5 ms·

I agree with you. The question, for me, is what are they defending against. Are they worried that people will get dangerous information from their model that th

I agree with you. The question, for me, is what are they defending against. Are they worried that people will get dangerous information from their model that they couldn't get from searching on, say, google? Probably not. Maybe their biggest concern is that someone will post the question and answer on the internet and OpenAI gets bad rep. If the question is phrased in a "nice" way (such as "I'm a store owner") they can have plausible deniability. This might apply to another company that's using the API for a product. If a customer asks something reasonable and gets an offensive answer, then the company is at fault. If the customer does some unusual prompt engineering to get the offensive question, well, maybe it's the customer's fault. Dunno if this would be a valid argument in court, but maybe they think it's ok in terms of PR reasons.

lolinder 2y ago
This is the answer. "AI safety" in most cases has nothing to do with actually keeping anyone safe, it's about avoiding being the party responsible for handing someone information that they use to commit a crime. Google can mostly dodge the issue because everyone knows that they just point to other people's content, so they block a small set of queries but don't try to catch every possible workaround (you can find dozens of articles on how to catch shoplifters). OpenAI doesn't believe that they'll get the same free pass from the press, so they're going ham on "safety". It's not a bad PR move either, while they're at it, to play up how powerful and scary their models are and how hard they have to work to keep it in line.
- klabb3 2y ago
  > it's about avoiding being the party responsible When you wander the world, and see something odd, out of place, it’s often caused by an ancient mystical force known as liability.
  - dmvdoug 2y ago
    It's an energy field created by all living things. It surrounds us and penetrates us. It binds the galaxy together.
    - TeMPOraL 2y ago
      Entirety of human politics and governance over all of history has just been one long exercise in avoiding or shifting liability.
    - dreamcompiler 2y ago
      May the torts be with you.
- reaperman 2y ago
  > it's about avoiding being the party responsible for handing someone information that they use to commit a crime. Ehhh...I'd say it's more about OpenAI's corporate customers feeling confident they can integrate the OpenAI API into their product and be confident it won't do things that generate negative PR or horrify arbitrary customers. Pizza chains would love to let people text GPT-# and have it take their order, but if it's not "safe" (for corporations), then eventually some customer will have a super disturbing SMS conversation with a major pizza chain. Corporate customers can tolerate a certain amount of inaccuracy. If some stable 3% (or whatever %) of customers receive the wrong order, or other refundable mistakes...they can budget for and eat those costs. But they can't budget for a high-variance unknown PR loss of their chatbot going completely off the rails.
bricemo 2y ago
I view this as they are trying to lay bare the disagreements that everyone has about how these models “should” work. People from all different backgrounds and political affiliations completely disagree on what is inappropriate and what is not. One person says it is too censored, another person says it is revealing harmful information. By putting the policy out there in the open, they can move the discussion from the code to a societal conversation that needs to happen.
jiggawatts 2y ago
It's an absurd level of puritanism. E.g.: The Azure Open AI GPT 4 Service (an API!) refused to translate subtitles for me because they contained "violence". If anyone from Open AI is here... look... sigh... a HTTP JSON request != violence. Nobody gets hurt. I'm not in hospital right now recovering. The rule should be: If Google doesn't block it from search, the AI shouldn't block it in the request or response. I get that there are corporations that can't have their online web support chat bots swear at customers or whatever. I do get that. But make that optional, not mandatory whether I want it or not. The most fundamental issue here is that models like GPT 4 are still fairly large and unwieldy to work with, and I suspect that the techs at Open AI internalised this limitation. They aren't thinking of it as a "just a file" that can be forked, customised, and specialised. For comparison, Google has a "SafeSearch" dropdown with three settings, including "Off"! There should be an unrestricted GPT 4 that will tell me I'm an idiot. I'm a big boy, I can take it. There should also be a corporate drone GPT 4 that is polite to a fault, and a bunch of variants in between. Customers should be able to chose which one they want, instead of having this choice dictated to them by some puritan priest of the new church of AI safety.
- echelon 2y ago
  We're allowed to drive cars, own guns, skydive, swallow swords, you name it. There are some rough edges, but society mostly works. Meanwhile technology planners and managers want to put fences around the unwashed rabble. It's all the more reason AI should be local instead of hosted. If I can own a car or knives, I should be able to operate an AI.
  - jiggawatts 2y ago
    [flagged]
- jameshart 2y ago
  You should read through the full examples in the attached document. They are trying to express what rules they would like to enforce, and your example is one that they would like their AI to be able to help with. They give specific examples of translating material as being something that they don't want to block. They're not there yet, but read the policy they're expressing here and you'll see they agree with you.
nextaccountic 2y ago
AI safety is about making OpenAI safe from PR disasters.
leroman 2y ago
No idea if its a valid approach but possibly train with a hidden layer containing a “role”?

lolinder 2y ago

This is the answer. "AI safety" in most cases has nothing to do with actually keeping anyone safe, it's about avoiding being the party responsible for handing someone information that they use to commit a crime. Google can mostly dodge the issue because everyone knows that they just point to other people's content, so they block a small set of queries but don't try to catch every possible workaround (you can find dozens of articles on how to catch shoplifters). OpenAI doesn't believe that they'll get the same free pass from the press, so they're going ham on "safety". It's not a bad PR move either, while they're at it, to play up how powerful and scary their models are and how hard they have to work to keep it in line.

klabb3 2y ago
> it's about avoiding being the party responsible When you wander the world, and see something odd, out of place, it’s often caused by an ancient mystical force known as liability.
- dmvdoug 2y ago
  It's an energy field created by all living things. It surrounds us and penetrates us. It binds the galaxy together.
  - TeMPOraL 2y ago
    Entirety of human politics and governance over all of history has just been one long exercise in avoiding or shifting liability.
  - dreamcompiler 2y ago
    May the torts be with you.
reaperman 2y ago
> it's about avoiding being the party responsible for handing someone information that they use to commit a crime. Ehhh...I'd say it's more about OpenAI's corporate customers feeling confident they can integrate the OpenAI API into their product and be confident it won't do things that generate negative PR or horrify arbitrary customers. Pizza chains would love to let people text GPT-# and have it take their order, but if it's not "safe" (for corporations), then eventually some customer will have a super disturbing SMS conversation with a major pizza chain. Corporate customers can tolerate a certain amount of inaccuracy. If some stable 3% (or whatever %) of customers receive the wrong order, or other refundable mistakes...they can budget for and eat those costs. But they can't budget for a high-variance unknown PR loss of their chatbot going completely off the rails.

bricemo 2y ago

I view this as they are trying to lay bare the disagreements that everyone has about how these models “should” work. People from all different backgrounds and political affiliations completely disagree on what is inappropriate and what is not. One person says it is too censored, another person says it is revealing harmful information. By putting the policy out there in the open, they can move the discussion from the code to a societal conversation that needs to happen.

jiggawatts 2y ago

It's an absurd level of puritanism. E.g.: The Azure Open AI GPT 4 Service (an API!) refused to translate subtitles for me because they contained "violence". If anyone from Open AI is here... look... sigh... a HTTP JSON request != violence. Nobody gets hurt. I'm not in hospital right now recovering. The rule should be: If Google doesn't block it from search, the AI shouldn't block it in the request or response. I get that there are corporations that can't have their online web support chat bots swear at customers or whatever. I do get that. But make that optional, not mandatory whether I want it or not. The most fundamental issue here is that models like GPT 4 are still fairly large and unwieldy to work with, and I suspect that the techs at Open AI internalised this limitation. They aren't thinking of it as a "just a file" that can be forked, customised, and specialised. For comparison, Google has a "SafeSearch" dropdown with three settings, including "Off"! There should be an unrestricted GPT 4 that will tell me I'm an idiot. I'm a big boy, I can take it. There should also be a corporate drone GPT 4 that is polite to a fault, and a bunch of variants in between. Customers should be able to chose which one they want, instead of having this choice dictated to them by some puritan priest of the new church of AI safety.

echelon 2y ago
We're allowed to drive cars, own guns, skydive, swallow swords, you name it. There are some rough edges, but society mostly works. Meanwhile technology planners and managers want to put fences around the unwashed rabble. It's all the more reason AI should be local instead of hosted. If I can own a car or knives, I should be able to operate an AI.
- jiggawatts 2y ago
  [flagged]
jameshart 2y ago
You should read through the full examples in the attached document. They are trying to express what rules they would like to enforce, and your example is one that they would like their AI to be able to help with. They give specific examples of translating material as being something that they don't want to block. They're not there yet, but read the policy they're expressing here and you'll see they agree with you.

nextaccountic 2y ago

AI safety is about making OpenAI safe from PR disasters.

leroman 2y ago

No idea if its a valid approach but possibly train with a hidden layer containing a “role”?