17 ms·

AI companies will need to report their safety tests to the US government

54 points by DaveFlater 3y ago

poopoopeepee62 3y ago
[flagged]
reissbaker 3y ago
Wow. This feels like a regulatory regime designed to smother open-source AI, and reduce competition in the American market since small companies are unlikely to be able to comply. The worst part is that doing so is actually against our national interests... China has already essentially caught up to GPT-4V with the release of Qwen-VL-Max yesterday [1]; the cat is out of the bag. Hobbling ourselves now doesn't help. 1: https://twitter.com/_akhaliq/status/1752033872982806718 https://twitter.com/_akhaliq/status/1752033872982806718
- rvnx 3y ago
  Well let's say congrats to them then, because we will all benefit back from that, especially since they work more in open way as we can download the Qwen-VL-Max model, inspect it and use it offline. Europe is copying ChatGPT, and all we got is a louzy LLaMA-fork.
  - reissbaker 3y ago
    Definitely congrats to them. I don't hate on Mistral though; their open-source models are extremely capable for their size and parameter count, and Mistral Medium is second only to GPT-4 on the Chatbot Arena (I'm not including Bard, since Bard gives their chatbot access to the internet, whereas the other models are being interacted with solely on the basis of their innate knowledge; that doesn't seem apples-to-apples, and the underlying Gemini Pro model without access to the internet underperforms GPT-4 and Mistral). And Mistral Medium is much cheaper than GPT-4 — around $8/million tokens, whereas GPT-4-Turbo is $30/million tokens. So I'd say Mistral is doing a decent job. With this kind of regulatory regime I wonder how much of the next wave of AI companies are going to be started abroad... I sort of doubt Mistral is the last one, even though the U.S. has such high talent density.
    - maeil 3y ago
      > and Mistral Medium is second only to GPT-4 on the Chatbot Arena ..Chatbot Arena is an incredibly flawed metric. Incredibly biased towards English, and towards certain kinds of tasks people are more likely to test on Chatbot Arena. If you use a broad range of tasks, let alone in a diverse range of languages, unfortunately GPT-4 is still miles ahead of Mistral. I wish it wasn't the case, hope Mistral catches up as soon as possible.
      - maeil 3y ago
        Would've been great if anyone disagreeing could've highlighted why, but alas. If you've tried Mistral on some creative tasks in a wide range of languages and found it competitive with GPT-4, please do tell.
    - rvnx 3y ago
      I agree with you it's great that Mistral exists and the efforts they do are very useful. I'm sure they are going to improve, but compared to what you have shown it's still more of a garage-shop. (Is Mistral worth 2B+ EUR ? That's another question). In one way or another, such regulation already implicitly exist in all the countries where there is no First Amendment equivalent. Perhaps a workaround would be to claim that this is free speech protected by the Fist Amendment and shouldn't be controlled. (Back to Mistral and regulations), in France, for example, there are certain words or things you cannot write or say without risking to go to jail (in theory, but in practice it's mostly fines), or if you spread certain historical "fake news".
- chasd00 3y ago
  Yeah the genie is out of the bottle. Any regulations a government sets up just puts its economy behind the competition. I think a lot of the US regulations are coming from large tech companies (google) feeling threatened. LLMs used for knowledge and skills transfer threaten search and therefore ads. If you can make it illegal or impractical then you don’t have to compete.
  - schnitzelstoat 3y ago
    > Any regulations a government sets up just puts its economy behind the competition. I fully expect us to do this in Europe. Then complain in 10 years when all the big AI tech comes from abroad.
- RugnirViking 3y ago
  I can appreciate that the model might be trained to work on primarily chinese language, but the performance for me really doesnt seem to be there yet. I hate to do the "I asked ai and pasted it here" style of comment, but I really wanted to understand the validity of the claim it surpasses gpt4 in all those benchmarks. I asked gpt4 and qwen-vl-max this prompt to try to get a sense of their capabilities. Nothing even close imo. "tell me a story about relations between people living on one side of a penny floating through space and the other. Use the format of the hero's journey, including rejecting the call, focus on worldbuilding by hinting at further complexity, and do it in a kafkaesque style" quen's story starts with: Once upon a time, there was a penny floating through space. gpt 4: Through the vast emptiness of space drifted an ancient penny, a relic from a long-forgotten Earth. The difference is night and day atm. Ask yourself: would Kafka have started a story with "once upon a time"
  - offices 3y ago
    No, because all of Kafka's books were written in German.
    - deleted 3y ago
      [deleted]
  - andy99 3y ago
    I don't think we can extrapolate much from that anecdote, but I'll try. The GPT version was predictably wordy and had the signature precocious high-school essay feeling, e.g. lots of adjectives. It didn't feel Kafkaesque at all, where is the confusion, breathless tone, mysterious K.? Qwen's is pretty unremarkable, just very direct, but I don't see that one is actually following directions better. Maybe further along the difference gets more stark. Also, isn't Qwen a Chinese-first model? How much of the fine tuning was in English? Neither example gets too actual utility, though it could highlight the sort of demo that chatgpt is trained for.
    - RugnirViking 3y ago
      that's fair. I just didn't want to paste a massive text block so went with the first line, which showed the extremely basic way of starting quen used. Link to the pastebin below (actually ended up being anonpate, seems like pastebin is down for me?) I felt the overall writing & characterization of gpt4 was far better, including themes of bureaucracy and psychosis whereas quen sounds like a cliched 6 year old writing an aimless story. I'm not saying either of these are amazing stories, but I think any english teacher/creative writing teacher would rate one over the other as things stand right now. Things like the comparing the rows of wheat embossed on the penny to the regimented way of life its people lead are actually half decent. https://anonpaste.pw/v/ccbfb3e8-746f-4311-9db4-cedbf6c3a440#cAtScCMIIST0-zpxj-KFjylZvsbgd9ywJYnbmqAms_A https://anonpaste.pw/v/ccbfb3e8-746f-4311-9db4-cedbf6c3a440#...
- donkeyd 3y ago
  I feel like this one is impossible to do right. On one side, it's people like you saying: 'government oversight is hurting our innovation'. Directly opposed is: 'AI Companies are growing too fast and something bad will happen if oversight doesn't come soon.' I agree with both and really don't have a clue what's the wise thing to do. I think it's probably the oversight thing, but since other countries will definitely compete without this oversight, someone will eventually release SkyNet. But do we want to be the first? I don't know...
  - fallingknife 3y ago
    Since there is no regulatory response that can deal with unknown unknowns like your second point, the correct answer is to not regulate for now.
  - CamperBob2 3y ago
    We know that excessive premature regulation by captive government agencies hurts innovation and empowers competing nations. We don't know that AI companies are growing too fast, or that Something Bad Will Happen if oversight doesn't come soon. Seems like an easy choice. We'd never have left the caves if we allowed the precautionary principle to dictate our lives.
    - johnnyanmac 3y ago
      Why are we in a rush to "compete with China" on this front? I don't exactly view that country as the bastions of a government who wants to promote the welfare of its citizens. They already I famously don't comply with copyright but no one is. Clamoring to take out the patent office to "compete". What is being a few years behind on China going to do to the western economy to make it not worth slowing down and considering the ethical quandaries? We know from last decade how hard it can be to regulate back issues once companies overreach.
      - CamperBob2 3y ago
        If AI turns out to be no big deal, then you're right, there's no rush to compete. And there's also no rush to regulate. Conversely, if AI turns out to to be a huge deal, then we certainly won't end up wishing we'd held ourselves back with regulation while rival/adversary nations plowed forward at full speed. Look at the people who will be doing the regulating. They'll get right on it after they decide which flavor of genocide to support, what books your local library gets to purchase, and who gets to use what restroom. Basically there is almost zero upside to early government intervention, but the potential downside to regulation is unbounded. That makes it a very easy call, to my way of thinking.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- bonton89 3y ago
  The whole drumbeat from OpenAI has always looked like using regulation to create a moat out of thin air. Are any of the open models in danger of disappearing soon? Should I be downloading local copies before it is to late?
- seanmcdirmid 3y ago
  Didn't China also issue a ruling that AI should conform to proper socialist values? I'm not sure how they are enforcing that though, Biden's executive order seems to have a lot more teeth (and even then, there is no standard yet, they just want information shared).
ejb999 3y ago
Will not be enforceable imo, not sure if it is even constitutional - like it or not, output of AI engines is a type of free-speech. (and no, not that 'AI' has free speech rights, the creators of the AI do)
- Etheryte 3y ago
  I'm not sure this argument makes sense, could you perhaps elaborate? Not everything you create that has output goes under free speech. A torrent client is also a program that you can write that outputs art/text/whatever, doesn't mean it goes under free speech.
  - ilikehurdles 3y ago
    The federal executive doesn’t regulate the BitTorrent protocol fyi. Copyright infringement is a civil matter.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- sidewndr46 3y ago
  We've had close to a 100 years of drug prohibition which disagrees with this notion
  - ejb999 3y ago
    selling illegal drugs is not free speech.
    - johnnyanmac 3y ago
      Paper is not free speech. Writing is. Government can't stop you from writing things down but it can tell you what trees you cannot cut down. An llm as is is simply a tree. It cannot produce speech by itself, and even if it did modern robotics are not considered citizens (we can deal with that when it comes).
- 3y ago
throwaway49849 3y ago
>The government’s National Institute of Standards and Technology will develop a uniform framework for assessing safety, as part of the order Biden signed in October. They probably need to develop an extremely antisocial, psycopathic, malevolent AI to assess other AIs for safety. Its purpose will be to run through thousands of scenarios, using manipulation, threats, and deception to try to extract dangerous information from the other AI. It can then score the responses based on the information it was able to extract. I don't really see any other way to automate this extremely tedious and error prone task. It's interesting though because we will need to concentrate all of the evil in the world into a single AI in order to run these tests.
- jMyles 3y ago
  Now do infectious pathogens.
- flenserboy 3y ago
  So there will be one uncensored, general-purpose, actually-useful AI out there that only the government will have. Hmmmm...
jMyles 3y ago
At the risk of hyperbole: It seems that, as AI becomes the prevalent model for human-computer interaction, requirements like this are not merely stifling to AI (and to the speech, press, and even religious protections that may arise from such interactions), but stifling to general-purpose computing. Along with increasing "protect the children" sockpuppetry like we have in the bill in the Florida house yesterday - which seem to seek a future in which internet access requires the furnishing of a state ID - actions like this (which you will note did not even come from an additional act of Congress) appear to be rather vulgar measures to prevent technology from empowering anyone who doesn't already have power.
- jprete 3y ago
  AI companies want to make completely unengineered systems with no systematic guarantee that they work or even knowledge of how they work, and then try to displace as much human labor as possible in as many critical points of control as possible. This is literally the goal of anyone seeking AGI. In my view, stifling this is a benefit, not a drawback.
  - jMyles 3y ago
    > try to displace as much human labor as possible > stifling this is a benefit I suppose this depends in part on how much value you place on keeping the world a laborious place for humans. Reducing the need for labor will almost certainly lead to more beauty in the world. If we aren't seeking a world where humans are freed from menial labor and so have bandwidth to make art and music, what are we actually seeking? Perhaps this needs to be defined first by the AI-luddites and then a more reasoned discussion can follow.
    - jprete 3y ago
      This was a better argument when AI wasn't making art and music. EDIT: For what it's worth, no I don't want people to have to do menial labor or whatnot. I just see no reason to expect AGI to make people's lives better if those people have nothing to economically contribute.
wand3r 3y ago
I laughed when Fox news said Taylor Swift was a "psyop" because it was absurd. Then a few weeks later her deepfakes go all over twitter and the government is cracking down on AI. Sure its a conspiracy theory, but I do think the government is trying to manipulate public opinion around this space and gain control of it.
- Zambyte 3y ago
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=geVNEmnPr5k https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=geVNEmnPr5k Presented as a meme, but it really makes ya think :\
- hellojesus 3y ago
  Deepfakes of her any anyone have existed for awhile. There are paid services. /r/ exists (and has existed long before deepfakes) where people make requests of deepfakes of their high school classmates. Heck, bubble images have existed for forever and are definitely legal as all they do is leave it up to the imagination - quite effectively. The recent Swift incident only seems noteworthy because many people were introduced to a cyber subculture of which they were previously unaware. But this subculture is 20+ years old. Anecdotally, when I caught wind of the incident on /g/ a few days ago and saw some of the ridiculous muppet-swift images, I got a chuckle and asked my wife if she had heard of the swift news. She's usually "in the know" with pop culture because she listens to JJR. To my surprise, not only had she not heard of it, but she was appalled and became very upset about the obviously AI generated image I showed her. She couldn't fathom someone generating such content. Even having the idea to generate such a thing seemed to break her world view. For me it was just another rule 34 chuckle.
walterbell 3y ago
https://www.cnbc.com/2022/10/24/how-googles-former-ceo-eric-schmidt-helped-write-ai-laws-in-washington-without-publicly-disclosing-investments-in-ai-start-ups.html https://www.cnbc.com/2022/10/24/how-googles-former-ceo-eric-... > “If you’re going to be leading a commission that is steering the direction of government AI and making recommendations for how we should promote this sector and scientific exploration in this area, you really shouldn’t also be dipping your hand in the pot and helping yourself to AI investments,” said Shaub of the Project on Government Oversight.
stainablesteel 3y ago
sounds like a soft censorship mechanism to me
deadbabe 3y ago
Can the reports just be reported by AI?
scotty79 3y ago
Is it connected to a missile launcher? [Y] [No, it's safe]
macinjosh 3y ago
I didn't know the executive branch could just enact new laws unilaterally. They are probably using some easily bent statute to allow for this. Here is hoping SCOTUS overturns Chevron this cycle so we can be free of dictatorial edicts such as this.
- addandsubtract 3y ago
  This reads a lot like leopardsatemyface. It's an executive order that Biden signed three months ago. If you have a problem with executive orders, I'm sure you also spoke up 6 years ago.
  - macinjosh 3y ago
    I did. I am pro-democracy so I hate authoritarian executive power no matter where it comes from. Check your bias.
- popcalc 3y ago
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_national_emergencies_in_the_United_States https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_national_emergencies_i...
  - macinjosh 3y ago
    The word emergency is doing a lot of work in most of these situations.
- codingdave 3y ago
  More info on executive orders: https://www.federalregister.gov/presidential-documents/executive-orders https://www.federalregister.gov/presidential-documents/execu...
testfoobar 3y ago
Is there a published list of safety tests that are to be conducted?
jjk166 3y ago
This is some terrible reporting. If you actually read the executive order[0], while there is lip service paid to several general issues associated with AI like job displacement and privacy violation, they actually are pretty narrow in what they mean by AI safety. They're specifically looking to restrict access to AI models that can be used to aid biological weapons development by modelling complex biochemical interactions. While I'm unconvinced this is the best way to tackle the issue, and there's always the possibility for overreach, the story as presented, namely that AI companies are about to become burdened with a vast and nebulous regulatory infrastructure prompted by vague and poorly informed fears about AI, is bunk. [0] 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...

54 points by DaveFlater 3y ago

[flagged]

Wow. This feels like a regulatory regime designed to smother open-source AI, and reduce competition in the American market since small companies are unlikely to be able to comply. The worst part is that doing so is actually against our national interests... China has already essentially caught up to GPT-4V with the release of Qwen-VL-Max yesterday [1]; the cat is out of the bag. Hobbling ourselves now doesn't help. 1: https://twitter.com/_akhaliq/status/1752033872982806718 https://twitter.com/_akhaliq/status/1752033872982806718

rvnx 3y ago
Well let's say congrats to them then, because we will all benefit back from that, especially since they work more in open way as we can download the Qwen-VL-Max model, inspect it and use it offline. Europe is copying ChatGPT, and all we got is a louzy LLaMA-fork.
- reissbaker 3y ago
  Definitely congrats to them. I don't hate on Mistral though; their open-source models are extremely capable for their size and parameter count, and Mistral Medium is second only to GPT-4 on the Chatbot Arena (I'm not including Bard, since Bard gives their chatbot access to the internet, whereas the other models are being interacted with solely on the basis of their innate knowledge; that doesn't seem apples-to-apples, and the underlying Gemini Pro model without access to the internet underperforms GPT-4 and Mistral). And Mistral Medium is much cheaper than GPT-4 — around $8/million tokens, whereas GPT-4-Turbo is $30/million tokens. So I'd say Mistral is doing a decent job. With this kind of regulatory regime I wonder how much of the next wave of AI companies are going to be started abroad... I sort of doubt Mistral is the last one, even though the U.S. has such high talent density.
  - maeil 3y ago
    > and Mistral Medium is second only to GPT-4 on the Chatbot Arena ..Chatbot Arena is an incredibly flawed metric. Incredibly biased towards English, and towards certain kinds of tasks people are more likely to test on Chatbot Arena. If you use a broad range of tasks, let alone in a diverse range of languages, unfortunately GPT-4 is still miles ahead of Mistral. I wish it wasn't the case, hope Mistral catches up as soon as possible.
    - maeil 3y ago
      Would've been great if anyone disagreeing could've highlighted why, but alas. If you've tried Mistral on some creative tasks in a wide range of languages and found it competitive with GPT-4, please do tell.
  - rvnx 3y ago
    I agree with you it's great that Mistral exists and the efforts they do are very useful. I'm sure they are going to improve, but compared to what you have shown it's still more of a garage-shop. (Is Mistral worth 2B+ EUR ? That's another question). In one way or another, such regulation already implicitly exist in all the countries where there is no First Amendment equivalent. Perhaps a workaround would be to claim that this is free speech protected by the Fist Amendment and shouldn't be controlled. (Back to Mistral and regulations), in France, for example, there are certain words or things you cannot write or say without risking to go to jail (in theory, but in practice it's mostly fines), or if you spread certain historical "fake news".
chasd00 3y ago
Yeah the genie is out of the bottle. Any regulations a government sets up just puts its economy behind the competition. I think a lot of the US regulations are coming from large tech companies (google) feeling threatened. LLMs used for knowledge and skills transfer threaten search and therefore ads. If you can make it illegal or impractical then you don’t have to compete.
- schnitzelstoat 3y ago
  > Any regulations a government sets up just puts its economy behind the competition. I fully expect us to do this in Europe. Then complain in 10 years when all the big AI tech comes from abroad.
RugnirViking 3y ago
I can appreciate that the model might be trained to work on primarily chinese language, but the performance for me really doesnt seem to be there yet. I hate to do the "I asked ai and pasted it here" style of comment, but I really wanted to understand the validity of the claim it surpasses gpt4 in all those benchmarks. I asked gpt4 and qwen-vl-max this prompt to try to get a sense of their capabilities. Nothing even close imo. "tell me a story about relations between people living on one side of a penny floating through space and the other. Use the format of the hero's journey, including rejecting the call, focus on worldbuilding by hinting at further complexity, and do it in a kafkaesque style" quen's story starts with: Once upon a time, there was a penny floating through space. gpt 4: Through the vast emptiness of space drifted an ancient penny, a relic from a long-forgotten Earth. The difference is night and day atm. Ask yourself: would Kafka have started a story with "once upon a time"
- offices 3y ago
  No, because all of Kafka's books were written in German.
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
- andy99 3y ago
  I don't think we can extrapolate much from that anecdote, but I'll try. The GPT version was predictably wordy and had the signature precocious high-school essay feeling, e.g. lots of adjectives. It didn't feel Kafkaesque at all, where is the confusion, breathless tone, mysterious K.? Qwen's is pretty unremarkable, just very direct, but I don't see that one is actually following directions better. Maybe further along the difference gets more stark. Also, isn't Qwen a Chinese-first model? How much of the fine tuning was in English? Neither example gets too actual utility, though it could highlight the sort of demo that chatgpt is trained for.
  - RugnirViking 3y ago
    that's fair. I just didn't want to paste a massive text block so went with the first line, which showed the extremely basic way of starting quen used. Link to the pastebin below (actually ended up being anonpate, seems like pastebin is down for me?) I felt the overall writing & characterization of gpt4 was far better, including themes of bureaucracy and psychosis whereas quen sounds like a cliched 6 year old writing an aimless story. I'm not saying either of these are amazing stories, but I think any english teacher/creative writing teacher would rate one over the other as things stand right now. Things like the comparing the rows of wheat embossed on the penny to the regimented way of life its people lead are actually half decent. https://anonpaste.pw/v/ccbfb3e8-746f-4311-9db4-cedbf6c3a440#cAtScCMIIST0-zpxj-KFjylZvsbgd9ywJYnbmqAms_A https://anonpaste.pw/v/ccbfb3e8-746f-4311-9db4-cedbf6c3a440#...
donkeyd 3y ago
I feel like this one is impossible to do right. On one side, it's people like you saying: 'government oversight is hurting our innovation'. Directly opposed is: 'AI Companies are growing too fast and something bad will happen if oversight doesn't come soon.' I agree with both and really don't have a clue what's the wise thing to do. I think it's probably the oversight thing, but since other countries will definitely compete without this oversight, someone will eventually release SkyNet. But do we want to be the first? I don't know...
- fallingknife 3y ago
  Since there is no regulatory response that can deal with unknown unknowns like your second point, the correct answer is to not regulate for now.
- CamperBob2 3y ago
  We know that excessive premature regulation by captive government agencies hurts innovation and empowers competing nations. We don't know that AI companies are growing too fast, or that Something Bad Will Happen if oversight doesn't come soon. Seems like an easy choice. We'd never have left the caves if we allowed the precautionary principle to dictate our lives.
  - johnnyanmac 3y ago
    Why are we in a rush to "compete with China" on this front? I don't exactly view that country as the bastions of a government who wants to promote the welfare of its citizens. They already I famously don't comply with copyright but no one is. Clamoring to take out the patent office to "compete". What is being a few years behind on China going to do to the western economy to make it not worth slowing down and considering the ethical quandaries? We know from last decade how hard it can be to regulate back issues once companies overreach.
    - CamperBob2 3y ago
      If AI turns out to be no big deal, then you're right, there's no rush to compete. And there's also no rush to regulate. Conversely, if AI turns out to to be a huge deal, then we certainly won't end up wishing we'd held ourselves back with regulation while rival/adversary nations plowed forward at full speed. Look at the people who will be doing the regulating. They'll get right on it after they decide which flavor of genocide to support, what books your local library gets to purchase, and who gets to use what restroom. Basically there is almost zero upside to early government intervention, but the potential downside to regulation is unbounded. That makes it a very easy call, to my way of thinking.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
bonton89 3y ago
The whole drumbeat from OpenAI has always looked like using regulation to create a moat out of thin air. Are any of the open models in danger of disappearing soon? Should I be downloading local copies before it is to late?
seanmcdirmid 3y ago
Didn't China also issue a ruling that AI should conform to proper socialist values? I'm not sure how they are enforcing that though, Biden's executive order seems to have a lot more teeth (and even then, there is no standard yet, they just want information shared).

ejb999 3y ago

Will not be enforceable imo, not sure if it is even constitutional - like it or not, output of AI engines is a type of free-speech. (and no, not that 'AI' has free speech rights, the creators of the AI do)

Etheryte 3y ago
I'm not sure this argument makes sense, could you perhaps elaborate? Not everything you create that has output goes under free speech. A torrent client is also a program that you can write that outputs art/text/whatever, doesn't mean it goes under free speech.
- ilikehurdles 3y ago
  The federal executive doesn’t regulate the BitTorrent protocol fyi. Copyright infringement is a civil matter.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
sidewndr46 3y ago
We've had close to a 100 years of drug prohibition which disagrees with this notion
- ejb999 3y ago
  selling illegal drugs is not free speech.
  - johnnyanmac 3y ago
    Paper is not free speech. Writing is. Government can't stop you from writing things down but it can tell you what trees you cannot cut down. An llm as is is simply a tree. It cannot produce speech by itself, and even if it did modern robotics are not considered citizens (we can deal with that when it comes).
3y ago

throwaway49849 3y ago

>The government’s National Institute of Standards and Technology will develop a uniform framework for assessing safety, as part of the order Biden signed in October. They probably need to develop an extremely antisocial, psycopathic, malevolent AI to assess other AIs for safety. Its purpose will be to run through thousands of scenarios, using manipulation, threats, and deception to try to extract dangerous information from the other AI. It can then score the responses based on the information it was able to extract. I don't really see any other way to automate this extremely tedious and error prone task. It's interesting though because we will need to concentrate all of the evil in the world into a single AI in order to run these tests.

jMyles 3y ago
Now do infectious pathogens.
flenserboy 3y ago
So there will be one uncensored, general-purpose, actually-useful AI out there that only the government will have. Hmmmm...

jMyles 3y ago

At the risk of hyperbole: It seems that, as AI becomes the prevalent model for human-computer interaction, requirements like this are not merely stifling to AI (and to the speech, press, and even religious protections that may arise from such interactions), but stifling to general-purpose computing. Along with increasing "protect the children" sockpuppetry like we have in the bill in the Florida house yesterday - which seem to seek a future in which internet access requires the furnishing of a state ID - actions like this (which you will note did not even come from an additional act of Congress) appear to be rather vulgar measures to prevent technology from empowering anyone who doesn't already have power.

jprete 3y ago
AI companies want to make completely unengineered systems with no systematic guarantee that they work or even knowledge of how they work, and then try to displace as much human labor as possible in as many critical points of control as possible. This is literally the goal of anyone seeking AGI. In my view, stifling this is a benefit, not a drawback.
- jMyles 3y ago
  > try to displace as much human labor as possible > stifling this is a benefit I suppose this depends in part on how much value you place on keeping the world a laborious place for humans. Reducing the need for labor will almost certainly lead to more beauty in the world. If we aren't seeking a world where humans are freed from menial labor and so have bandwidth to make art and music, what are we actually seeking? Perhaps this needs to be defined first by the AI-luddites and then a more reasoned discussion can follow.
  - jprete 3y ago
    This was a better argument when AI wasn't making art and music. EDIT: For what it's worth, no I don't want people to have to do menial labor or whatnot. I just see no reason to expect AGI to make people's lives better if those people have nothing to economically contribute.

wand3r 3y ago

I laughed when Fox news said Taylor Swift was a "psyop" because it was absurd. Then a few weeks later her deepfakes go all over twitter and the government is cracking down on AI. Sure its a conspiracy theory, but I do think the government is trying to manipulate public opinion around this space and gain control of it.

Zambyte 3y ago
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=geVNEmnPr5k https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=geVNEmnPr5k Presented as a meme, but it really makes ya think :\
hellojesus 3y ago
Deepfakes of her any anyone have existed for awhile. There are paid services. /r/ exists (and has existed long before deepfakes) where people make requests of deepfakes of their high school classmates. Heck, bubble images have existed for forever and are definitely legal as all they do is leave it up to the imagination - quite effectively. The recent Swift incident only seems noteworthy because many people were introduced to a cyber subculture of which they were previously unaware. But this subculture is 20+ years old. Anecdotally, when I caught wind of the incident on /g/ a few days ago and saw some of the ridiculous muppet-swift images, I got a chuckle and asked my wife if she had heard of the swift news. She's usually "in the know" with pop culture because she listens to JJR. To my surprise, not only had she not heard of it, but she was appalled and became very upset about the obviously AI generated image I showed her. She couldn't fathom someone generating such content. Even having the idea to generate such a thing seemed to break her world view. For me it was just another rule 34 chuckle.

walterbell 3y ago

https://www.cnbc.com/2022/10/24/how-googles-former-ceo-eric-schmidt-helped-write-ai-laws-in-washington-without-publicly-disclosing-investments-in-ai-start-ups.html https://www.cnbc.com/2022/10/24/how-googles-former-ceo-eric-... > “If you’re going to be leading a commission that is steering the direction of government AI and making recommendations for how we should promote this sector and scientific exploration in this area, you really shouldn’t also be dipping your hand in the pot and helping yourself to AI investments,” said Shaub of the Project on Government Oversight.

stainablesteel 3y ago

sounds like a soft censorship mechanism to me

deadbabe 3y ago

Can the reports just be reported by AI?

scotty79 3y ago

Is it connected to a missile launcher? [Y] [No, it's safe]

macinjosh 3y ago

I didn't know the executive branch could just enact new laws unilaterally. They are probably using some easily bent statute to allow for this. Here is hoping SCOTUS overturns Chevron this cycle so we can be free of dictatorial edicts such as this.

addandsubtract 3y ago
This reads a lot like leopardsatemyface. It's an executive order that Biden signed three months ago. If you have a problem with executive orders, I'm sure you also spoke up 6 years ago.
- macinjosh 3y ago
  I did. I am pro-democracy so I hate authoritarian executive power no matter where it comes from. Check your bias.
popcalc 3y ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_national_emergencies_in_the_United_States https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_national_emergencies_i...
- macinjosh 3y ago
  The word emergency is doing a lot of work in most of these situations.
codingdave 3y ago
More info on executive orders: https://www.federalregister.gov/presidential-documents/executive-orders https://www.federalregister.gov/presidential-documents/execu...

testfoobar 3y ago

Is there a published list of safety tests that are to be conducted?

jjk166 3y ago

This is some terrible reporting. If you actually read the executive order[0], while there is lip service paid to several general issues associated with AI like job displacement and privacy violation, they actually are pretty narrow in what they mean by AI safety. They're specifically looking to restrict access to AI models that can be used to aid biological weapons development by modelling complex biochemical interactions. While I'm unconvinced this is the best way to tackle the issue, and there's always the possibility for overreach, the story as presented, namely that AI companies are about to become burdened with a vast and nebulous regulatory infrastructure prompted by vague and poorly informed fears about AI, is bunk. [0] 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...