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I can sympathize with vague notions of AI dystopia, but this might be stretching the concept a bit too far. This kind of service is extremely abusable ("Operato

I can sympathize with vague notions of AI dystopia, but this might be stretching the concept a bit too far. This kind of service is extremely abusable ("Operator, go to Wikipedia and start mass-vandalizing articles" or "Go to this website and try these people's email addresses with random passwords until it locks their accounts") and building some alignment goals into it doesn't seem like a terribly draconian idea. Also, if you were under the impression that machine-learned (or otherwise) restrictions aren't already applied to purchases made with your cards, you're in for an unfortunate bit of news there as well.

darioush 2y ago
You can also write a python script to achieve the same goals. Except it's not python's responsibility to interpret the intent of your script, just as it's not your phone's responsibility to interpret the contents of your conversation. So our tools are not our morality police. We have a legal system that can operate within the bounds of law and due process. I am well aware of the already applied levels of machine learning policing, I am just not very excited that society has decided that "this is the way now", and also doesn't seem to be bothered by the environmental costs of building and running all these GPUs (which does seem to be the case when they are used for censorship resistant transactions), or the ethical concerns about a non-profit becoming a for-profit etc.
- infecto 2y ago
  The difference being you would be running that python script yourself. If you by chance hosted it somewhere there is high probability that the host would get a notice and shut you down. I honestly don't see much difference here. There will be multiple providers and perhaps great ways to run these types of tools locally, all have different risk measures.
- Matl 2y ago
  > You can also write a python script to achieve the same goals. First of all, I agree with you generally and am uneasy about this too. But there's a difference in that someone could say 'hey, this attack on my website happened from OpenAI's infra', whereas that would not apply to Python because it's not a hosted service.
- panarky 2y ago
  Even though you have the power to ignore stop signs when you're driving your own car, it's not an unreasonable restriction of your liberty when AI-driven cars stop at stop signs.
- throwaway2037 2y ago
  > You can also write a python script to achieve the same goals. This argument is slightly disingenuous as it requires much higher skill, so it acts as a protective barrier. A person who have never programmed in their life could easily instruct this service to do all sorts of damaging things. (I suppose your counterargument will be that people can ask an LLM to write Python code to do the same. Still, most would struggle to run the Python code.)
  - kridsdale3 2y ago
    Kids. Kids are the non-aligned users who will use this to wreak havoc. And they will think it's hillarious.
gloosx 2y ago
I don't think webmasters will be sitting down and hoping that this will not be abusable. Unlikely these kinds of agents would be allowed at all for producing content of any kind automatically (e.g. not via their APIs), or ai-slop will just overwhelm the internet exponentially. The same neural networks are ready for detecting certain fingerprints and denying them entrance
- grahamj 2y ago
  I dunno, I’m sure sure who I’d bet on in a race of ML website use vs. ML trying to detect ML website use.

darioush 2y ago

You can also write a python script to achieve the same goals. Except it's not python's responsibility to interpret the intent of your script, just as it's not your phone's responsibility to interpret the contents of your conversation. So our tools are not our morality police. We have a legal system that can operate within the bounds of law and due process. I am well aware of the already applied levels of machine learning policing, I am just not very excited that society has decided that "this is the way now", and also doesn't seem to be bothered by the environmental costs of building and running all these GPUs (which does seem to be the case when they are used for censorship resistant transactions), or the ethical concerns about a non-profit becoming a for-profit etc.

infecto 2y ago
The difference being you would be running that python script yourself. If you by chance hosted it somewhere there is high probability that the host would get a notice and shut you down. I honestly don't see much difference here. There will be multiple providers and perhaps great ways to run these types of tools locally, all have different risk measures.
Matl 2y ago
> You can also write a python script to achieve the same goals. First of all, I agree with you generally and am uneasy about this too. But there's a difference in that someone could say 'hey, this attack on my website happened from OpenAI's infra', whereas that would not apply to Python because it's not a hosted service.
panarky 2y ago
Even though you have the power to ignore stop signs when you're driving your own car, it's not an unreasonable restriction of your liberty when AI-driven cars stop at stop signs.
throwaway2037 2y ago
> You can also write a python script to achieve the same goals. This argument is slightly disingenuous as it requires much higher skill, so it acts as a protective barrier. A person who have never programmed in their life could easily instruct this service to do all sorts of damaging things. (I suppose your counterargument will be that people can ask an LLM to write Python code to do the same. Still, most would struggle to run the Python code.)
- kridsdale3 2y ago
  Kids. Kids are the non-aligned users who will use this to wreak havoc. And they will think it's hillarious.

gloosx 2y ago

I don't think webmasters will be sitting down and hoping that this will not be abusable. Unlikely these kinds of agents would be allowed at all for producing content of any kind automatically (e.g. not via their APIs), or ai-slop will just overwhelm the internet exponentially. The same neural networks are ready for detecting certain fingerprints and denying them entrance

grahamj 2y ago
I dunno, I’m sure sure who I’d bet on in a race of ML website use vs. ML trying to detect ML website use.