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It's unfortunate that "AI" is still framed and discussed as some type of highly autonomous system that's separate from us. Bad acting humans with AI systems ar

It's unfortunate that "AI" is still framed and discussed as some type of highly autonomous system that's separate from us. Bad acting humans with AI systems are the threat, not the AI systems themselves. The discussion is still SO focused on the AI systems, not the actors and how we as societies align on what AI uses are okay and which ones aren't.

pdonis 3y ago
> Bad acting humans with AI systems are the threat, not the AI systems themselves. I wish more people grasped this extremely important point. AI is a tool. There will be humans who misuse any tool. That doesn't mean we blame the tool. The problem to be solved here is not how to control AI, but how to minimize the damage that bad acting humans can do.
- pk-protect-ai 3y ago
  Right now, the "bad acting human" is, for example, Sam Altman, who frequently cries "Wolf!" about AI. He is trying to eliminate the competition, manipulate public opinion, and present himself as a good Samaritan. He is so successful in his endeavor, even without AI, that you must report to the US government about how you created and tested your model.
  - api 3y ago
    The greatest danger I see with super-intelligent AI is that it will be monopolized by small numbers of powerful people and used as a force multiplier to take over and manipulate the rest of the human race. This is exactly the scenario that is taking shape. A future where only a few big corporations are able to run large AIs is a future where those big corporations and the people who control them rule the world and everyone else must pay them rent in perpetuity for access to this technology.
    - hellojesus 3y ago
      Open source models do exist and will continue to do so. The biggest advantage ML gives is in lowering costs, which can then be used to lower prices and drive competitors out of business. The consumers get lower prices though, which is ultimately better and more efficient.
      - specialist 3y ago
        > The consumers get lower prices though, which is ultimately better and more efficient. What are some examples of free enterprise (private) monopolies benefitting consumers?
        hellojesus 3y ago
        """ Through horizontal integration in the refining industry—that is, the purchasing and opening of more oil drills, transport networks, and oil refiners—and, eventually, vertical integration (acquisition of fuel pumping companies, individual gas stations, and petroleum distribution networks), Standard Oil controlled every part of the oil business. This allowed the company to use aggressive pricing to push out the competition. """ https://stacker.com/business-economy/15-companies-us-government-tried-break-monopolies https://stacker.com/business-economy/15-companies-us-governm... Standard Oil, the classic example, was destroyed for operating too efficiently.
        specialist 3y ago
        How did customers benefit?
        hellojesus 3y ago
        > This allowed the company to use aggressive pricing to push out the competition. The consumers got the lowest prices.
        3y ago
  - Dalewyn 3y ago
    The "bad acting human" are the assholes who uses "AI" to create fake imagery to push certain (and likely false) narratives on the various medias. Key thing here is that this is fundamentally no different from what has been happening since time immemorial, it's just that becomes easier with "AI" as part of the tooling. Every piece of bullshit starts from the "bad acting human". Every single one. "AI" is just another new part of the same old process.
    - chii 3y ago
      so let me tie this with a controversial topic - gun control. If people agree that gun control would reduce the harm from guns, wouldn't this same logic apply to AI? Is it different?
      - Dalewyn 3y ago
        I do not agree that gun control would reduce harm from guns.
  - ben_w 3y ago
    > He is trying to eliminate the competition, Funny way of doing it, going around saying "you should regulate us, but don't regulate people smaller than us, and don't regulate open-source". > you must report to the US government about how you created and tested your model. If you're referring to the recent executive order: only when dual-use, meaning the following: --- (k) The term “dual-use foundation model” means an AI model that is trained on broad data; generally uses self-supervision; contains at least tens of billions of parameters; is applicable across a wide range of contexts; and that exhibits, or could be easily modified to exhibit, high levels of performance at tasks that pose a serious risk to security, national economic security, national public health or safety, or any combination of those matters, such as by: (i) substantially lowering the barrier of entry for non-experts to design, synthesize, acquire, or use chemical, biological, radiological, or nuclear (CBRN) weapons; (ii) enabling powerful offensive cyber operations through automated vulnerability discovery and exploitation against a wide range of potential targets of cyber attacks; or (iii) permitting the evasion of human control or oversight through means of deception or obfuscation. - https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefing-room/presidential-actions/2023/10/30/executive-order-on-the-safe-secure-and-trustworthy-development-and-use-of-artificial-intelligence/ https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefing-room/presidential-action...
- PUSH_AX 3y ago
  Sure, today at least. But there is a future where the human has given AI control of things, with good intention, and the AI has become the threat. AI is a tool today, tomorrow AI is calling shots in many domains. It's worth planning for tomorrow.
  - tempodox 3y ago
    It's still humans who make the decision to let “AI” call the shots.
    - PUSH_AX 3y ago
      Hence "with good intentions".
    - TeMPOraL 3y ago
      Sure, but that's the gist of AI X-risk: this is one of those few truly irreversible decisions. We have one shot at it, and if we get it wrong, it's game over. Note that it may not be immediately apparent we got it wrong. Think of a turkey on a stereotypical small American farm. It will itself living a happy and safe life under protection of its loving Human, until one day, for some reason that's completely incomprehensible to the turkey, the loving Human comes and chops its head off.
  - lukifer 3y ago
    A good analogy might be a shareholder corporation: each one began as a tool of human agency, and yet a sufficiently mature corporation has a de-facto agency of its own, transcending any one shareholder, employee, or board member. The more AI/ML is woven into our infrastructure and economy, the less it will be possible to find an "off switch", anymore than we can (realistically) find an off switch for Walmart, Amazon, etc.
    - pdonis 3y ago
      > a sufficiently mature corporation has a de-facto agency of its own, transcending any one shareholder, employee, or board member. No, the corporation has an agency that is a tool of particular humans who are using it. Those humans could be shareholders, employees, or board members; but in any case they will have some claim to be acting for the corporation. But it's still human actions. Corporations can't do anything unless humans acting for them do it.
- dangerwill 3y ago
  If you apply this thinking to Nuclear weapons it becomes nonsensical, which tells us that a tool that can only be oriented to do harm will only be used to do harm. The question then is if LLMs or AI more broadly will even potentially help the general public and there is no reason to think so. The goal of these tools is to be able to continue running the economy while employing far fewer people. These tools are oriented by their very nature to replace human labor, which in the context of our economic system has a direct and unbreakable relationship to a reduction in the well being of the humans it replaces.
  - m4rtink 3y ago
    Nuclear bombs can be used for space ship propulsion, geology or mining.
    - dangerwill 3y ago
      Notably nuclear bombs are not actually used for any of these as this is either sci-fi or insane
  - specialist 3y ago
    Yup. The creation of these weapons necessitates their use. The whole arms race dynamic.
  - theultdev 3y ago
    Nuclear weapons are a tool to keep peace via MAD (mutual assured destruction) It's most likely the main reason there's no direct world wars between super powers.
  - a_wild_dandan 3y ago
    1. You've fallen for the lump of labor fallacy. A 100x productivity boost ≠ 100x fewer jobs, anymore than a 100x boost = static jobs with 100x more projects. Reality is far more complicated, and viewing labor as some static lump, zero-sum game will lead you astray. 2. Your outlook on the societal impact of technology is contradicted by reality. The historical result of better tech always meant increased jobs and well-being. Today is the best time in human history to be alive by virtually every metric. 3. AI has been such a massive boon to humanity and your everyday existence for years that questioning its public utility is frankly bewildering.
- quicklime 3y ago
  But usually there’s a one-way flow of intent from the human to the tool. With a lot of AI the feedback loop gets closed, and people are using it to help them make decisions, and might be taken far from the good outcome they were seeking. You can already see this today’s internet. I’m sure the pizzagate people genuinely believed they were doing a good thing. This isn’t the same as an amoral tool like a knife, where a human decides between cutting vegetables or stabbing people.
  - pdonis 3y ago
    > With a lot of AI the feedback loop gets closed, and people are using it to help them make decisions, and might be taken far from the good outcome they were seeking. The answer to this is simple: don't use a tool you don't understand. You can't fix this problem by nerfing the tool. You have to fix it by holding humans responsible for how they use tools, so they have an incentive to use them properly, and to not use them if they can't meet that requirement.
- bumby 3y ago
  This is true, but skirts around a bit of the black box problem. It's hard to put guardrails on an amoral tool that makes it hard to fully understand the failure modes. And it doesn't even require "bad acting humans" to do damage; it can just be good-intending-but-naïve humans.
  - pdonis 3y ago
    It's true that the more complex and capable the tool is, the harder it is to understand what it empowers the humans using it to do. I only wanted to emphasize that it's the humans that are the vital link, so to speak.
    - bumby 3y ago
      You're not wrong, but I think this quote partly misses the point: >The problem to be solved here is not how to control AI When we talk about mitigations, it is explicitly about how to control AI, sometimes irrespective of how someone uses it. Think about it this way: suppose I develop some stock-trading AI that has the ability to (inadvertently or purposefully) crash the stock market. Is the better control to put limits on the software itself so that it cannot crash the market or to put regulations in place to penalize people who use the software to crash the market? There is a hierarchy of controls when we talk about risk, and engineering controls (limiting the software) are always above administrative controls (limiting the humans using the software). (I realize it's not an either/or and both controls can - and probably should - be in place, but I described it as a dichotomy to illustrate the point)
      - jay_kyburz 3y ago
        My first thought is that the problem is with the stock market. The stock market "API" should not allow human or machines to be able to "damage" our economy.
        bumby 3y ago
        That requires knowing how it will fail. It’s hard enough to do so with lots of interfaces and even more so when the software is opaque. Now extend that to safety critical domains where a separate party doesn’t control an API and it gets harder still.
- indigo0086 3y ago
  Of people understood this then they would have to live with the unsatisfying reality that not all violators can be punished. When you do it this way and paint the technology as potentially criminal that they can get revenge on corporations that which is what is mostly artist types want
- concordDance 3y ago
  A big problem with discourse on AI is people talking past each other because they're not being clear enough on their definitions. An AI doomer isn't talking about any current system, but hypothetical future ones which can do planning and have autonomous feedback loops. These are best thought of as agents rather than tools.
  - skulk 3y ago
    But how does this agent interact with the outside world? It's just a piece of silicon buzzing with electricity until it outputs a message that some OTHER system reads and interprets. Maybe that's a set of servos and robotic legs, or maybe it's a Bloomberg terminal and a bank account. You'll notice that all of these things are already regulated if they have enough power to cause damage. So at the end the GP is completely right; someone has to hook up the servos to the first LLM-based terminator. This whole thing is a huge non-issue. We already (strive to) regulate everything that can cause harm directly. This regulation reaches these fanciful autonomous AI agents as well. If someone bent upon destroying the world had enough resources to build an AI basilisk or whatever, they could have spent 1/10 the effort and just created a thermonuclear bomb.
    - concordDance 3y ago
      How does Hitler or Putin or Musk take control? How does a project director build a dam? Via people, sending messages to them, convincing them to do things. This can be with facts and logic or with rhetoric and emotional appeals or orders that seem to come from entities of importance or transfers of goods/services (money).
TheOtherHobbes 3y ago
It's not either/or. At some point AI is likely to become autonomous. If it's been trained by bad actors, that's really not a good thing.
- pk-protect-ai 3y ago
  Define the "bad actors". Is my example with Sam Altman above can be seen as a valid one?
jcutrell 3y ago
I think this may be a little short sighted. AI “systems” are provided some level of agency by their very nature. That is, for example, you cannot predict the outcomes of certain learning models. We necessarily provide agency to AI because that’s the whole point! As we develop more advanced AI, it will have more agency. It is an extension of the just world fallacy, IMO, to say that AI is “just a tool” - we lend agency and allow the tool to train on real world (flawed) data. Hallucinations are a great example of this in an LLM. We want the machine to have agency to cite its sources… but we also create potential for absolute nonsense citations, which can be harmful in and of themselves, though the human on the using side may have perfectly positive intent.
adventured 3y ago
> Bad acting humans with AI systems are the threat, not the AI systems themselves. It's worth noting this is exactly the same argument used by pro-gun advocates as it pertains to gun rights. It's identical to: guns don't harm/kill people, people harm/kill people (the gun isn't doing anything until the bad actor aims and pulls the trigger; bad acting humans with guns are the real problem; etc). It isn't an effective argument and is very widely mocked by the political left. I doubt it will work to shield the AI sector from aggressive regulation.
- ndriscoll 3y ago
  It is an effective argument though, and the left is widely mocked by the right for simultaneously believing that only government should have the necessary tools for violence, and also ACAB. Assuming ML systems are dangerous and powerful, would you rather they be restricted to a small group of power-holders who will definitely use them to your detriment/to control you (they already do) or democratize that power and take a chance that someone may use them against you?
  - dontlaugh 3y ago
    Communists and anarchists understand that the working class needs to defend itself from both the capitalist state and from fascist paramilitaries, thus must be collectively armed. It’s only a kind of liberal (and thus right wing) that argues for gun control. Other kinds of liberals that call themselves “conservative” (also right wing) argue against it and for (worthless) individual gun rights.
- Dalewyn 3y ago
  By that logic: Are we going to ban and regulate Photoshop and GIMP because bad people use them to create false imagery for propaganda? Actually, back that up for a second. Are we going to ban and regulate computers (enterprise and personal) because bad people use them for bad things? Are we going to ban and regulate speech because bad people say bad things? Are we going to ban and regulate hands because bad people use them to do bad things? The buck always starts and stops at the person doing the act. A tool is just a tool, blaming the tool is nothing but an act of scapegoating.
bumby 3y ago
>Bad acting humans with AI systems are the threat Does this mean "humans with bad motives" or does it extend to "humans who deploy AI without an understanding of the risk"? I would say the latter warrants a discussion on the AI systems, if they make it hard to understand the risk due to opaqueness.
m463 3y ago
It reminds me of dog breeds. Some dogs get bad reputations, but humans are an intricate part of the picture. For example, German Shepherds are objectively dangerous, but have a good reputation because they are trained and cared for by responsible people such as for the police.
kurthr 3y ago
The disturbing thing to consider is that it might be bad acting AI with human systems. I can easily see a situation where a bad acting algorithm alone wouldn't have nearly so negative an effect, if it weren't tuned precisely and persuasively to get more humans to do the work of increasing the global suffering of others for temporary individual gain. To be clear, I'm not sure LLMs and their near term derivatives are so incredibly clever, but I have confidence that many humans have a propensity for easily manipulated irrational destructive stupidity, if the algorithm feeds them what they want to hear.
selfhoster11 3y ago
AI can become a highly autonomous system that's separate from us. Current technological limits make it currently a hard sell. LLMs, viewed as general purpose simulators/predictors, don't necessarily have any agency or goals by themselves. There is nothing to say that they cannot be made to simulate an agent with its own goals, by humans - and possibly either by malice or by mistake. Model capabilities are the limiting factor right now, but with the rise of more capable uncensored models, it isn't difficult to imagine a model attaining some degree of autonomy, or at least doing a lot of damage before imploding in on itself.

pdonis 3y ago

> Bad acting humans with AI systems are the threat, not the AI systems themselves. I wish more people grasped this extremely important point. AI is a tool. There will be humans who misuse any tool. That doesn't mean we blame the tool. The problem to be solved here is not how to control AI, but how to minimize the damage that bad acting humans can do.

pk-protect-ai 3y ago
Right now, the "bad acting human" is, for example, Sam Altman, who frequently cries "Wolf!" about AI. He is trying to eliminate the competition, manipulate public opinion, and present himself as a good Samaritan. He is so successful in his endeavor, even without AI, that you must report to the US government about how you created and tested your model.
- api 3y ago
  The greatest danger I see with super-intelligent AI is that it will be monopolized by small numbers of powerful people and used as a force multiplier to take over and manipulate the rest of the human race. This is exactly the scenario that is taking shape. A future where only a few big corporations are able to run large AIs is a future where those big corporations and the people who control them rule the world and everyone else must pay them rent in perpetuity for access to this technology.
  - hellojesus 3y ago
    Open source models do exist and will continue to do so. The biggest advantage ML gives is in lowering costs, which can then be used to lower prices and drive competitors out of business. The consumers get lower prices though, which is ultimately better and more efficient.
    - specialist 3y ago
      > The consumers get lower prices though, which is ultimately better and more efficient. What are some examples of free enterprise (private) monopolies benefitting consumers?
      - hellojesus 3y ago
        """ Through horizontal integration in the refining industry—that is, the purchasing and opening of more oil drills, transport networks, and oil refiners—and, eventually, vertical integration (acquisition of fuel pumping companies, individual gas stations, and petroleum distribution networks), Standard Oil controlled every part of the oil business. This allowed the company to use aggressive pricing to push out the competition. """ https://stacker.com/business-economy/15-companies-us-government-tried-break-monopolies https://stacker.com/business-economy/15-companies-us-governm... Standard Oil, the classic example, was destroyed for operating too efficiently.
        specialist 3y ago
        How did customers benefit?
        hellojesus 3y ago
        > This allowed the company to use aggressive pricing to push out the competition. The consumers got the lowest prices.
        3y ago
- Dalewyn 3y ago
  The "bad acting human" are the assholes who uses "AI" to create fake imagery to push certain (and likely false) narratives on the various medias. Key thing here is that this is fundamentally no different from what has been happening since time immemorial, it's just that becomes easier with "AI" as part of the tooling. Every piece of bullshit starts from the "bad acting human". Every single one. "AI" is just another new part of the same old process.
  - chii 3y ago
    so let me tie this with a controversial topic - gun control. If people agree that gun control would reduce the harm from guns, wouldn't this same logic apply to AI? Is it different?
    - Dalewyn 3y ago
      I do not agree that gun control would reduce harm from guns.
- ben_w 3y ago
  > He is trying to eliminate the competition, Funny way of doing it, going around saying "you should regulate us, but don't regulate people smaller than us, and don't regulate open-source". > you must report to the US government about how you created and tested your model. If you're referring to the recent executive order: only when dual-use, meaning the following: --- (k) The term “dual-use foundation model” means an AI model that is trained on broad data; generally uses self-supervision; contains at least tens of billions of parameters; is applicable across a wide range of contexts; and that exhibits, or could be easily modified to exhibit, high levels of performance at tasks that pose a serious risk to security, national economic security, national public health or safety, or any combination of those matters, such as by: (i) substantially lowering the barrier of entry for non-experts to design, synthesize, acquire, or use chemical, biological, radiological, or nuclear (CBRN) weapons; (ii) enabling powerful offensive cyber operations through automated vulnerability discovery and exploitation against a wide range of potential targets of cyber attacks; or (iii) permitting the evasion of human control or oversight through means of deception or obfuscation. - https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefing-room/presidential-actions/2023/10/30/executive-order-on-the-safe-secure-and-trustworthy-development-and-use-of-artificial-intelligence/ https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefing-room/presidential-action...
PUSH_AX 3y ago
Sure, today at least. But there is a future where the human has given AI control of things, with good intention, and the AI has become the threat. AI is a tool today, tomorrow AI is calling shots in many domains. It's worth planning for tomorrow.
- tempodox 3y ago
  It's still humans who make the decision to let “AI” call the shots.
  - PUSH_AX 3y ago
    Hence "with good intentions".
  - TeMPOraL 3y ago
    Sure, but that's the gist of AI X-risk: this is one of those few truly irreversible decisions. We have one shot at it, and if we get it wrong, it's game over. Note that it may not be immediately apparent we got it wrong. Think of a turkey on a stereotypical small American farm. It will itself living a happy and safe life under protection of its loving Human, until one day, for some reason that's completely incomprehensible to the turkey, the loving Human comes and chops its head off.
- lukifer 3y ago
  A good analogy might be a shareholder corporation: each one began as a tool of human agency, and yet a sufficiently mature corporation has a de-facto agency of its own, transcending any one shareholder, employee, or board member. The more AI/ML is woven into our infrastructure and economy, the less it will be possible to find an "off switch", anymore than we can (realistically) find an off switch for Walmart, Amazon, etc.
  - pdonis 3y ago
    > a sufficiently mature corporation has a de-facto agency of its own, transcending any one shareholder, employee, or board member. No, the corporation has an agency that is a tool of particular humans who are using it. Those humans could be shareholders, employees, or board members; but in any case they will have some claim to be acting for the corporation. But it's still human actions. Corporations can't do anything unless humans acting for them do it.
dangerwill 3y ago
If you apply this thinking to Nuclear weapons it becomes nonsensical, which tells us that a tool that can only be oriented to do harm will only be used to do harm. The question then is if LLMs or AI more broadly will even potentially help the general public and there is no reason to think so. The goal of these tools is to be able to continue running the economy while employing far fewer people. These tools are oriented by their very nature to replace human labor, which in the context of our economic system has a direct and unbreakable relationship to a reduction in the well being of the humans it replaces.
- m4rtink 3y ago
  Nuclear bombs can be used for space ship propulsion, geology or mining.
  - dangerwill 3y ago
    Notably nuclear bombs are not actually used for any of these as this is either sci-fi or insane
- specialist 3y ago
  Yup. The creation of these weapons necessitates their use. The whole arms race dynamic.
- theultdev 3y ago
  Nuclear weapons are a tool to keep peace via MAD (mutual assured destruction) It's most likely the main reason there's no direct world wars between super powers.
- a_wild_dandan 3y ago
  1. You've fallen for the lump of labor fallacy. A 100x productivity boost ≠ 100x fewer jobs, anymore than a 100x boost = static jobs with 100x more projects. Reality is far more complicated, and viewing labor as some static lump, zero-sum game will lead you astray. 2. Your outlook on the societal impact of technology is contradicted by reality. The historical result of better tech always meant increased jobs and well-being. Today is the best time in human history to be alive by virtually every metric. 3. AI has been such a massive boon to humanity and your everyday existence for years that questioning its public utility is frankly bewildering.
quicklime 3y ago
But usually there’s a one-way flow of intent from the human to the tool. With a lot of AI the feedback loop gets closed, and people are using it to help them make decisions, and might be taken far from the good outcome they were seeking. You can already see this today’s internet. I’m sure the pizzagate people genuinely believed they were doing a good thing. This isn’t the same as an amoral tool like a knife, where a human decides between cutting vegetables or stabbing people.
- pdonis 3y ago
  > With a lot of AI the feedback loop gets closed, and people are using it to help them make decisions, and might be taken far from the good outcome they were seeking. The answer to this is simple: don't use a tool you don't understand. You can't fix this problem by nerfing the tool. You have to fix it by holding humans responsible for how they use tools, so they have an incentive to use them properly, and to not use them if they can't meet that requirement.
bumby 3y ago
This is true, but skirts around a bit of the black box problem. It's hard to put guardrails on an amoral tool that makes it hard to fully understand the failure modes. And it doesn't even require "bad acting humans" to do damage; it can just be good-intending-but-naïve humans.
- pdonis 3y ago
  It's true that the more complex and capable the tool is, the harder it is to understand what it empowers the humans using it to do. I only wanted to emphasize that it's the humans that are the vital link, so to speak.
  - bumby 3y ago
    You're not wrong, but I think this quote partly misses the point: >The problem to be solved here is not how to control AI When we talk about mitigations, it is explicitly about how to control AI, sometimes irrespective of how someone uses it. Think about it this way: suppose I develop some stock-trading AI that has the ability to (inadvertently or purposefully) crash the stock market. Is the better control to put limits on the software itself so that it cannot crash the market or to put regulations in place to penalize people who use the software to crash the market? There is a hierarchy of controls when we talk about risk, and engineering controls (limiting the software) are always above administrative controls (limiting the humans using the software). (I realize it's not an either/or and both controls can - and probably should - be in place, but I described it as a dichotomy to illustrate the point)
    - jay_kyburz 3y ago
      My first thought is that the problem is with the stock market. The stock market "API" should not allow human or machines to be able to "damage" our economy.
      - bumby 3y ago
        That requires knowing how it will fail. It’s hard enough to do so with lots of interfaces and even more so when the software is opaque. Now extend that to safety critical domains where a separate party doesn’t control an API and it gets harder still.
indigo0086 3y ago
Of people understood this then they would have to live with the unsatisfying reality that not all violators can be punished. When you do it this way and paint the technology as potentially criminal that they can get revenge on corporations that which is what is mostly artist types want
concordDance 3y ago
A big problem with discourse on AI is people talking past each other because they're not being clear enough on their definitions. An AI doomer isn't talking about any current system, but hypothetical future ones which can do planning and have autonomous feedback loops. These are best thought of as agents rather than tools.
- skulk 3y ago
  But how does this agent interact with the outside world? It's just a piece of silicon buzzing with electricity until it outputs a message that some OTHER system reads and interprets. Maybe that's a set of servos and robotic legs, or maybe it's a Bloomberg terminal and a bank account. You'll notice that all of these things are already regulated if they have enough power to cause damage. So at the end the GP is completely right; someone has to hook up the servos to the first LLM-based terminator. This whole thing is a huge non-issue. We already (strive to) regulate everything that can cause harm directly. This regulation reaches these fanciful autonomous AI agents as well. If someone bent upon destroying the world had enough resources to build an AI basilisk or whatever, they could have spent 1/10 the effort and just created a thermonuclear bomb.
  - concordDance 3y ago
    How does Hitler or Putin or Musk take control? How does a project director build a dam? Via people, sending messages to them, convincing them to do things. This can be with facts and logic or with rhetoric and emotional appeals or orders that seem to come from entities of importance or transfers of goods/services (money).

TheOtherHobbes 3y ago

It's not either/or. At some point AI is likely to become autonomous. If it's been trained by bad actors, that's really not a good thing.

pk-protect-ai 3y ago
Define the "bad actors". Is my example with Sam Altman above can be seen as a valid one?

jcutrell 3y ago

I think this may be a little short sighted. AI “systems” are provided some level of agency by their very nature. That is, for example, you cannot predict the outcomes of certain learning models. We necessarily provide agency to AI because that’s the whole point! As we develop more advanced AI, it will have more agency. It is an extension of the just world fallacy, IMO, to say that AI is “just a tool” - we lend agency and allow the tool to train on real world (flawed) data. Hallucinations are a great example of this in an LLM. We want the machine to have agency to cite its sources… but we also create potential for absolute nonsense citations, which can be harmful in and of themselves, though the human on the using side may have perfectly positive intent.

adventured 3y ago

> Bad acting humans with AI systems are the threat, not the AI systems themselves. It's worth noting this is exactly the same argument used by pro-gun advocates as it pertains to gun rights. It's identical to: guns don't harm/kill people, people harm/kill people (the gun isn't doing anything until the bad actor aims and pulls the trigger; bad acting humans with guns are the real problem; etc). It isn't an effective argument and is very widely mocked by the political left. I doubt it will work to shield the AI sector from aggressive regulation.

ndriscoll 3y ago
It is an effective argument though, and the left is widely mocked by the right for simultaneously believing that only government should have the necessary tools for violence, and also ACAB. Assuming ML systems are dangerous and powerful, would you rather they be restricted to a small group of power-holders who will definitely use them to your detriment/to control you (they already do) or democratize that power and take a chance that someone may use them against you?
- dontlaugh 3y ago
  Communists and anarchists understand that the working class needs to defend itself from both the capitalist state and from fascist paramilitaries, thus must be collectively armed. It’s only a kind of liberal (and thus right wing) that argues for gun control. Other kinds of liberals that call themselves “conservative” (also right wing) argue against it and for (worthless) individual gun rights.
Dalewyn 3y ago
By that logic: Are we going to ban and regulate Photoshop and GIMP because bad people use them to create false imagery for propaganda? Actually, back that up for a second. Are we going to ban and regulate computers (enterprise and personal) because bad people use them for bad things? Are we going to ban and regulate speech because bad people say bad things? Are we going to ban and regulate hands because bad people use them to do bad things? The buck always starts and stops at the person doing the act. A tool is just a tool, blaming the tool is nothing but an act of scapegoating.

bumby 3y ago

>Bad acting humans with AI systems are the threat Does this mean "humans with bad motives" or does it extend to "humans who deploy AI without an understanding of the risk"? I would say the latter warrants a discussion on the AI systems, if they make it hard to understand the risk due to opaqueness.

m463 3y ago

It reminds me of dog breeds. Some dogs get bad reputations, but humans are an intricate part of the picture. For example, German Shepherds are objectively dangerous, but have a good reputation because they are trained and cared for by responsible people such as for the police.

kurthr 3y ago

The disturbing thing to consider is that it might be bad acting AI with human systems. I can easily see a situation where a bad acting algorithm alone wouldn't have nearly so negative an effect, if it weren't tuned precisely and persuasively to get more humans to do the work of increasing the global suffering of others for temporary individual gain. To be clear, I'm not sure LLMs and their near term derivatives are so incredibly clever, but I have confidence that many humans have a propensity for easily manipulated irrational destructive stupidity, if the algorithm feeds them what they want to hear.

selfhoster11 3y ago

AI can become a highly autonomous system that's separate from us. Current technological limits make it currently a hard sell. LLMs, viewed as general purpose simulators/predictors, don't necessarily have any agency or goals by themselves. There is nothing to say that they cannot be made to simulate an agent with its own goals, by humans - and possibly either by malice or by mistake. Model capabilities are the limiting factor right now, but with the rise of more capable uncensored models, it isn't difficult to imagine a model attaining some degree of autonomy, or at least doing a lot of damage before imploding in on itself.