7 ms·

I don't want "safe" AI, I want "accurate" AI. If I want a picture of NYC getting nuked, how can the AI know in which context it will be used? Maybe I'm writing

by umvi 3y ago

I don't want "safe" AI, I want "accurate" AI. If I want a picture of NYC getting nuked, how can the AI know in which context it will be used? Maybe I'm writing a sci-fi book and looking for cover art ideas. Who is driving this big push for "safety", anyway? Do consumers actually want safety or are a concern-trolling vocal minority pressuring AI corporations to kowtow? I personally hate it when SV moral arbiters nanny me.

throw18376 3y ago
here's what i speculate (i'm not an insider or anything, pure speculation). the "true believers" at OpenAI mostly don't care if bad images get generated. they are worried about "safety" as in the sci-fi Terminator scenario, not "safety" as in "avoid harming people with offensive or unpleasant images". however they see controlling a cutting edge AI towards some goal to be an important thing to study, and they want to practice doing it, and to do that they need to pick some arbitrary goal. the arbitrary goal becomes this type of "PG-rated-only" censorship, because it helps avoid bad press coverage, makes it easier to raise money, etc. but they don't sincerely care about it. some others in tech do sincerely care though.
- raxxorraxor 3y ago
  I think this is a marketing push to sell false security. There are some believers in the supposed AI apocalypse though.
naillo 3y ago
I think it's just them being scared of models running on their servers producing things that cause bad PR. And the reason they're not willing to not run things on their servers is competitive advantage as well as just extracting more money out of users that way. (I definitely don't think actual safety is the concern.)
Sharlin 3y ago
AI corporations do what corporations do, which is try to avoid lawsuits. Or worse: the well-known, incredibly arbitrary extrajudicial punishment that can be summarily meted out by the duopoly of payment service providers. Secondarily, they want to avoid bad publicity.
thinkingtoilet 3y ago
I see this comment over and over and over here on HN and it really blows my mind that people don't get it. These models are made so that enterprise clients will pay a lot of money to use them. I was a director at S&P Global and if you brought in software that could make pornographic images, violent images, or introduce copyright violations into our research you would be laughed out of the room within exactly 1 minute. The push for "safety" is that we live in a capitalistic society and the people will pay the most money for access to these models will want them to be "safe". If you don't like it, go ahead and create a competitor and see how many sales you get to enterprise customers. SV isn't trying to be your nanny. They are trying to make money. I'm shocked this isn't obvious to well-educated people who visit this forum.
- h9n 3y ago
  It is possible to write pornographic literature using Microsoft Word — and many do
  - thinkingtoilet 3y ago
    Please try to assume good faith here. Obviously MS Word does not write the pornographic content for you.
- AnthonyMouse 3y ago
  There is clearly a market for a content filter. Why is there a market for the inability to turn it off?
  - pixl97 3y ago
    Payment processors and credit card companies is why.
    - AnthonyMouse 3y ago
      Don't OnlyFans et al accept credit cards?
hn_throwaway_99 3y ago
You should know that your position is societally untenable. Excellent example: in the early days of Reddit, they very much had a "you can post anything that is not illegal" policy, and this led to subreddits like jailbait, fatpeoplehate, etc. Around 2012 I think (someone can look up the exact date) there was a coordinated effort to shine a bright media spotlight on the "underbelly" subreddits that made a ton of Internet and national news, e.g. features by Anderson Cooper on CNN, prominent op eds in NY Times, etc. Reddit changed course and specifically banned sexually suggestive pictures of minors and those without consent. I have an opinion, but I am not arguing here for whether the decision was "right" or "wrong". I am simply pointing out that Reddit had 0 choice in the matter. If they had held firm with their "anything that's legal" policy, they would simply not exist today. They would have been deplatformed to the nth degree, and furthermore laws would have (and actually have, e.g. in the case of revenge porn) changed to make their existence untenable. E.g. platforms like Reddit can't exist without Section 230, which is already under attack and I guarantee would have been removed if you had lots of platforms saying they're fine with people posting unknown, sexually suggestive pictures of minors. Nevermind having 0 advertisers willing to pay their bills. I'm not crazy about "SV moral arbiters" either, but I don't like posts like yours because they pretend a reality that doesn't exist.
- hanselot 3y ago
  Ah you mean that time before reddit was entirely hivemind? The most valuable information on the Internet will always come from the chans. You just need to be able to evaluate everything with critical thinking. You know, that thing where you can reason about something without necessarily agreeing with it. Please don't interpret this as bait. From my perspective a vast majority of people have embraced outsourcing their reason. Things like fph exist exactly because people are told day in and day out that diabetes is healthy. Its perhaps the most ugly manifestation of the natural reaction to this polar opposite called body positivity. But banishing thought doesn't eradicate it. It simply validates all those driven away. Sadly that is something vitally absent from borg based Internet.
  - hn_throwaway_99 3y ago
mattlondon 3y ago
If "unsafe" AI becomes ingrained then it really will be banned or have some arbitrary artificial limitations on power ("maximum 100,000 parameters" or whatever). They are trying to leapfrog the inevitable backlash from governments by saying they are doing the right thing and take it seriously yadayada.
ben_w 3y ago
> I personally hate it when SV moral arbiters nanny me. I've been annoyed with them pushing their mores on the global internet since at least 2010. I suspect you'd also hate the substantially different mores that I would have in their place. > Who is driving this big push for "safety", anyway? Do consumers actually want safety or are a concern-trolling vocal minority pressuring AI corporations to kowtow? 1. Yudkowsky, whose general vibes are an important part of the discussion for about half the people who work on these AI in the first place, even where they disagree in particulars. 2. Anyone who noticed the way biases in training data propagate stereotypes, an observation which substantially predates any of the currently interesting generators. 3. Anyone who has been on the receiving end normal old fashioned inappropriate content, or who is the parent or guardian of such a person. 4. Also the usual concern trolling types, as some people have already been arrested for using such models to sexualise specific people including, indeed, at least one case where it was a minor. 5. Anyone who can see the potential for these models in automated personalised propaganda. 6. Anyone concerned with the potential for a fully automated system that A/B tests with a constant stream of newly generated output until it finds a super-stimulus you can't help but engage with. These groups don't all talk to each other, and in many cases dismiss the severity, likelihood, and timescales of each other, though often still using overlapping language that makes any conversations on these issues even more difficult than figuring out exactly what someone who just used "woke" as a pejorative is actually objecting to.
smsm42 3y ago
Moral panic is driving it. Every time somebody manages to make AI bot say something outrage worthy, all the press is throwing a fit - how dare you, think of the children!!! And since the western culture is ruled by concern-trolling vocal minorities now, corporates predictably kowtow. Nobody wants to be canceled, or paraded before Congress as somebody who let the evil robots destroy our children for profits. SV has nothing to do with starting it though, they just follow. Look at your newspaper, college campus and talk show to find the leaders and the fanners of the flames.

by umvi 3y ago

throw18376 3y ago

here's what i speculate (i'm not an insider or anything, pure speculation). the "true believers" at OpenAI mostly don't care if bad images get generated. they are worried about "safety" as in the sci-fi Terminator scenario, not "safety" as in "avoid harming people with offensive or unpleasant images". however they see controlling a cutting edge AI towards some goal to be an important thing to study, and they want to practice doing it, and to do that they need to pick some arbitrary goal. the arbitrary goal becomes this type of "PG-rated-only" censorship, because it helps avoid bad press coverage, makes it easier to raise money, etc. but they don't sincerely care about it. some others in tech do sincerely care though.

raxxorraxor 3y ago
I think this is a marketing push to sell false security. There are some believers in the supposed AI apocalypse though.

naillo 3y ago

I think it's just them being scared of models running on their servers producing things that cause bad PR. And the reason they're not willing to not run things on their servers is competitive advantage as well as just extracting more money out of users that way. (I definitely don't think actual safety is the concern.)

Sharlin 3y ago

AI corporations do what corporations do, which is try to avoid lawsuits. Or worse: the well-known, incredibly arbitrary extrajudicial punishment that can be summarily meted out by the duopoly of payment service providers. Secondarily, they want to avoid bad publicity.

thinkingtoilet 3y ago

I see this comment over and over and over here on HN and it really blows my mind that people don't get it. These models are made so that enterprise clients will pay a lot of money to use them. I was a director at S&P Global and if you brought in software that could make pornographic images, violent images, or introduce copyright violations into our research you would be laughed out of the room within exactly 1 minute. The push for "safety" is that we live in a capitalistic society and the people will pay the most money for access to these models will want them to be "safe". If you don't like it, go ahead and create a competitor and see how many sales you get to enterprise customers. SV isn't trying to be your nanny. They are trying to make money. I'm shocked this isn't obvious to well-educated people who visit this forum.

h9n 3y ago
It is possible to write pornographic literature using Microsoft Word — and many do
- thinkingtoilet 3y ago
  Please try to assume good faith here. Obviously MS Word does not write the pornographic content for you.
AnthonyMouse 3y ago
There is clearly a market for a content filter. Why is there a market for the inability to turn it off?
- pixl97 3y ago
  Payment processors and credit card companies is why.
  - AnthonyMouse 3y ago
    Don't OnlyFans et al accept credit cards?

hn_throwaway_99 3y ago

You should know that your position is societally untenable. Excellent example: in the early days of Reddit, they very much had a "you can post anything that is not illegal" policy, and this led to subreddits like jailbait, fatpeoplehate, etc. Around 2012 I think (someone can look up the exact date) there was a coordinated effort to shine a bright media spotlight on the "underbelly" subreddits that made a ton of Internet and national news, e.g. features by Anderson Cooper on CNN, prominent op eds in NY Times, etc. Reddit changed course and specifically banned sexually suggestive pictures of minors and those without consent. I have an opinion, but I am not arguing here for whether the decision was "right" or "wrong". I am simply pointing out that Reddit had 0 choice in the matter. If they had held firm with their "anything that's legal" policy, they would simply not exist today. They would have been deplatformed to the nth degree, and furthermore laws would have (and actually have, e.g. in the case of revenge porn) changed to make their existence untenable. E.g. platforms like Reddit can't exist without Section 230, which is already under attack and I guarantee would have been removed if you had lots of platforms saying they're fine with people posting unknown, sexually suggestive pictures of minors. Nevermind having 0 advertisers willing to pay their bills. I'm not crazy about "SV moral arbiters" either, but I don't like posts like yours because they pretend a reality that doesn't exist.

hanselot 3y ago
Ah you mean that time before reddit was entirely hivemind? The most valuable information on the Internet will always come from the chans. You just need to be able to evaluate everything with critical thinking. You know, that thing where you can reason about something without necessarily agreeing with it. Please don't interpret this as bait. From my perspective a vast majority of people have embraced outsourcing their reason. Things like fph exist exactly because people are told day in and day out that diabetes is healthy. Its perhaps the most ugly manifestation of the natural reaction to this polar opposite called body positivity. But banishing thought doesn't eradicate it. It simply validates all those driven away. Sadly that is something vitally absent from borg based Internet.
- hn_throwaway_99 3y ago

mattlondon 3y ago

If "unsafe" AI becomes ingrained then it really will be banned or have some arbitrary artificial limitations on power ("maximum 100,000 parameters" or whatever). They are trying to leapfrog the inevitable backlash from governments by saying they are doing the right thing and take it seriously yadayada.

ben_w 3y ago

> I personally hate it when SV moral arbiters nanny me. I've been annoyed with them pushing their mores on the global internet since at least 2010. I suspect you'd also hate the substantially different mores that I would have in their place. > Who is driving this big push for "safety", anyway? Do consumers actually want safety or are a concern-trolling vocal minority pressuring AI corporations to kowtow? 1. Yudkowsky, whose general vibes are an important part of the discussion for about half the people who work on these AI in the first place, even where they disagree in particulars. 2. Anyone who noticed the way biases in training data propagate stereotypes, an observation which substantially predates any of the currently interesting generators. 3. Anyone who has been on the receiving end normal old fashioned inappropriate content, or who is the parent or guardian of such a person. 4. Also the usual concern trolling types, as some people have already been arrested for using such models to sexualise specific people including, indeed, at least one case where it was a minor. 5. Anyone who can see the potential for these models in automated personalised propaganda. 6. Anyone concerned with the potential for a fully automated system that A/B tests with a constant stream of newly generated output until it finds a super-stimulus you can't help but engage with. These groups don't all talk to each other, and in many cases dismiss the severity, likelihood, and timescales of each other, though often still using overlapping language that makes any conversations on these issues even more difficult than figuring out exactly what someone who just used "woke" as a pejorative is actually objecting to.

smsm42 3y ago

Moral panic is driving it. Every time somebody manages to make AI bot say something outrage worthy, all the press is throwing a fit - how dare you, think of the children!!! And since the western culture is ruled by concern-trolling vocal minorities now, corporates predictably kowtow. Nobody wants to be canceled, or paraded before Congress as somebody who let the evil robots destroy our children for profits. SV has nothing to do with starting it though, they just follow. Look at your newspaper, college campus and talk show to find the leaders and the fanners of the flames.