5 ms·

Safety for AI is like making safe bullets or safe swords or safe shotguns. The reason why there's so much emphasis on this is liability. That's it. Otherwise t

Safety for AI is like making safe bullets or safe swords or safe shotguns. The reason why there's so much emphasis on this is liability. That's it. Otherwise there's really no point. It's the psychological aspect of blame that influences the liability. If I wanted to make a dirty bomb it's harder to blame google for it if I found the results through google, easier to blame AI for it if I found the results from an LLM. Mainly because the data was transferred from the servers directly to me when it's an LLM. But the logical route of getting that information is essentially the same. So because of this companies like Meta (who really don't give a shit) spend so much time emphasizing on this safety bs. Now I'm not denigrating meta for not giving a shit, because I don't give a shit either. Kitchen knives can kill people folks. Nothing can stop it. And I don't give a shit about people designing safety into kitchen knives anymore than I give a shit about people designing safety into AI. Pointless.

cageface 3y ago
It's more like making safe nukes. One person can do a lot more damage with AI than they can with a gun.
- corethree 3y ago
  First off that's theoretical. No damage of that scale has been done by an LLM yet. Second off nobody really believes this. That's why there's no age limit for LLM usage and there is for gun usage. Would you let your 10 year old kid play with a hand gun or chatGPT? Let's be real.
  - dieselgate 3y ago
    I agree with your pragmatic approach. LLMs are a "high magnitude" advancement but we can't really correlate that with "severe destruction" in a physical way - maybe in a theoretical or abstract way. Kind of reminds me of the whole "dihydrogen monoxide kills so many people per year" parody
- threadweaver34 3y ago
  I'm not sure if it will actually be like that. In just a few years, AI will be so widespread we'll just assume anything not from a source we trust is fake.
  - tiffanyg 3y ago
    Yeah, that sounds like a great idea. The US (in particular) has seen a significant decline in trust (think community, as in union, as in Federalist #10 etc.) in all manner of fundamentals of democracy and 'modernity' (tech, science, etc.) in the past several decades. And, bear in mind that there are significant differences in the way people cope with these sorts of changes and the increasing instability* quite generally for many people as well as local and regional communities. Fire departments, since the time of Ben Franklin, have mostly, to my knowledge, doused fires with "extinguishers," not "accelerants".** * Especially economic - not in the sense of "time for 'entitlements'", ideally, in the sense of "time to reconsider if trashing the 'New Deal' starting ~ in the 70s might have been a bad idea" ... for those not already thinking that way. Nothing better (socially) than to provide people with meaningful ways of 'acquiring capital.' ** Outside of stories in books, anyway...
- Moldoteck 3y ago
  Lol. Can you point pls how an llm be as dangerous as a nuclear bumb? Ok, let's go deeper, suppose we have created real AGI that is running on a ton of compute, how will this be as dangerous as nuclear bomb? By launching them? You know, this is impossible right? More chances it'll mess with trading systems but again, nothing to the scale of a nuclear bomb
wilsonnb3 3y ago
Just for the record, people put a lot of effort into making safe bullets and shotguns. Neither is going to go bang unless you make it go bang. Definitely not pointless.
- corethree 3y ago
  The safety is for accidental usage. If the intent is to kill a safety isn't going to stop anything. All the unsafe things I can do with AI I can do with Google. No safety on Google. why? Liability is less of an issue.
  - baby 3y ago
    Not sure why you're getting downvoted. The safety around guns is indeed for the shooter, not for the shootee.
  - bigfudge 3y ago
    I think the "how to make bioweapons with crispr" part might not be as easy to do with google. It's a matter of degree, but you might be able to go from zero to virus with an expert holding your hand.
    - corethree 3y ago
      It's actually easier with Google. LLMs tend to give summaries of everything.
csydas 3y ago
i would disagree. i thjnk the safety concerns and conversations from the companies serving AI services are misguided simply because the companies know what they want to do with it (advertising based on user data and input) but they have no idea how to accurately predict all the unexpected or undesired responses from the AIs. they know there is likely some potential revenue there but they aren’t sure how to make the AI comply with regulations. they already have processes for manipulating results and have a trained and likely tagged data set of “bad” things the AI shouldn’t return. if they don’t want the ai telling how to do illegal stuff they will just not include that in its dataset. if the ai “learns” this, that’s responsibility of the user likely in the clause. they will simply document how it was trained and true expected results, add clause on “if you don’t wanna see disturbing responses don’t ask disturbing questions for it to find he answer to”, and probably it will be enough unless the ai gets really combative and destructive. i really don’t thjnk this about safety at all, it’s trying to seed the idea that the ai companies are at all concerned about violating existing privacy regulations that Meta et. al. already are bumping against. obviously it’s supposition but i thjnk this is far likelier what they’re worried on and what all this “safety” talk is about. they just want plausible deniability to be seeded before the first lawsuits come.
- corethree 3y ago
  Right. You and I are in agreement. Read my post carefully. I stated that it's all about liability. That's the only reason why they care.
  - csydas 3y ago
    I think there are elements we agree on (liability), but I don't think it's about any real safety concern or anything beyond just "we are not sure we cannot break the law on privacy and data collection/advertising with our AI...so we are going to pretend we are trying", and this just seems like it's Meta just stopping the pretending, but naturally just my opinion which is open to change. that's more my point, but yes, I can see that maybe I came off as too disagreeable edit: In other words, my contention with Meta's statements and your analysis is mostly that I don't really think "safety" is Meta's concern -- the knife analogy I think isn't even necessary (the models are already neutered in this regard as I see it), I think instead it's that they likely know the models will violate many regulations and also privacy laws, and they're trying to seed the idea that they built their AI implementation responsibly and any violation is just a "hallucination". It would be great if a reporter truly took meta to task on what they mean by safety and what specifically they are trying to protect people from; I have little hope this will happen.
Barrin92 3y ago
> Safety for AI is like making safe bullets or safe swords or safe shotguns. This seems like a very confused analogy for two reasons. One, there's a reason you aren't able to get your hands on a sword or shotgun in most places on earth, I'd prefer that not to be the case for AI. Secondly, AI is a general purpose tool. Safety for AI is like safety for a car, or a phone, or the electrity grid. it's going to be a ubiqutous background technology, not merely a tool to inflict damage. And I want safety and reliablity in a technology that's going to power most stuff around me.
- corethree 3y ago
  >This seems like a very confused analogy for two reasons. One, there's a reason you aren't able to get your hands on a sword or shotgun in most places on earth, I'd prefer that not to be the case for AI. In the US, I can get my hands on guns, knives and swords. In other countries you can get axes and knives. I think guns are mostly banned in other places. >Safety for AI is like safety for a car, or a phone Your phone has a safety? What about your car? At best the car has air bags that prevent you from dying. Doesn't prevent you from running other people over. The type of "safety" that big tech is talking about is safety to prevent people from using it malicious ways. They do this by making the AI LESS reliable. For example chatGPT will refuse to help you do malicious things. The big emphasis on this is pointless imo. If people aren't using AI to look up malicious things, they're going to be using google instead which has mostly the same information.

cageface 3y ago

It's more like making safe nukes. One person can do a lot more damage with AI than they can with a gun.

corethree 3y ago
First off that's theoretical. No damage of that scale has been done by an LLM yet. Second off nobody really believes this. That's why there's no age limit for LLM usage and there is for gun usage. Would you let your 10 year old kid play with a hand gun or chatGPT? Let's be real.
- dieselgate 3y ago
  I agree with your pragmatic approach. LLMs are a "high magnitude" advancement but we can't really correlate that with "severe destruction" in a physical way - maybe in a theoretical or abstract way. Kind of reminds me of the whole "dihydrogen monoxide kills so many people per year" parody
threadweaver34 3y ago
I'm not sure if it will actually be like that. In just a few years, AI will be so widespread we'll just assume anything not from a source we trust is fake.
- tiffanyg 3y ago
  Yeah, that sounds like a great idea. The US (in particular) has seen a significant decline in trust (think community, as in union, as in Federalist #10 etc.) in all manner of fundamentals of democracy and 'modernity' (tech, science, etc.) in the past several decades. And, bear in mind that there are significant differences in the way people cope with these sorts of changes and the increasing instability* quite generally for many people as well as local and regional communities. Fire departments, since the time of Ben Franklin, have mostly, to my knowledge, doused fires with "extinguishers," not "accelerants".** * Especially economic - not in the sense of "time for 'entitlements'", ideally, in the sense of "time to reconsider if trashing the 'New Deal' starting ~ in the 70s might have been a bad idea" ... for those not already thinking that way. Nothing better (socially) than to provide people with meaningful ways of 'acquiring capital.' ** Outside of stories in books, anyway...
Moldoteck 3y ago
Lol. Can you point pls how an llm be as dangerous as a nuclear bumb? Ok, let's go deeper, suppose we have created real AGI that is running on a ton of compute, how will this be as dangerous as nuclear bomb? By launching them? You know, this is impossible right? More chances it'll mess with trading systems but again, nothing to the scale of a nuclear bomb

wilsonnb3 3y ago

Just for the record, people put a lot of effort into making safe bullets and shotguns. Neither is going to go bang unless you make it go bang. Definitely not pointless.

corethree 3y ago
The safety is for accidental usage. If the intent is to kill a safety isn't going to stop anything. All the unsafe things I can do with AI I can do with Google. No safety on Google. why? Liability is less of an issue.
- baby 3y ago
  Not sure why you're getting downvoted. The safety around guns is indeed for the shooter, not for the shootee.
- bigfudge 3y ago
  I think the "how to make bioweapons with crispr" part might not be as easy to do with google. It's a matter of degree, but you might be able to go from zero to virus with an expert holding your hand.
  - corethree 3y ago
    It's actually easier with Google. LLMs tend to give summaries of everything.

csydas 3y ago

i would disagree. i thjnk the safety concerns and conversations from the companies serving AI services are misguided simply because the companies know what they want to do with it (advertising based on user data and input) but they have no idea how to accurately predict all the unexpected or undesired responses from the AIs. they know there is likely some potential revenue there but they aren’t sure how to make the AI comply with regulations. they already have processes for manipulating results and have a trained and likely tagged data set of “bad” things the AI shouldn’t return. if they don’t want the ai telling how to do illegal stuff they will just not include that in its dataset. if the ai “learns” this, that’s responsibility of the user likely in the clause. they will simply document how it was trained and true expected results, add clause on “if you don’t wanna see disturbing responses don’t ask disturbing questions for it to find he answer to”, and probably it will be enough unless the ai gets really combative and destructive. i really don’t thjnk this about safety at all, it’s trying to seed the idea that the ai companies are at all concerned about violating existing privacy regulations that Meta et. al. already are bumping against. obviously it’s supposition but i thjnk this is far likelier what they’re worried on and what all this “safety” talk is about. they just want plausible deniability to be seeded before the first lawsuits come.

corethree 3y ago
Right. You and I are in agreement. Read my post carefully. I stated that it's all about liability. That's the only reason why they care.
- csydas 3y ago
  I think there are elements we agree on (liability), but I don't think it's about any real safety concern or anything beyond just "we are not sure we cannot break the law on privacy and data collection/advertising with our AI...so we are going to pretend we are trying", and this just seems like it's Meta just stopping the pretending, but naturally just my opinion which is open to change. that's more my point, but yes, I can see that maybe I came off as too disagreeable edit: In other words, my contention with Meta's statements and your analysis is mostly that I don't really think "safety" is Meta's concern -- the knife analogy I think isn't even necessary (the models are already neutered in this regard as I see it), I think instead it's that they likely know the models will violate many regulations and also privacy laws, and they're trying to seed the idea that they built their AI implementation responsibly and any violation is just a "hallucination". It would be great if a reporter truly took meta to task on what they mean by safety and what specifically they are trying to protect people from; I have little hope this will happen.

Barrin92 3y ago

> Safety for AI is like making safe bullets or safe swords or safe shotguns. This seems like a very confused analogy for two reasons. One, there's a reason you aren't able to get your hands on a sword or shotgun in most places on earth, I'd prefer that not to be the case for AI. Secondly, AI is a general purpose tool. Safety for AI is like safety for a car, or a phone, or the electrity grid. it's going to be a ubiqutous background technology, not merely a tool to inflict damage. And I want safety and reliablity in a technology that's going to power most stuff around me.

corethree 3y ago
>This seems like a very confused analogy for two reasons. One, there's a reason you aren't able to get your hands on a sword or shotgun in most places on earth, I'd prefer that not to be the case for AI. In the US, I can get my hands on guns, knives and swords. In other countries you can get axes and knives. I think guns are mostly banned in other places. >Safety for AI is like safety for a car, or a phone Your phone has a safety? What about your car? At best the car has air bags that prevent you from dying. Doesn't prevent you from running other people over. The type of "safety" that big tech is talking about is safety to prevent people from using it malicious ways. They do this by making the AI LESS reliable. For example chatGPT will refuse to help you do malicious things. The big emphasis on this is pointless imo. If people aren't using AI to look up malicious things, they're going to be using google instead which has mostly the same information.