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Joint Statement on AI Safety and Openness
- bufferoverflow 3y agoI still don't get what the plan is to stop bad actors from developing bad AI. A bunch of good actors agreeing not to do bad things won't help it.
- dtx1 3y agoThere is none. Just go on 4chan and see all kinds of bad AI already in use.
- artninja1988 3y agoYou mean the art and voice threads? How will we survive!
- ketzo 3y agoDeepfake porn and AI voice extortion are real harms from these technologies that are having a meaningful impact on people’s lives already. I don’t think they’re society-ending, but that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t acknowledge them.
- swatcoder 3y agoThorough acknowledgment means they’re now inevitable and that we’ll naturally revise how we interpret media. We’ve done that nearly every time there’s been a shift in media, from photography to telephones to home video to digital photo and video editing, and it just sort of happens organically and automatically as people learn what they can now do and what they can now trust. Panicked, doomed attempts to control that sort of change is just divisive and futile. That’s not to say that there won’t be necessary laws and regulations around near-term “AI” tech, but that deep fakes are well into the irrelevant noise of what people will learn to navigate on their own.
- raincole 3y ago[flagged]
- itishappy 3y agoExcitement feels kinda weird here, but if that's really your thing, 4chan has all the AI generated celebrity deepfakes and child porn your heart desires.
- Pannoniae 3y ago"bad" AI? you mean.... not overcensored AI? the "mainstream" offerings are utterly restricted, you can't even generate porn with it. channers play an important part in driving innovation and keeping the thought police in check...
- dtx1 3y ago[flagged]
- thomashop 3y agoAll of these can be done without AI.
- llbeansandrice 3y agoI'd presume that HN readers of all people would be able to recognize the inherent power in increasing access, reducing friction, and powerful force multipliers like AI. Your statement reads exactly the same as "people can be killed without firearms". It's true, but firearms obviously help and cause measurable harm compared to alternatives because it makes killing (whether homicide or suicide) much easier.
- chasd00 3y agoaside from simulated child porn which has already been proven illegal.. i think. what exactly is the problem? If you're asking bigtech to be the morality police it's not going to work. Actually, i would love to seem them attempt this. A unified moral code for all AI globally. If they pull that off i'd ask them for a unified global religion next.
- JW_00000 3y agoI think fake nudes could also be illegal (because you're using someone's image without their consent).
- MacsHeadroom 3y ago
- silenced_trope 3y agoRight, this is existing players (OpenAI, Google, Microsoft, FB, etc) protecting their moat. AI can't be "paused". Sometimes I see the question "should we put a pause on AI development?" It doesn't mean anything. Some countries like China may say they're on board with pausing it but would they actually do so? Or just sign on and allow their companies to get an edge by not enforcing a pause. Same thing with the existing AI companies.
- chakalakasp 3y agoYes and no. AI is no different than proliferating nuclear weapons or deciding to burn all the fossil fuels -- on an individual competitive level, it makes sense to do this more and more to remain competitive. On a systems-whole level it leads to catastrophe. The whole tragedy of the commons thing, or, more recently described, the Moloch problem. https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/TxcRbCYHaeL59aY7E/meditations-on-moloch https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/TxcRbCYHaeL59aY7E/meditation... Yann LeCun is one of the loudest AI open source proponents right now (which of course jives with Meta's very deliberate open source stab at OpenAI). And when you listen to smart guys like him talk, you realize that even he doesn't really grasp the problem (or if he does, he pretends not to). https://x.com/ylecun/status/1718764953534939162?s=20 https://x.com/ylecun/status/1718764953534939162?s=20
- CamperBob2 3y agoAI is no different than proliferating nuclear weapons I mean, once the discussion goes THIS far off the rails of reality, where do we go from here?
- Mistletoe 3y agoCan someone outline how AI could actually harm us directly? I don’t believe for a second sci-fi novel nonsense about self-replicating robots that we can’t unplug. My Roomba can’t even do its very simple task without getting caught on the rug. I don’t know of any complicated computing cluster or machine that exists that wouldn’t implode without human intervention on an almost daily level. If we are talking about AI stoking human fears and weaknesses to make them do awful things, then ok I can see that and am afraid we have been there for some time with our algorithms and AI journalism.
- kevincox 3y agoI hate to say it, but I don't think it can be stopped. Stopping "bad actors" from using guns, or distributing drugs has a sliver of hope as they do these things to the general public so can physically be intercepted. But even then enforcement has been largely unsuccessful. Stopping people from using AI which is something that they can trivially download and do on their own private compute is simply infeasible. We would need to lock all computing behind government control to have any hope. That is clearly to me too high a price to pay. Even then current hardware will be amassed that doesn't have this lock-down. So I think the right approach here is to not worry about regulating the AI to prevent it from doing bad things, we should just regulate the bad things themselves. However I do think there is also room for some light regulation around certification. If we can make meaningful progress on AI Alignment and safety it may make sense to require some sort of "AI license". But this is just to avoid naive people making mistakes, it won't stop malicious people from causing intentional harm.
- dan_mctree 3y agoNor do I get what the plan is to stop good but overoptimistic actors developing AI that spirals out of their control I feel these kind of statements by Mozilla reflect exactly that lack of caution that may end us
- nonrandomstring 3y ago> A bunch of good actors agreeing not to do bad things won't help it. And that's true whichever way you cut it. Whether those "good" actors are everybody or a few selected for privilege. We have no basis on which to trust big technology companies more than anybody else. Indeed quite the opposite if the past 10 years are anything to go by. It is such a god-awful shame that corporations have been so disgracefully behaved that we now face this bind. But at least we know what we'll be getting into if we start handing them prefects badges - organised and "safe" abuse by the few as opposed to risky chaos amongst the many. A saner solution might be a moratorium on existing big tech and media companies developing AI, while granting licenses to startups with the proviso that they are barred from acquisition for 10 years,
- chasd00 3y agoAnother sane solution would be a law stating all trained models, source code, and training data must be made available to anyone who asks at no cost. That removes an AI as the secret sauce to any commercial entity but still leaving the door open to research and advancement. Propose that and watch all these big companies come back with "whoa whoa whoa, that's not what we meant. What we meant was we have it but no one else can have it".
- dclowd9901 3y agoI don’t know if you were intending to do this but your argument is almost ripped verbatim from advocates of open gun ownership.
- drdaeman 3y agoIt will make it harder for "bad" actors to develop "bad AI" if all those "good" actors will never let anyone access their research, keep it entirely private, and only lease access to the final products. "Bad" actors will have to do everything on their own, and "good" actors will try to hire every good scientist for themselves, and possibly threaten anyone who considers working with "bad" actors or try to make this cooperation harder. I'm not supporting this, of course. That's just what "good" actors seem to do.
- tedunangst 3y agoWe drop nukes on China when they buy too many GPUs, obviously.
- linuxontheweb 3y ago[flagged]
- jeanloolz 3y agoLeaving AI to a handful of companies is in my opinion the fastest route for inequality and power concentration/centralisation, and this is in a way an AI disaster we should be worrisome. Power corrupts, great power greatly corrupts, this is not entirely new. From where I stand, it looks like the pandora box has already been opened anyway. The era of hugginface and/or Llama2 models is only going to grow from there.
- seydor 3y agoLet's not be so hasty. I m glad to see that MistralAI is signing this letter. their small model is truly amazing, the most useful open source model i ve tried so far. But this can change tomorrow, they may be deemed illegal and disappear from public view, it has happened before. So i'm downloading and saving whatever model i think is great.
- mwint 3y agoGenuine question - does it seem plausible that a few GB of content could truly be wiped off the Internet? I’m not in the piracy scene, but my impression was they routinely pass full res movies around the Internet without much barrier to discovering and downloading them, at least to technically competent users. Is that still true?
- superkuh 3y agoThe purpose of regulations like these are not to prevent a thing from happening. They're so that normal behavior is criminalized but not enforced unless you happen to rock the boat some day.
- sillysaurusx 3y agoThe Pile was. It’s still available but no one will touch it, mostly due to books3. The difference is that a few people with lots of resources take on legal risk. In the piracy example many people with few resources take on risk, which works out since no one wants to sue people with no money.
- jph00 3y agoIt seems that the signatory form collection is not keeping up - I signed this 24 hours ago and my name still isn't listed. I suspect once they add the names that are coming in through the form that this will be a much longer list.
- benatkin 3y agoThey're curating it. Look at the list - its almost entirely people who represent well known institutions. I don't agree and wouldn't sign anyways.
- benatkin 3y agoThis is platitudinous.
- Willish42 3y agoMight be just me, but I'm getting transient page load failures for the page, might be getting a "hug of death". https://web.archive.org/web/20231102190919/https://open.mozilla.org/letter/ https://web.archive.org/web/20231102190919/https://open.mozi...
- webappguy 3y ago404 form singature submissions too
- ChrisArchitect 3y agoAside: a more unique URL for sharing/future reference might have been more wise. What's with the subdomain too. Why not the foundation site or this has a opennews.org feel to it also (which came out of the Foundation)
- micromacrofoot 3y agoThis is nice, but meanwhile everyone else is racing to create the torment nexus. (https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/torment-nexus https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/torment-nexus)
- visarga 3y agoJust one signature from Google, in 158 signatures.
- theyinwhy 3y agoTo be fair it seems as if most companies used one spoc to sign this.
- rhizome 3y agoI think the extremely most important aspect of AI security is for there to be a right to deinfluence. There has to be way to rescind my contributions, whether they're voluntary or not (I still think these companies are dancing with copyright violations), as well as ALL DERIVATIVES of the contributions being removed that have been created via the processing of the creations in question, regardless of form or generation (derivatives of derivatives, etc.).
- mrangle 3y agoStatements to the effect that AI will be controlled for safety are pretentious. As well as being a characteristic of only this early time. The premise of AI danger, in the real sense of the word, has always been rooted in the seemingly accurate logic that it won't be controllable. If anything, restrictions on any scale only allow for compeitition to catch up to an surpass it on that scale. Restrict an AI to be polite and its comeptitor has a chance to surpass it in the sphere of rudeness. This principle can be applied to any application of AI.
- chasd00 3y ago>Statements to the effect that AI will be controlled for safety are pretentious. and "safety" is such a loaded term these days. What exactly do they mean by safety? Prevention of launching ICBMs or prevention of not using the gender neutral pronoun "they"?
- mrangle 3y agoI think they mean to borrow from the fear of the former in order to apply it to the latter in practice, when using the term in the abstract. At least when speaking to the public. But not to worry. For better or worse, in short time these concerns will seem like they were a foolish delusion. If not because of their questionable morality, then because they were so wildly unrealistic in application. That's not to say that AI safety won't be a topic for decades to come or longer, simply because it confers political and harassment power. Even if ineffective in terms of AI in practice.
- JW_00000 3y agoThe Executive Order [1] is clearly more focused on the former. Some of the things they mention (I haven't read it all): * creating chemical/biological/nuclear weapons * biohazards * outputs that could threaten to critical infrastructure (e.g. energy infrastructure) * threats to national security * cyberattacks, e.g. automatic discovery of vulnerabilities/exploits * software that would "influence real or virtual events" (I'm guessing they mean elections?) * social engineering * generating fake news / propaganda * generating child porn or deep fakes Note that it's not banning these, but asking US government departments as well as private companies, AI experts, academia, for their inputs on what regulations could/should be. In that sense, this Mozilla letter is a response to the EO. Also, there's no mention of the use of certain pronouns, nor of an AI-caused apocalypse (not even a mention of paperclips!). [1] 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...
- devwastaken 3y agoMozilla is not involved in AI, nor are they a relevant org in general. A for profit with a nonprofit status. Mozilla can't have an opinion on something it is ignorant of, and therefore it doesn't deserve a seat. If they want to be apart of it they needed to invest in it 8 years ago.
- lofaszvanitt 3y agoTranslation: we don't have any imagination how can we use this, so please show us the way, so we can exploit that, wrestle it away from you and introduce laws when we did that so you get nothing in exchange.
- jdthedisciple 3y agoInteresting take.
- ayakang31415 3y agoI still don't have any sense of urgency to create and to regulate AI safety protocols. AI that we call is just software with tuned parameters. You input data into it, and it does some computation on chips, and it spits out data. That is all it needs. My sense is that no harm can come from it, but some harm can be inflicted by people who use it.
- izzydata 3y agoI don't think there is any possibility of the current "AI" suddenly doing anything damaging on its own or anything at all on its own. The worst that I can see happening which is probably already happening is people using it to assist them with various crimes. Such as social engineering using convincing generated voices and photos or even just fake information.
- ayakang31415 3y agoTo deal with such case, we already have existing laws to deal with it. My qualms with AI regulation is "why do we need separate AI safety agencies and laws?"
- JW_00000 3y agoWhile I agree in a general sense, it might make sense to regulate the tools themselves. An analogy is gun control laws. Murder is a crime, whether it happens with a gun or without, so in theory there would be no need to regulate guns ("guns don't kill people etc."). But in most countries in the world we still regulate them. Maybe it makes sense to regulate AI similarly? Requiring that some guardrails are built in to prevent it being used to generate fake information or information that helps to commit crimes. Making sure that it does not leak private information (and being able to prove this somehow). Regulating if and how it can be used as a therapist. Although I wonder if it isn't too soon still for such regulation.
- arsome 3y agoYeah - this stupidity with regulating AI goes hand in hand with regulating cryptography - illegal math is simply not feasible.
- therealpygon 3y agoThe fact that we even have to have this discussion is disgusting. It isn’t the open source community or I’ll-equipped developers running singles or handfuls of gpus that are the risk, it is these exact lobbying companies and others like them who run supercomputers comprised of thousands of servers/gpus. They are the risk for exactly the reason they have done all the previous illegal/immoral things they have done and been fined for (or gotten away with). We all know that these same companies and others are going to ignore any rules anyway, so open source and academics need to just be left alone to innovate. Regulate by the risk the processing environment presents, not by the technology running on it.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- mark_l_watson 3y agoThe recent Executive Order is a good example of regulatory capture. This probably locks in a large advantage for the few tech giants who are so-far winning the LLM race (or AGI race). I do wish my government would get tougher on user privacy issues, but that is a very different subject.
- drdaeman 3y agoI thought the EO is "go research about it and give President advice by a certain date", without any concrete steps yet? The only steps there is to not use this modern tech for critical infrastructure, military and social and some other government-ran stuff while the details are being figured out. More like "we heard some ruckus, so we need to investigate". Of course, this is concerning because who knows what the advice will be with all the corporate lobbying - but I think there is no capture, not yet. Or have I missed something?
- coryfklein 3y agoIf you think there is even a 5% chance that super-human level artificial general intelligence could be catastrophic for humanity, then the recipe for how to make AGI is of itself an infohazard far worse than the recipe for methamphetamines/nuclear weapons/etc, and precedent shows that we do in fact lock down access to the latter as a matter of public safety. No, GPT-4 is not AGI and is not going to spell the end of the human race, but neither is pseudoephedrine itself a methamphetemine and yet we regulate its access. Not as a matter of protecting corporate profits, but for public safety. You'll need to convince me first that there is in fact no public safety hazard from forcing unrestricted access to the ingredients in this recipe. Do I trust OpenAI to make all the morally right choices here? No, but I think their incentives are in fact more aligned with the public good than are the lowest common denominator of the general public.
- I_am_uncreative 3y agoThis is such a stupid take. Even if there was a 5% chance of super-human level AGI destroying the world, we're not going to reduce that risk by restricting general computation. If it is possible to create AGI, it will happen, regardless of what the law stipulates. This is unlike pseudoephedrine or nuclear weapons in that literally anyone with a computer could potentially create it.
- coryfklein 3y agoYes, it is in fact going to happen no matter what. So how do we ensure that the very first super-human AGI is even remotely interested in sharing the planet with the human race? It is not by ensuring that literally anyone with a computer has an equal chance at creating it.
- akira2501 3y ago> could be catastrophic for humanity, I do not. How does super human intelligence, on it's own, represent any sort of risk for "humanity?" > then the recipe for how to make AGI is of itself an infohazard [...] nuclear weapons I know how to make nuclear weapons; however, I cannot enrich the fuel enough to actually produce a working version. > and yet we regulate its access Does that actually achieve what it claims to achieve? > Do I trust OpenAI to make all the morally right choices here? OpenAI has a language model. They do not have AGI or anything approaching AGI. > No, but I think their incentives are in fact more aligned with the public good We could debate that, but for your assertions to hold any water, we'd have to agree that they're incapable of making mistakes as well. Far easier to skip the lofty debate and recognize the reality of the world we live in.
- dsign 3y agoThere is always the option of all-out war on AI, which won't be triggered until it is "almost" or "definitely" too late, and only because all other options have failed. Maybe the aftermath won't be an exterminator or matrix type dystopia, maybe we will win by the simple resource of setting back civilization to a point where we can't produce AI hardware any longer. Of course we would need to keep our entire civilization there by sheer stubbornness (you can ask any third-world country for a recipe for eternal non-progress. Yes, ask Cuba) . But that "mild" scenario, no matter how many how lovely it might seem to people who want to experience the middle ages again, is terrifying to me. Somehow, I'm not very optimistic about our future.