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We’re talking about making sure chatbots don’t say “nigger,” not bioweapons. At some point you need to trust that the people using the tools are adults.
by junofan 3y ago
We’re talking about making sure chatbots don’t say “nigger,” not bioweapons. At some point you need to trust that the people using the tools are adults.
- Retric 3y agoFacebook has far bigger issues than that, such as peoples medical information getting released or potentially getting it wrong. Privacy might not be well protected in the US but defamation lawsuits are no joke. So training on people’s private chat history isn’t necessarily safe. Even just the realization that ‘Logs from a chatbot conversation can go viral’ has actual real world implications.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- fatherzine 3y agonot sure it's fair to trivialize ai risks. for just one example, the pen is mightier than the sword.
- paulddraper 3y agoCounterpoint: sticks and stones
- junofan 3y agoI’m not trivializing risks. I’m characterizing output. These systems aren’t theoretical anymore. They’re used by hundreds of millions of people daily in one form or another. What are these teams accomplishing? Give me a concrete example of a harm prevented. “Pen is mightier than the sword” is an aphorism.
- fatherzine 3y agooh, these teams are useless bureaucratic busybodies that only mask the real issue: ai is explosively powerful, and nobody has the slightest clue on how to steward that power and avoid the pain ai will unfortunately unleash.
- junofan 3y agoSounds more like a religion than a well-defined business objective.
- fatherzine 3y agonot entirely sure what you refer to, but here's a possibly flawed and possibly unrelated analogy: while our nervous systems depend on low intensity electric fields to function, subjecting them to artificial fields orders of magnitude more intense is well documented to cause intense pain, and as the intensity increases, eventually to death by electrocution. i submit that, sadly, we are going to observe the same phenomenon with intelligence as the parameter.
- ben_w 3y ago> Give me a concrete example of a harm prevented One can only do this by inventing a machine to observe the other Everett Branches where people didn't do safety work. Without that magic machine, the closest one can get to what you're asking for is to see OpenAI's logs for which completions for which prompts they're blocking; if they do this with content from the live model and not just the original red-team effort leading up to launch, then it's lost in the noise of all the other search results.
- nvm0n2 3y agoThis is veering extremely close to tiger-protecting rock territory.
- ben_w 3y agoThere's certainly a risk of that, but I think the second paragraph is enough to push it away from that problem in this specific instance.
- fatherzine 3y agoThe second paragraph is veering extremely close to shamanic person worship territory -- shamans have privileged access to the otherworld that we mere mortals lack.
- ben_w 3y agoAgain, I agree there's certainly a risk of that, but OpenAI did show at least some examples from their pre-release red teaming of gpt-4. What OpenAI showed definitely doesn't convince everyone (see some recent replies to my other comments for an example), though as find the examples sufficiently convincing I am unfortunately unable to see things from the POV of those who don't and therefore can't imagine what would change the minds of doubters.
- Retric 3y agoProduction LLM’s have been modified to avoid showing kids how to make dangerous chemicals using household chemicals. That’s a specific hazard being mitigated.
- Hipoint 3y agoWhat about the harm that’s come from pens and keyboards? Do we need departments staffed with patronizing and humorless thought police to decide what we should be able to write and read?
- latency-guy2 3y agoA saying is not true just because it's repeated, especially when you have your own interpretation and I have mine.
- troupo 3y ago> At some point you need to trust that the people using the tools are adults. Ah yes. Let's see: - invasive and pervasive tracking - social credit scores - surveillance [1] All done by adults, no need to worry [1] Just one such story: https://www.404media.co/fusus-ai-cameras-took-over-town-america/ https://www.404media.co/fusus-ai-cameras-took-over-town-amer...
- ben_w 3y agoYou ought to be talking about both. A friendly and helpful AI assistant that doesn't have any safety guardrails will give you detailed instructions for how to build and operate a bioweapon lab in the same style it will give you a cake recipe; and it will walk you though the process of writing code to search for dangerous nerve agents with the same apparent eagerness as when you ask for an implementation of Pong written in PostScript. A different AI, one which can be used to create lip-synced translations of videos, can also be used to create realistic fakes that say anything at all, and that can be combined with an LLM to make a much more convincing simulacra — even just giving them cloned voices of real people makes them seem more real and this has already been used for novel fraud.
- junofan 3y agoThere’s no way to build out a wet lab with a chatbot for weapons production. It’s just not feasible. Your example is a fantasy. Fraud is covered by the legal system. I don’t know anything about nerve agents.
- ben_w 3y agoI said it would give you instructions, not do it for you. Do you really think that's infeasible compared with everything else they're good at? Fraud being illegal is why I used it as an example. Fully automated fraud is to one-on-one fraud as the combined surveillance apparatus of the Stasi at their peak is to a lone private detective. Or what a computer virus is to a targeted hack of a single computer. Sign flip: https://www.theverge.com/2022/3/17/22983197/ai-new-possible-chemical-weapons-generative-models-vx https://www.theverge.com/2022/3/17/22983197/ai-new-possible-... Also remember that safety for AI, as AI is an active field of research, has to be forward facing to prevent what the next big thing could do wrong if the safety people don't stop it first, and not what the current big thing can do.
- junofan 3y agoNobody’s taking those instructions and building out a lab successfully who doesn’t already know what they’re doing haha. What have the safety people stopped so far? That’s where I’m struggling to see the point.
- _heimdall 3y agoIf that's your biggest concern with AI, that's a perfect example of why we need ethics teams in AI companies. All of these companies are building towards AGI, the complex ethics both of how an AGI is used and what rights it might have as an intelligent being go well beyond racist slurs.
- nvm0n2 3y agoCertainly but have any of the AI ethics teams at these big companies done any work on those bigger ethical issues, or is it all language control?
- _heimdall 3y agoI don't know enough about the teams unfortunately. My gut says no and that they're more PR than AI ethics, but that might be unfairly cynical.
- patcon 3y agoI feel you are being unimaginative and maybe a bit naive. I worked in biochemistry and used to eagerly anticipate the equivalent of free continuous integration services for wet lab work. It's here, just not evenly distributed and cheap yet: https://pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/acssynbio.6b00108 https://pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/acssynbio.6b00108 https://strateos.com/strateos-control-our-lab/ https://strateos.com/strateos-control-our-lab/ These realities are more adjacent than you think. Our job as a species is to talk about these things before they're on top of us. Your smugness reveals a lack of humility which is part of what puts us at risk. You look badly