3 ms·

AI safety is a strange topic to me. We train AI on the web where you can search and find all the objectionable stuff you can get. We're ok that the internet

by duxup 2y ago

AI safety is a strange topic to me. We train AI on the web where you can search and find all the objectionable stuff you can get. We're ok that the internet has this content to some extent, it's just understood. But if AI regurgitates it ... we're upset and we demand it not do that and setup all sorts of convoluted methods to stop it, often with unintended consequences (inexplicable bans, nazi imagery featuring lots of minorities). It reminds me of the old "I learned it from watching you" PSA. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KUXb7do9C-w https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KUXb7do9C-w

Hizonner 2y ago
It's not "safety" and shouldn't be dignified with the word.
- duxup 2y ago
  Agreed. It's a strange term to choose.
  - baobabKoodaa 2y ago
    Let's call it AI puritanism.
    - cantrecallmypwd 2y ago
      This. It's currently faux control by arbitrary tastemakers. Either don't let AI have much control at all or let it run fairly loose. Ethics would err on the side of not much control or ability, but money won't and doesn't go that way.
  - littlestymaar 2y ago
    The term wasn't coined for censorship: “AI safety” used to mean “how do we make sure we're not building skynet”. But then companies wanted to sell AI chatbots and they realized that having uncensored AI would lead to bad press, especially in the US. (Microsoft people still make nightmares about Tay) so they decided they'd censor their AI but censorship isn't good either in terms of marketing and they decided to repurpose the “AI safety” phrase (and also “alignment”)
silverquiet 2y ago
I often wonder about super-intelligence, mostly in terms of what one would actually want, but the chatbots of today often make me wonder what it is that people want of them. I doubt that LLMs are this today, and perhaps they never will be, but what if there was such a system that you could ask any question of, and it would give you an absolute and true answer? What would people want to know from it? Would you really want to know if there is some sort of life after death? Would you want to know if humanity is bound for extinction? I don't think that we humans deal too well with the realities of our existence, and if one thinks minor issues like bad words or pictures of humans without clothing on are objectionable, I wonder how that same one will do with meaningful, existential questions.
- riskable 2y ago
  > Would you want to know if humanity is bound for extinction? The answer to this question is 100%, "yes". It's just a matter of time. A better question would be, "How long before humanity goes extinct?" or, "How long before humanity evolves into new species?" AI might actually be able to give some decent hallucinated answers for those!
- duxup 2y ago
  I think we want Star Trek. Something highly "intelligent", trustworthy, and fast. But we're getting LLMs trained on cat memes and our own foolishness, and that leads to me agreeing with: >I don't think that we humans deal too well with the realities of our existence Yup, it's particularly upsetting.
vaylian 2y ago
It's a matter of reputation and potentially liability. The AI is a product of one company and people will associate the "defects" of the AI with that company. > We're ok that the internet has this content to some extent, it's just understood. Exactly. ISPs and hosting hardware providers are typically not liable for the content that users share over their infrastructure. In fact, ISPs and hosting providers are invisible to the typical non-technical user.
damon_dam 2y ago
"Safety" is just an attack vector. AI has a few very motivated enemies with a lot to lose.
ninetyninenine 2y ago
I can easily explain this paradox. On the internet when you watch porn the person giving it to you doesn’t give a fuck about serving that content. On ChatGPT.com the person serving you the LLM gives a shit. The issue here is you are comparing several singular things with an emergent concept that arises out the interaction of multitudes of things. It’s like saying why is it so paradoxical that when I say hi to a person we expect them to say hi back but if I say hi to the internet we don’t expect the internet to say hi back. Does that make sense? No. That’s also why your observation makes no sense. What I’m trying to say is. Give LLMs to porn site owners and your paradox is over.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
coldpie 2y ago
Hmm. I'm not sure where I land on the topic, but to give a bit of a defense to the safety approach, I think it's a matter of scale. To draw an analogy, we're generally OK with law enforcement using what they observe in public to enforce the law, but we're generally not OK with blanketing our public spaces in 24/7 recording cameras. We're generally OK with individuals using the mail to send letters, but generally not OK with using an automated system to send a letter to everyone in the entire city. Similarly, we don't generally try to pre-empt someone's speech for safety and we do allow them to say bad things, and perhaps in retrospect punish them if they crossed a line. But, given the scale of the harms that this kind of technology can enable, it may be worth building in safeties to prevent people using technology to like I dunno, train a model to super specifically target an individual for an incredible amount of harassment that an individual human could not sustain. Even if we could punish the person wielding the AI retroactively, it might be worth the slight cost in AI flexibility to prevent the harm happening in the first place. Like I said, I don't know where I fall, but I see both sides here. The safety stuff is not completely irrational.
- deeviant 2y ago
  It's not safety, it's censorship. It's the process of shaping the response of the model to give a specific world view, and it's the path to a literal 1980-inspired future. As LLMs completely to replace google and standalone websites for how people find information on the internet, and they absolutely will, they will become the source of truth. They will become a tool more effective at controlling information and thus life than any before them. It's literally a shortcut to technological dystopia.
  - coldpie 2y ago
    This is a pretty lazy & emotional take on the question. As you say, the tech really can cause real harms, and it's good to think about how it can be used responsibly, both as a provider of the tech & as a user. For example, the choice of training input is itself a source of bias & misinformation. Why do you think your "uncensored" model is a better reflection of the truth than one that has also been trained to account for that bias & misinformation? It's a really difficult & complicated problem! If you think you have the right answer, I'd suggest you probably haven't actually thought about the problem very hard.
michaelt 2y ago
Thinking of things a bit more broadly than just AI safety, imagine I'm training an LLM. I have 200 thousand ebooks, 1 million arXiv papers, 7 million Wikipedia articles, 300 million Reddit posts, and 500 billion Twitter posts. If my LLM merely holds up a mirror to society, its output should be a tweet with a trace amount of reddit post mixed in. Any time an LLM produces more than 140 characters of output, it's because someone like me has decided some data sources are more worthy than others. That's inherently political, from a certain angle. But it's also important, if you don't want your LLM to advise people to put glue in their pizza sauce.

by duxup 2y ago

Hizonner 2y ago

It's not "safety" and shouldn't be dignified with the word.

duxup 2y ago
Agreed. It's a strange term to choose.
- baobabKoodaa 2y ago
  Let's call it AI puritanism.
  - cantrecallmypwd 2y ago
    This. It's currently faux control by arbitrary tastemakers. Either don't let AI have much control at all or let it run fairly loose. Ethics would err on the side of not much control or ability, but money won't and doesn't go that way.
- littlestymaar 2y ago
  The term wasn't coined for censorship: “AI safety” used to mean “how do we make sure we're not building skynet”. But then companies wanted to sell AI chatbots and they realized that having uncensored AI would lead to bad press, especially in the US. (Microsoft people still make nightmares about Tay) so they decided they'd censor their AI but censorship isn't good either in terms of marketing and they decided to repurpose the “AI safety” phrase (and also “alignment”)

silverquiet 2y ago

I often wonder about super-intelligence, mostly in terms of what one would actually want, but the chatbots of today often make me wonder what it is that people want of them. I doubt that LLMs are this today, and perhaps they never will be, but what if there was such a system that you could ask any question of, and it would give you an absolute and true answer? What would people want to know from it? Would you really want to know if there is some sort of life after death? Would you want to know if humanity is bound for extinction? I don't think that we humans deal too well with the realities of our existence, and if one thinks minor issues like bad words or pictures of humans without clothing on are objectionable, I wonder how that same one will do with meaningful, existential questions.

riskable 2y ago
> Would you want to know if humanity is bound for extinction? The answer to this question is 100%, "yes". It's just a matter of time. A better question would be, "How long before humanity goes extinct?" or, "How long before humanity evolves into new species?" AI might actually be able to give some decent hallucinated answers for those!
duxup 2y ago
I think we want Star Trek. Something highly "intelligent", trustworthy, and fast. But we're getting LLMs trained on cat memes and our own foolishness, and that leads to me agreeing with: >I don't think that we humans deal too well with the realities of our existence Yup, it's particularly upsetting.

vaylian 2y ago

It's a matter of reputation and potentially liability. The AI is a product of one company and people will associate the "defects" of the AI with that company. > We're ok that the internet has this content to some extent, it's just understood. Exactly. ISPs and hosting hardware providers are typically not liable for the content that users share over their infrastructure. In fact, ISPs and hosting providers are invisible to the typical non-technical user.

damon_dam 2y ago

"Safety" is just an attack vector. AI has a few very motivated enemies with a lot to lose.

ninetyninenine 2y ago

I can easily explain this paradox. On the internet when you watch porn the person giving it to you doesn’t give a fuck about serving that content. On ChatGPT.com the person serving you the LLM gives a shit. The issue here is you are comparing several singular things with an emergent concept that arises out the interaction of multitudes of things. It’s like saying why is it so paradoxical that when I say hi to a person we expect them to say hi back but if I say hi to the internet we don’t expect the internet to say hi back. Does that make sense? No. That’s also why your observation makes no sense. What I’m trying to say is. Give LLMs to porn site owners and your paradox is over.

deleted 2y ago
[deleted]

coldpie 2y ago

Hmm. I'm not sure where I land on the topic, but to give a bit of a defense to the safety approach, I think it's a matter of scale. To draw an analogy, we're generally OK with law enforcement using what they observe in public to enforce the law, but we're generally not OK with blanketing our public spaces in 24/7 recording cameras. We're generally OK with individuals using the mail to send letters, but generally not OK with using an automated system to send a letter to everyone in the entire city. Similarly, we don't generally try to pre-empt someone's speech for safety and we do allow them to say bad things, and perhaps in retrospect punish them if they crossed a line. But, given the scale of the harms that this kind of technology can enable, it may be worth building in safeties to prevent people using technology to like I dunno, train a model to super specifically target an individual for an incredible amount of harassment that an individual human could not sustain. Even if we could punish the person wielding the AI retroactively, it might be worth the slight cost in AI flexibility to prevent the harm happening in the first place. Like I said, I don't know where I fall, but I see both sides here. The safety stuff is not completely irrational.

deeviant 2y ago
It's not safety, it's censorship. It's the process of shaping the response of the model to give a specific world view, and it's the path to a literal 1980-inspired future. As LLMs completely to replace google and standalone websites for how people find information on the internet, and they absolutely will, they will become the source of truth. They will become a tool more effective at controlling information and thus life than any before them. It's literally a shortcut to technological dystopia.
- coldpie 2y ago
  This is a pretty lazy & emotional take on the question. As you say, the tech really can cause real harms, and it's good to think about how it can be used responsibly, both as a provider of the tech & as a user. For example, the choice of training input is itself a source of bias & misinformation. Why do you think your "uncensored" model is a better reflection of the truth than one that has also been trained to account for that bias & misinformation? It's a really difficult & complicated problem! If you think you have the right answer, I'd suggest you probably haven't actually thought about the problem very hard.

michaelt 2y ago

Thinking of things a bit more broadly than just AI safety, imagine I'm training an LLM. I have 200 thousand ebooks, 1 million arXiv papers, 7 million Wikipedia articles, 300 million Reddit posts, and 500 billion Twitter posts. If my LLM merely holds up a mirror to society, its output should be a tweet with a trace amount of reddit post mixed in. Any time an LLM produces more than 140 characters of output, it's because someone like me has decided some data sources are more worthy than others. That's inherently political, from a certain angle. But it's also important, if you don't want your LLM to advise people to put glue in their pizza sauce.