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I'm not sure what this means exactly, because AI is a wide field that covers so much and angers a great many people for many different reasons. But IMO it's po

I'm not sure what this means exactly, because AI is a wide field that covers so much and angers a great many people for many different reasons. But IMO it's pointless to hope for something else. AI at its core turns out to be pretty simple. No matter what the best intentioned scientist did, somebody else would think differently. For example, Stable Diffusion was originally released with a filter that refused to generate porn. There's your scientist thinking of social consequences. But does anyone even still remember that was a thing? Because I'm pretty sure every SD UI in existence at this point has it disabled by default.

vouaobrasil 2y ago
> No matter what the best intentioned scientist did, somebody else would think differently. This is exactly an argument that supports technological determinism. We simply can't decide -- we have no ability for oversight to stop technology from evolving. That's precisely why I think AI is so dangerous.
- dale_glass 2y ago
  IMO, the dangers of AI are mostly overrated. AI is just a new fancy way of generating pictures and text. It does those things better in some regards, but the danger is the same we already had.
  - vouaobrasil 2y ago
    It's also a way of mechanizing even further large amounts of human labor and reducing the importance of art. I guess it depends on what you value: for you, apparently a world with AI is not so bad. For me, it's disgusting.
    - dale_glass 2y ago
      I honestly don't see it fundamentally different from most other code. I generated images and music (PLAY instruction) with GWBASIC back when I was a teenager. I generated text with Perl. This is just the continuation of the same old, just a bit fancier.
      - vouaobrasil 2y ago
        I don't think it is. One could say that getting hit by a car is the continuation of getting hit by a person, but one is much more powerful than another. AI allows mass creation of much more complicated works at a speed much greater than before. the PLAY instruction might create some music, but it won't be the sort of music that can compete with human-made music. AI music is very close to it. Speed is important, strength is important. There is no obvious qualitative difference, but qualitative differences emerge due to a massive increase in complexity, just like consciousness emerges in us but (probably) not in a bacteria due to the massive difference in complexity, even though we are just a scaling of the former. Your text generation with Perl wouldn't be able to write an article, but ChatGPT can, and the magnitude difference is precisely what we cannot handle, just like I can't be hit by a speeding car at 100km/h and survive but I'd probably walk away from being hit at 2km/h (and once this actually happened to me, without injury). Would you say there's not much difference between the two?
  - _heimdall 2y ago
    This is actually where the AI concern arguments seem to get misunderstood in my opinion. I've never heard anyone raise serious concerns over fancier ML and generative algorithms - maybe concerns over job loss but I don't think that's what you had in mind (correct me if I'm wrong). The more serious concerns I hear are related to actual artificial intelligence, something much smarter than humans acting on a time scale drastically different than humans. I'm not vouching for those concerns here, but I would say its more fair to keep them in the context of AI rather than ML, LLMs, and generative tools.
  - HarHarVeryFunny 2y ago
    We're only just starting to get to the point that AI, if unconstrained, is capable enough to be dangerous. The danger is getting to the point where the not-so-bright malevolent actor can tap into AI to get detailed instructions to do something highly destructive, or have it do it on their behalf (e.g. hack into some system), that they wouldn't previously have been able to figure out just by Googling for information and trying to piece it together themself. Of course not all malevolent actors are dimwits, but there are also many things that even a highly intelligent individual couldn't do on their own, such as a Stuxnet level attack, that AI will eventually (how soon?) be able to facilitate.
_heimdall 2y ago
> For example, Stable Diffusion was originally released with a filter that refused to generate porn. There's your scientist thinking of social consequences We would have to know their internal conversations to know whether that filter was being driven by scientific concern over social consequences or any number of business goals/concerns. We can't assume the reasoning behind it when we only have the end result.
- dale_glass 2y ago
  That doesn't matter for the point I'm making: which is that this attempt (and any other) are trivially nullified by those that come next. The SD devs couldn't have created a state of affairs in which AI never ever would generate porn. And transformer architecture is too low level to care about things like that, there was no way for the people who made the guts of the modern AI systems to make it so that they only can ever make cute fluffy kittens or give accurate advice. So what I'm saying is that there's no timeline in which socially conscious scientists would have succeeded in ensuring the the current gen AI landscape with its porn, deepfakes and propaganda didn't come to exist.

vouaobrasil 2y ago

> No matter what the best intentioned scientist did, somebody else would think differently. This is exactly an argument that supports technological determinism. We simply can't decide -- we have no ability for oversight to stop technology from evolving. That's precisely why I think AI is so dangerous.

dale_glass 2y ago
IMO, the dangers of AI are mostly overrated. AI is just a new fancy way of generating pictures and text. It does those things better in some regards, but the danger is the same we already had.
- vouaobrasil 2y ago
  It's also a way of mechanizing even further large amounts of human labor and reducing the importance of art. I guess it depends on what you value: for you, apparently a world with AI is not so bad. For me, it's disgusting.
  - dale_glass 2y ago
    I honestly don't see it fundamentally different from most other code. I generated images and music (PLAY instruction) with GWBASIC back when I was a teenager. I generated text with Perl. This is just the continuation of the same old, just a bit fancier.
    - vouaobrasil 2y ago
      I don't think it is. One could say that getting hit by a car is the continuation of getting hit by a person, but one is much more powerful than another. AI allows mass creation of much more complicated works at a speed much greater than before. the PLAY instruction might create some music, but it won't be the sort of music that can compete with human-made music. AI music is very close to it. Speed is important, strength is important. There is no obvious qualitative difference, but qualitative differences emerge due to a massive increase in complexity, just like consciousness emerges in us but (probably) not in a bacteria due to the massive difference in complexity, even though we are just a scaling of the former. Your text generation with Perl wouldn't be able to write an article, but ChatGPT can, and the magnitude difference is precisely what we cannot handle, just like I can't be hit by a speeding car at 100km/h and survive but I'd probably walk away from being hit at 2km/h (and once this actually happened to me, without injury). Would you say there's not much difference between the two?
- _heimdall 2y ago
  This is actually where the AI concern arguments seem to get misunderstood in my opinion. I've never heard anyone raise serious concerns over fancier ML and generative algorithms - maybe concerns over job loss but I don't think that's what you had in mind (correct me if I'm wrong). The more serious concerns I hear are related to actual artificial intelligence, something much smarter than humans acting on a time scale drastically different than humans. I'm not vouching for those concerns here, but I would say its more fair to keep them in the context of AI rather than ML, LLMs, and generative tools.
- HarHarVeryFunny 2y ago
  We're only just starting to get to the point that AI, if unconstrained, is capable enough to be dangerous. The danger is getting to the point where the not-so-bright malevolent actor can tap into AI to get detailed instructions to do something highly destructive, or have it do it on their behalf (e.g. hack into some system), that they wouldn't previously have been able to figure out just by Googling for information and trying to piece it together themself. Of course not all malevolent actors are dimwits, but there are also many things that even a highly intelligent individual couldn't do on their own, such as a Stuxnet level attack, that AI will eventually (how soon?) be able to facilitate.

_heimdall 2y ago

> For example, Stable Diffusion was originally released with a filter that refused to generate porn. There's your scientist thinking of social consequences We would have to know their internal conversations to know whether that filter was being driven by scientific concern over social consequences or any number of business goals/concerns. We can't assume the reasoning behind it when we only have the end result.

dale_glass 2y ago
That doesn't matter for the point I'm making: which is that this attempt (and any other) are trivially nullified by those that come next. The SD devs couldn't have created a state of affairs in which AI never ever would generate porn. And transformer architecture is too low level to care about things like that, there was no way for the people who made the guts of the modern AI systems to make it so that they only can ever make cute fluffy kittens or give accurate advice. So what I'm saying is that there's no timeline in which socially conscious scientists would have succeeded in ensuring the the current gen AI landscape with its porn, deepfakes and propaganda didn't come to exist.