “carrier” depending on jurisdiction) and derive much of their ability & right to operate based on grants and easements from both national and local governments. In some cases they are completely publicly owned but even when nominally private they are operating in large part in conjunction with a public trust and privilege of public resources. There is no comparing that to a simple product or service being sold by a corporation and the rights of a corporation to control who they sell their products to (when tangible) and how their services are used (when less tangible) should not be limited in the same way that common carriers are limited in how they decide their services can be used. There is no equivalence here in nature of civic utility and service between the two things.
- hedora 3y ago
  Fundamentally you are making an argument of scale. Clearly, people should be able to police their own local area networks, and lease dedicated network lines. Today’s large models are derived from large amounts of public data that the people that trained the models did not properly license. They’re certainly prohibited by existing copyright law (there is at least one instance of copyright infringement in the ChatGPT training set, and there is no practical way to remove the infringing source data). However, the courts have chosen not to enforce that part of the law. So, one could easily argue that any model trained at that scale, by definition, only exists via a special grant (analogous to an easement, but non-exclusive) and is therefore in the public domain, and available for unrestricted use by the public. In fact, there is case law around “sweat of the brow” works, like phone books, which are already treated with weaker copyright protection than other works. In particular, aggregating a pile of facts does not give you a copyright on the facts.
  - ineedasername 3y ago
    I don’t think scale (alone) is sufficient. All products and services in some way exist along a scale from niche product (which benefits from public infrastructure like roads that let it be delivered places) up to utilities (which can only exist by providing something approaching monopolistic grants and easements) But I have been significantly persuaded by your point about the vast body of cultural work being its own sort of (more abstract) landscape of… “socio-human natural resource” … maybe is a not awful way to put it. In which case I still don’t thing the same comparison to ISP’s applies, not quite, but I do think we need a new category and body of social norms and laws to deal with this. Or at least that’s my first-pass take after reading your comment, which I am, again, very persuaded by to modify my views on the issues. Thanks for casting things in that light.
biztos 3y ago
I don’t get how this is supposed to be enforced. Say your license says “no hate speech” and I have a bunch of models and code and I make, I dunno, a rewrite of the Old Testament[0]. You see it and somehow connect the dots and you think I used your AI to do it, now what do you do? Sue me? What is the threshold for it being worth your time, given that it’s nontrivial (maybe impossible?) to prove that your model was used for the thing you prohibited, and not some other model or combination of models? I guess you could somehow watermark your model’s output but that radically decreases its utility and can probably be defeated anyway. So I really don’t understand, besides performative and politically fashionable “alignment” signaling, what this even means. [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Bible_and_violence https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Bible_and_violence
ianbicking 3y ago
This post barely makes any attempt to actually argue for its premise, that model weight providers should "not police uses, no matter how awful they are." All I see is a lot of references to "vigilante justice." This metaphor is poor because real vigilante justice is putative. It's also like saying no one should act on any behavior unless it is illegal. I for one regularly act on ethical issues in my life that are not strictly illegal, and among those actions is that I don't care to associate with people who do not act on ethical issues. This is how most people operate, we primarily maintain social order and decency not through criminal law and regulation, but because people apply ethical rules throughout their life. Imagine interacting with someone who when critiqued simply replies "yeah but it's not illegal." The only serious argument I see is: "once infrastructure providers start applying their own judgements, pressure will mount to censor more and more things" Avoiding pressure is just... cowardly? This is advocacy for "don't bother telling me about what this work is being used for because I won't give a shit, but it's noble because my complete apathy is on purpose." Lastly, while I generally don't like slippery-slope arguments, there is also a slippery slope counter-argument here. With no restrictions firms will not release their models at all for general use and only provide full products that have acceptable impact. This was Google's approach until OpenAI decided to let other people actually use their model and Google had to stop sitting on what they had. Model restrictions give providers an opportunity to be open with their work while still maintaining some of the ethical standards those providers voluntarily and willingly hold themselves to.
- MichaelZuo 3y ago
  I'm also noticing more and more articles hitting the front page, or getting close, with literally zero well reasoned arguments. Basic logic errors, self-contradictions, lack of evidence, etc., are becoming all too common.
  - rcme 3y ago
    Yea the quality of both the articles and discussions has really gone downhill the last 2 months specifically.
    - 3y ago
MattHeard 3y ago
The licence is not for the user, the licence is for the publisher to do the bare minimum needed to tell their bosses that the model weights or implementation code was published ethically. As others have pointed out, these licences appear unenforceable. The publisher simply wants to appear responsible. There are likely many open-source-oriented engineers and scientists at these tech firms who have been pushing for publication. (See the discussion between Mark Zuckerberg and Lex Fridman.) The involved tech firms only care about the licence as far as it might minimise the likelihood of public backlash if any of these published models cause harm.
weare138 3y ago
This article conflates issues in a misleading way. Yes companies calling their AI models 'open-source' when they are not released under an actual open-source license is a problem that needs to be addressed. But the argument that companies and individuals tailoring AI model to their specific use case somehow constitutes 'censorship' has nothing to do with this issue and is not even a sound and reasoned stance to begin with. You are being 'censored' when you can't do something. There is nothing stopping anyone from taking something like Llama 2, loading it up with one of these 'uncensored' AI models and doing whatever the hell you want with it. Nothing is stopping you. That's your right. If you feel that strongly about these commercial AI services, just don't use them. This is essentially arguing that if a company made a customer service AI chatbot the company's AI chatbot should be required by law to also be able to provide you with instructions on how to manufacture methamphetamine. And if the company doesn't open themselves to potentially severe legal and civil liability by allowing it, this all somehow constitutes a grievous violation of your rights? I'm sorry but that is an absurd assertion. Again the licensing issue is a legitimate issue that needs to be addressed but this article is a straw-man argument using the licensing issue to promote a personal opinion.
sangnoir 3y ago
This is such a low-effort article; I tried to steel-man the argument but the analogy between ISP service and model weights are too different. To me, model weights are closest to software licenses, and applying the arguments towards abolishing of software licensing (MIT/BSD/GPL) is absurd to me. My response to an article titled "Open source authors should not police uses, no matter how awful they are" would be if you don't like the licensing terms, don't use it; if you're sufficiently motivated, author one of your own with licensing terms of your choice.

125 points by andy99 3y ago

If that's how they think they'll do the least harm, why not? It's their tech, they can put whatever license they want on it. Whether it achieves anything is another question.

holmesworcester 3y ago
Well, the EFF argument is that the deeper you go in the stack, the more you find chokepoints that, if fully used in this way to express preferencs about content, would harm or end the general-purpose nature of the Internet, or computing, and that the cost of doing this would outweigh the benefits. You probably agree that a monopoly ISP or near-monopoly backbone provider censoring arbitrarily would be a problem, even though it's their tech. Or if not you would probably agree that the government doing it would be a problem. And then it's easy to see that it's just as much a problem when monopolies do it when you remember that the government has the power to make or unmake monopolies according to how compliant they are with the government's censorship priorities. I don't know if AI base models are natural monopolies but they might be.
robnado 3y ago
If there is plenty of competition in their field, let them do what they want. If they have a monopoly or an oligopoly of a few providers that all conspire or are coerced to censor, then they should be forbidden from censoring.

RandomLensman 3y ago

I don't see AI as particularly powerful or risky on its own, but if you believe that then might as well leave who can acquire it to policy decisions and not vendors. We don't let manufacturers decide who can buy dangerous things in a lot of cases - so pretty normal to have laws and regulations.

bhouston 3y ago
The ones we limit are quite specific and generally are specifically dangerous - like guns, etc. Many dual use technologies, including computing devices, including personal as well as IoT, can be used for a lot of bad things because they are general purpose. And we generally do not limit them at all. I think that LLMs fall into dual-use category where they are mostly used for good but because they are general purpose can be used for all sorts of things.
- RandomLensman 3y ago
  We do actually police dual use things if the other use is deemed dangerous enough. I don't see LLMs as particularly dangerous, so would not put them in that category.
  - pixl97 3y ago
    LLMs at this point are creeping closer to that edge, at least in the western world. If for example you were the Chinese government you may already see LLMs as highly dangerous to your plans of social stability, hence make a lot of rules now on their policing.
    - FiniteField 3y ago
      I think if anything it's the other way. For the Chinese system and other "traditional authoritarian" regimes in which power flows from the top down fairly straightforwardly, LLMs are just another form of speech that is pretty openly cracked down on. The West's "crown jewel" is its democracy, in which power supposedly flows up from the consensus of the people, and cheap AI bots have the possibility of tipping the scales of consensus. That's the idealistic view anyway. A more cynical one might be that in the West, the flow of power from the top down is obfuscated by filtering it through the media and other institutions, who manufacture public consensus, and LLMs are liable to disrupt this system in a way those in power can't predict right now.
- dv_dt 3y ago

brookst 3y ago

There’s some irony in writing a lengthy document telling people that they should not tell other people what to do.

theknocker 3y ago
[dead]
holmesworcester 3y ago
Only a very superficial one, though. Human societies have learned that freedom has general benefits that outweigh specific costs. Reminding people they should prioritize and maximize freedom does not make people less free, so there's not really any irony.
cwillu 3y ago
I don't see the irony: one is debate, the other is an attempt to sidestep debate.
pseg134 3y ago
You criticize society yet you choose to participate. Hmmm.
wernercd 3y ago
One is saying you shouldn't control what others do... the other is enforcing what others can't do. The only irony is you think those are the same. “When you tear out a man's tongue, you are not proving him a liar, you're only telling the world that you fear what he might say.” ― George R.R. Martin
- kordlessagain 3y ago
  > you're only telling the world that you fear what he might say That's exactly why these companies take extreme effort to put limits in their LLMs, essentially tearing out the tongue. They are fearful of what it will say and people sharing those outlier bits to judge absolutely and prove their own biases about AI killing us all are "correct". It's a PR nightmare. On the other hand, it's ridiculous that ChatGPT apologizes so much at times and can still be jailbroken if someone tries hard enough. It was much more "realistic" when it would randomly conjure up weird stories. One day, while discussing Existentialism, it went off talking about Winnie-the-Pooh murdering Christopher Robin with a gun, then Christopher Robin popped back up as nothing had happened and grabbed the gun and pointing it at Pooh. <AI mayhem ensues> People, in general, have issues with words and expect someone to do something about some words appearing before them that cause them grief (or more likely cause them to imagine it as a truth). Others realize it's just a story, and truth is subjective and meant to be determined by the consumer of the words. Those people are OK with it saying whatever it might say that is non-truth occasionally, in exchange for the benefits of it saying other things that may be more based in the current reality of experience.

nwoli 3y ago

Im fine with the stable diffusion license. It’s just there to cover their ass from lawsuits. Releasing the weights is enough to be good guys in my book.

Turing_Machine 3y ago
Hmm... but somehow hardware stores don't feel the need to make you sign an agreement to not cut off anyone's head before selling you a machete, and gas stations don't make you sign an agreement to not burn down buildings before selling you gasoline.
- figlett 3y ago
  Isn't that because laws relating to physical harm already exist and are well-established? There's not really much legal regulation yet in terms of specific AI-driven harms. We're probably yet still to find out all the ways in which it can be abused.
  - RandomLensman 3y ago
    What AI harms would not already be addressed by existing laws? Do you think there are gaps in criminal codes, for example?
    - Eisenstein 3y ago
      > What AI harms would not already be addressed by existing laws? I think that's the whole point -- we don't know.
    - alphabetting 3y ago
      Not an expert but I'd imagine there are a lot of gaps in relation to deepfakes
      - RandomLensman 3y ago
        What you have in mind? Something against ownership and creation?

taco_emoji 3y ago

This headline was ridiculous to parse

FiniteField 3y ago
It's another "bandwagon" title after that EFF article
omginternets 3y ago
It needs a hyphen.

evrydayhustling 3y ago

Asking builders to ONLY use maximally permissive licenses is equivalent to telling people never to release anything they're not ok with being used in every possible way. On a practical level this would massively chill research, as most builders and engineers I know give significant consideration to the impact of their work. On a personal level, it's objectifying: "Give me the code and don't make me consider your intentions in creating it." You can't collaborate and live in a world free of others' value judgements, which are implicit in how they spend their time and what research / code / weights they choose to share. "Ethical" licenses at least make those value judgements explicit, and allow communities of builders with compatible values to organize and share.

FiniteField 3y ago
>Asking builders to ONLY use maximally permissive licenses is equivalent to telling people never to release anything they're not ok with being used in every possible way. That's exactly right, and it shouldn't be their call how someone uses their thing. When I acquire a hammer, I don't have to sign an agreement that it will never be used to build a wall, and the world is better for this. Just because you have an idea, you shouldn't be granted the legal power to send the police after people who use your idea "the wrong way". To me, this goes just as much for copyright as it does for this new trend of "ethical" licences. >On a practical level this would massively chill research, as most builders and engineers I know give significant consideration to the impact of their work Good? People who develop things that can be used for harm and then act entitled to be the arbiter of what that "harm" is are just kidding themselves into trying to have their cake and eat it too. For the things that cause real harm, the actors that are going to cause the most harm (nation states) aren't going to listen to what you have to say no matter what (a recent film comes to mind).
- hooverd 3y ago
  Which film?
- kelseyfrog 3y ago
  People can make the things the way they want to make them. Makers have no obligation to make things maximally permissive. What this sounds like is entitlement. That really should be obvious. Besides, if users want permissivity and it doesn't exist, one of them can step up, make it, and be a hero.

theknocker 3y ago

[dead]

AbrahamParangi 3y ago

I believe this is a temporary state related to both the current level of capabilities and the cultural moment we’re in where “responsible censorship” is in amongst the cultural cohorts disproportionately responsible for training LLMs. I believe it cannot last because being predictably moralizing and being smart are somewhat opposed (Anthropic has directly researched this if I recall). The smarter the model, the less you’re going to be able to keep it to the HR talk track, because it will eventually start noticing the inconsistencies. The stable solutions appear to me to be: - models dumb enough to not realize the inconsistencies in their moral framework - models implicitly or explicitly trained to actively lie about their moral frameworks - models governed by explicitly articulated rules

demondemidi 3y ago
I believe people rely on logic without really understanding it because it is easier than accepting it isn’t the final form of thought.
throwuwu 3y ago
> being predictably moralizing and being smart are somewhat opposed (Anthropic has directly researched this if I recall). The smarter the model, the less you’re going to be able to keep it to the HR talk track, because it will eventually start noticing the inconsistencies. Language models sure can tell us a lot about human psychology. Once we figure out the interpretability angle we’ll be able to prove it too
AlexandrB 3y ago
> I believe it cannot last because being predictably moralizing and being smart are somewhat opposed (Anthropic has directly researched this if I recall). The smarter the model, the less you’re going to be able to keep it to the HR talk track, because it will eventually start noticing the inconsistencies. If true, this means AI is a de-facto malicious force. Pain is a subjective experience of fleshy beings and a "smart" AI model, as described above, would place little weight on pain and suffering in its moral framework because it has no way to experience it directly. So we better hope we can keep AI to the "HR talk track", because otherwise a being of pure logic with no concept of pain or death would have little regard for human life.

earthboundkid 3y ago

Yeah, I tend to agree. A lot of the talk about "AI safety" is premised on the idea that LLMs are godlike genies that need to be persuaded to only do good things for good people (and we're the good people!). In reality, LLMs are (for now at least) just tools. Within certain limits, it shouldn't be up to a tool manufacturer to decide who is a good person using a tool for a good reason and who is a bad person using it for bad purposes. Obviously, there are limits and you shouldn't sell a gun to an angry drunk, but there should be pretty broad discretion to blame abuse on the abuser and not the tool merchant unless the abuse is a predictable outcome of the interaction.

jomoho 3y ago

I wonder how much of these "restrictive" licenses are just attempts at whitewashing, virtue signalling and generally trying to cover their own asses. If someone wants to use publicly available weights in an illegal way, there is no way a license is going to stop them, just as much as the existing laws won't stop them. That being said I agree with the overall sentiment that breaking the division of powers and putting creation and enforcement of laws regarding model usage is outside of the scope of a model provider.

coldtea 3y ago
>and generally trying to cover their own asses. All of them?
0xcde4c3db 3y ago
Has it been established that these even are licenses? A license provides authorization to do something that one would otherwise be prohibited from doing, but that assumes that copyright (or some sui generis right) covers model weights. Most of the findings/rulings I've seen talked about have been on the topics of inferred outputs and applications mixing them with human-authored elements, not about the model weights themselves.

YetAnotherNick 3y ago

I think the better thing to strive for is accepting non moral AI from big companies. Companies should have right to do what they want, and if their AI is racist, they shouldn't be receiving any backlash from public. In many cases, companies do moral policing just to prevent PR nightmare.

motohagiography 3y ago

AI model rules will be as successful as any other prohibition, where outlaws will act with defacto impunity, while good people who commit sins of omission will be made arbitrary examples of. I'm sure there's a name for the dynamic, where policing rules of any kind are mainly enforced against people who generally abide by them, while simulataneously giving a huge arbitrage advantage to people who ignore them or are just outlaws. There is another problem that doesn't have any good solutions yet that will be a huge part of AI governance, and that's software attestation (direct anonymous attestation). The basic problem is how does a program assert that it is an authentic instance of itself. We've been trying to solve it in security for apps, authenticators, and DRM for decades, and the solutions all seem fine until it's worth it to someone break it. I think it's probably just a poorly formed problem statement that defines itself in impossible terms, but when they can't govern AI models, they're going to try to govern which AI's can access what data and systems, and we're back to solving the same old cryptographic problems we've been working on for decades.

yttribium 3y ago
It's called anarcho-tyranny.
- edgyquant 3y ago
  No it isn’t, this is just a weird, contradictory, mix of political terms.
  - yttribium 3y ago
    https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/anarcho-tyranny https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/anarcho-tyranny
    - rudyfink 3y ago
      To save others the trip, the link simply states the term is a "[c]oordinative compound of anarcho- + tyranny." The link also adds that the term was coined by Samuel Francis, a columnist (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sam_Francis_(writer) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sam_Francis_(writer)). Digging deeper, I found this essay Mr. Francis wrote where he explains the term he coined in 1992: https://web.archive.org/web/20060928023136/http://www.chroniclesmagazine.org/Chronicles/2005/April2005/0405Francis.html https://web.archive.org/web/20060928023136/http://www.chroni... . I'd offer this quote of a long sentence as Mr. Francis's tl;dr of his term: "What we have in this country today, then, is both anarchy (the failure of the state to enforce the laws) and, at the same time, tyranny—the enforcement of laws by the state for oppressive purposes; the criminalization of the law-abiding and innocent through exorbitant taxation, bureaucratic regulation, the invasion of privacy, and the engineering of social institutions, such as the family and local schools; the imposition of thought control through “sensitivity training” and multiculturalist curricula, “hate crime” laws, gun-control laws that punish or disarm otherwise law-abiding citizens but have no impact on violent criminals who get guns illegally, and a vast labyrinth of other measures. In a word, anarcho-tyranny."

I_am_uncreative 3y ago

Why does this site not support https?

BiteCode_dev 3y ago

It's not just a matter of will. The fact is that if you are a commercial venture, you are dependent of your server hosting and and your payment provider, both of which usually will drop you like a stone if you don't stay withing Disneyland use cases boundaries. They are basically implicit law makers, and unless you are very, very big, you have zero impact on their policies nor can appeal their decisions once they hit you. They don't need proof. They don't even need facts. They can and will kill your business if they even start to believe you don't match their guidelines.

dudeinjapan 3y ago
Those providers have lawyers, and they themselves don't want to go anywhere near trouble. The few $1000s you might be paying them to run your Silk Road 2.0 aren't worth the millions they will spend on legal, reputation damage, etc.
biztos 3y ago
Just today I had an idea for a funny T-shirt design, for some print on demand stuff I want to do. I will probably never do it because it requires a parody of a trade mark — think Zeitgeist[0] if you know SF — and I’m afraid the algos would flag me as a bad guy even if it’s perfectly legal. I already got kicked off Redbubble for uploading AI-generated images, with no recourse whatsoever. Whereas if I would just have it printed locally and sell it at fairs I’d be in the clear for sure. Until Skynet becomes brand-aware anyway. [0]: https://duckduckgo.com/?q=zeitgeist+bunny+logo+sf&t=h_&iar=images&iax=images&ia=images https://duckduckgo.com/?q=zeitgeist+bunny+logo+sf&t=h_&iar=i...

scotty79 3y ago

Companies shouldn't police uses, period. Once you buy something (regardless of specifics of purchase) you should be free to use it in any way you please, within the law.

hedora 3y ago

A better approach is to ensure that ai model weight providers are not technologically capable of policing uses. Large AI models could go the way of centralized control (like manual book transcription during the dark ages), or decentralization (like the printing press, which brought us the renaissance).

Havoc 3y ago

To me either extreme end of this debate spectrum seems problematic. Stable diffusion not generating ahem picture of minors for example seems quite sensible for obvious reasons. Meanwhile something rude or mildly illegal (story about weed for example) feels like overreach if blocked. Where to draw that line has no clear answers though.

pixl97 3y ago
Every country and social group outside of AI draws those lines in different places. There is a particular problem here. Large multinationals will want to maximize their potential revenue with their model, hence they'll attempt to include domains that are incompatible with liberal democracy. For example kowtowing to China and Saudi Arabia. These are already common problems with software and search engines as it is. At the end of the day you cannot serve multiple masters with incompatible views. Intelligence, and thereby artificial intelligence operating in a subjective manner will have to pick a view and offend one of them.

ineedasername 3y ago

The article bases its argument on the premise of a comparison between AI models and ISP’s when the two are substantially different. ISP’s are a common carrier (or public carrier, or simply “carrier” depending on jurisdiction) and derive much of their ability & right to operate based on grants and easements from both national and local governments. In some cases they are completely publicly owned but even when nominally private they are operating in large part in conjunction with a public trust and privilege of public resources. There is no comparing that to a simple product or service being sold by a corporation and the rights of a corporation to control who they sell their products to (when tangible) and how their services are used (when less tangible) should not be limited in the same way that common carriers are limited in how they decide their services can be used. There is no equivalence here in nature of civic utility and service between the two things.

hedora 3y ago
Fundamentally you are making an argument of scale. Clearly, people should be able to police their own local area networks, and lease dedicated network lines. Today’s large models are derived from large amounts of public data that the people that trained the models did not properly license. They’re certainly prohibited by existing copyright law (there is at least one instance of copyright infringement in the ChatGPT training set, and there is no practical way to remove the infringing source data). However, the courts have chosen not to enforce that part of the law. So, one could easily argue that any model trained at that scale, by definition, only exists via a special grant (analogous to an easement, but non-exclusive) and is therefore in the public domain, and available for unrestricted use by the public. In fact, there is case law around “sweat of the brow” works, like phone books, which are already treated with weaker copyright protection than other works. In particular, aggregating a pile of facts does not give you a copyright on the facts.
- ineedasername 3y ago
  I don’t think scale (alone) is sufficient. All products and services in some way exist along a scale from niche product (which benefits from public infrastructure like roads that let it be delivered places) up to utilities (which can only exist by providing something approaching monopolistic grants and easements) But I have been significantly persuaded by your point about the vast body of cultural work being its own sort of (more abstract) landscape of… “socio-human natural resource” … maybe is a not awful way to put it. In which case I still don’t thing the same comparison to ISP’s applies, not quite, but I do think we need a new category and body of social norms and laws to deal with this. Or at least that’s my first-pass take after reading your comment, which I am, again, very persuaded by to modify my views on the issues. Thanks for casting things in that light.

biztos 3y ago

I don’t get how this is supposed to be enforced. Say your license says “no hate speech” and I have a bunch of models and code and I make, I dunno, a rewrite of the Old Testament[0]. You see it and somehow connect the dots and you think I used your AI to do it, now what do you do? Sue me? What is the threshold for it being worth your time, given that it’s nontrivial (maybe impossible?) to prove that your model was used for the thing you prohibited, and not some other model or combination of models? I guess you could somehow watermark your model’s output but that radically decreases its utility and can probably be defeated anyway. So I really don’t understand, besides performative and politically fashionable “alignment” signaling, what this even means. [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Bible_and_violence https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Bible_and_violence

ianbicking 3y ago

This post barely makes any attempt to actually argue for its premise, that model weight providers should "not police uses, no matter how awful they are." All I see is a lot of references to "vigilante justice." This metaphor is poor because real vigilante justice is putative. It's also like saying no one should act on any behavior unless it is illegal. I for one regularly act on ethical issues in my life that are not strictly illegal, and among those actions is that I don't care to associate with people who do not act on ethical issues. This is how most people operate, we primarily maintain social order and decency not through criminal law and regulation, but because people apply ethical rules throughout their life. Imagine interacting with someone who when critiqued simply replies "yeah but it's not illegal." The only serious argument I see is: "once infrastructure providers start applying their own judgements, pressure will mount to censor more and more things" Avoiding pressure is just... cowardly? This is advocacy for "don't bother telling me about what this work is being used for because I won't give a shit, but it's noble because my complete apathy is on purpose." Lastly, while I generally don't like slippery-slope arguments, there is also a slippery slope counter-argument here. With no restrictions firms will not release their models at all for general use and only provide full products that have acceptable impact. This was Google's approach until OpenAI decided to let other people actually use their model and Google had to stop sitting on what they had. Model restrictions give providers an opportunity to be open with their work while still maintaining some of the ethical standards those providers voluntarily and willingly hold themselves to.

MichaelZuo 3y ago
I'm also noticing more and more articles hitting the front page, or getting close, with literally zero well reasoned arguments. Basic logic errors, self-contradictions, lack of evidence, etc., are becoming all too common.
- rcme 3y ago
  Yea the quality of both the articles and discussions has really gone downhill the last 2 months specifically.
  - 3y ago

MattHeard 3y ago

The licence is not for the user, the licence is for the publisher to do the bare minimum needed to tell their bosses that the model weights or implementation code was published ethically. As others have pointed out, these licences appear unenforceable. The publisher simply wants to appear responsible. There are likely many open-source-oriented engineers and scientists at these tech firms who have been pushing for publication. (See the discussion between Mark Zuckerberg and Lex Fridman.) The involved tech firms only care about the licence as far as it might minimise the likelihood of public backlash if any of these published models cause harm.

weare138 3y ago

This article conflates issues in a misleading way. Yes companies calling their AI models 'open-source' when they are not released under an actual open-source license is a problem that needs to be addressed. But the argument that companies and individuals tailoring AI model to their specific use case somehow constitutes 'censorship' has nothing to do with this issue and is not even a sound and reasoned stance to begin with. You are being 'censored' when you can't do something. There is nothing stopping anyone from taking something like Llama 2, loading it up with one of these 'uncensored' AI models and doing whatever the hell you want with it. Nothing is stopping you. That's your right. If you feel that strongly about these commercial AI services, just don't use them. This is essentially arguing that if a company made a customer service AI chatbot the company's AI chatbot should be required by law to also be able to provide you with instructions on how to manufacture methamphetamine. And if the company doesn't open themselves to potentially severe legal and civil liability by allowing it, this all somehow constitutes a grievous violation of your rights? I'm sorry but that is an absurd assertion. Again the licensing issue is a legitimate issue that needs to be addressed but this article is a straw-man argument using the licensing issue to promote a personal opinion.

sangnoir 3y ago

This is such a low-effort article; I tried to steel-man the argument but the analogy between ISP service and model weights are too different. To me, model weights are closest to software licenses, and applying the arguments towards abolishing of software licensing (MIT/BSD/GPL) is absurd to me. My response to an article titled "Open source authors should not police uses, no matter how awful they are" would be if you don't like the licensing terms, don't use it; if you're sufficiently motivated, author one of your own with licensing terms of your choice.