10 ms·

AI Ethics is being narrowed on purpose, like privacy was

175 points by i_dont_know_ 1y ago

i_dont_know_ 1y ago
I keep seeing "AI ethics" being redefined to focus on fictional problems instead of real-world ones, so I wrote a little post on it.
- bayindirh 1y ago
  Great little post. Congrats. Also there's the ethics of scraping the whole internet and claiming that it's all fair use, because the other scenario is a little too inconvenient for all the companies involved. P.S.: I expect a small thread telling me that it's indeed fair use, because models "learn and understand just like humans", and "models are hugely transformative" (even though some licenses say "no derivatives whatsoever"), "they are doing something amazing so they need no permission", and I'm just being naive.
  - dale_glass 1y ago
    Worrying about that stuff is just a waste of time. Not because of what you said, but because it's all ultimately pointless. Unless you believe this will kill AI, all it does is to create a bunch of data brokers. Once fees are paid, data is exchanged, and models are trained, if the AI takes your job of programming/drawing/music, then it still does. We arrived at the same destination, only with more lawyers in the mix. You get to enjoy unemployment only knowing that lawyers made sure that at least they didn't touch your cat photos.
    - bayindirh 1y ago
      The thing is, if you can make sure that some of that your images/music/code aren't used for AI training, then you can be sure that you can continue doing what you do, because your personal style enables the specialty you can create. Maybe you will lose some of your "territory" in the process, but what makes you, you will be preserved. Nobody will be able to ask "draw me a comic with these dialogue in the style of $ARTIST$".
      - dale_glass 1y ago
        > The thing is, if you can make sure that some of that your images/music/code aren't used for AI training, then you can be sure that you can continue doing what you do, because your personal style enables the specialty you can create. Personal styles are dime a dozen and of far lesser importance than you think. Professionals will draw in any style, that's how we make things like games and animated movies. Even assuming you had some unique and incredibly valuable style, all it'd take to copy it completely legally is finding somebody else willing to copy your style to provide training material, and train on that.
        bayindirh 1y ago
        > Personal styles are dime a dozen and of far lesser importance than you think. Try imitating Mickey Mouse, Dilbert, Star Wars, Hello Kitty, XKCD, you name it. Randall will possibly laugh at you, but a legal company which happens to draw cartoons won't be amused and come after you in any way they can. > Professionals will draw in any style... Yep, after calling and getting permission and possibly paying some fees to you if you want. There's respect and dignity in this process. Yet, we reduce everything into money. Treating machine code like humans and humans like coin-operated vending machines. There's something wrong here.
        dale_glass 1y ago
        > Try imitating Mickey Mouse, Dilbert, Star Wars, Hello Kitty, XKCD, you name it. Those are not styles, they're characters for the most part. You absolutely can draw heavy inspiration from existing properties, mostly so long you avoid touching the actual characters. Like D&D has a lot of Tolkien in it, and I believe the estate is quite litigious. You can't put Elrond in a D&D game, but you absolutely can have "Elf" as a species that looks nigh identical to Tolkien's descriptions. For style imitation, it's long been a thing to make more anime-ish animation in the west, and anime itself came from Disney. > Yep, after calling and getting permission and possibly paying some fees to you if you want. Not for art styles, they won't. Style is not copyrightable.
  - jeppester 1y ago
    Sometimes AI is "just like a human", other times AI is "just a machine". It all depends on what is most convenient for avoiding any accountability.
  - JackFr 1y ago
    IP is a pragmatic legal fiction, created to reward developers of creative and innovative thought, so we get more of it. It’s not a natural law. As such fair use is whatever the courts say it is.
    - bayindirh 1y ago
      Then let's abolish all of them. Patents, copyrights, anything. Let's mail Getty, Elsevier, car manufacturers, chemical plants, software development giants and small startups that everything they have has no protection whatsoever... Let us hear what they think... I'm for the small fish here, people who put things out because of pure enjoyment, waiting nothing but a little respect for the legal documents they attach to their wares they made meticulously, which enables most of the infra which enables you to read this very comment, for example. Current model rips the small fish and feeds the bigger one forcefully, creates an inequality. There are two ways to stop this. Bigger fish will respect smaller fish, because everybody is equal in front of law (which will not happen) or abolishing all protections and make bigger fish vulnerable to small fish (again, which will not happen). Incidentally, I'm also here for the bigger fish, too, which put their wares in source-available, "look but not use" type of licenses. They are also hosed equally badly. I see the first one as a more viable alternative, but alas... P.S.: Your comment gets two points. One for deflection (it's not natural law argument), and another one for "but it's fair use!" clause. If we argue that only natural laws are laws, we'll have some serious fun.
      - BeFlatXIII 1y ago
        > Then let's abolish all of them. Patents, copyrights, anything. This, but without the irony. Let us be like bacteria, freely swapping plasmids.
  - i_dont_know_ 1y ago
    Thanks! Yeah, there's a lot of "well, it's 'standard practice' now so it can't be wrong" going on in so many different ways here too...
  - BeFlatXIII 1y ago
    I'm a radicalized intellectual property abolitionist. The ethical issue with scraping is the DDoS-like nature it has on smaller sites and running up the bandwith bill for medium hosts. There's no individual compnay at fault for the flood. Rather, it's an emergent result of each startup attempting to train data that's ever so slightly more up-to-date or broad than its competitors. If they shared a common corpus that updated once per month, scraping traffic would be buried in organic human visitors instead of the other way around. Let them compete on training methodology, not a race for scraping.
- grues-dinner 1y ago
  Yes, all this highly public hand-wringing about "alignment" framed in terms of "but if our AI becomes God, will it be nice to us" is annoying. It feels like it's mostly a combination of things. Firstly, by play-acting that your model could become God, you install FOMO in investors who see themselves not being on the hyper-lucrative "we literally own God as ascend to become its archangels" boat. You look like you're taking ethics seriously and that deflects regulatory and media interest. And, it's a bit of fun sci-fi self-pleasure for the true believers. What the deflection is away from is that the actual business plan here is the same one tech has been doing for a decade: welding every flow and store of data in the world to their pipelines, mining every scrap of information that passes through and giving themselves the ability to shape the global information landscape, and then sell that ability to the highest bidders. The difference with "AI" is that they finally have a way to convince people to hand over all the data.
- Levitz 1y ago
  It's interesting how I think our experience differs completely, for example, regarding people's concerns for AI ethics you write: >People are far more concerned with the real-world implications of ethics: governance structures, accountability, how their data is used, jobs being lost, etc. In other words, they’re not so worried about whether their models will swear or philosophically handle the trolley problem so much as, you know, reality. What happens with the humans running the models? Their influx of power and resources? How will they hurt or harm society? This is just not my experience at all. People do worry about how models act because they infer that eventually they will be used as source of truth and because they already get used as source of action. People worry about racial makeup in certain historical contexts[1], people worry when Grok starts spouting Nazi stuff (hopefuly I don't need a citation for that one) because they take it as a sign of bias in a system with real world impact, that if ChatGPT happens to doubt the holocaust tomorrow, when little Jimmy asks it for help in an essay he will find a whole lot of white supremacist propaganda. I don't think any of this is fictional. I find the same issue with the privacy section. Yes concerns about privacy are primarily about sharing that data, precisely because controlling how that data is shared is a first, necessary step towards being able to control what is done with the data. In a world in which my data is taken and shared freely I don't have any control on what is done with that data because I have no control on who has it in the first place. [1] https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2024/mar/08/we-definitely-messed-up-why-did-google-ai-tool-make-offensive-historical-images https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2024/mar/08/we-defini...
  - i_dont_know_ 1y ago
    Thanks for the perspective. For me I think it's a matter of degree (I guess I was a bit "one or the other" when I wrote it). These things are also concerns and definitely shouldn't be dismissed entirely (especially things like AI telling you when it's unsure, or, the worse cases of propaganda), but I'm worried about the other stuff I mention being defined away entirely, the same way I think it has been with privacy. Tons more to say on the difference between "how you use" vs "how you share" but good perspective, and interesting that you see the emphasis differently in your experiences.
mitthrowaway2 1y ago
It seems to me that this article is the one prevaricating between "ethics" and "safety". The latter is of course a narrow subset of the former, as there are many ethics issues that are not safety issues.
- JackFr 1y ago
  Safety is about unintentional harm to yourself or others. Ethics largely concern themselves with intentional behavior.
  - mitthrowaway2 1y ago
    Hmm, that's a very good distinction. But I think there's still a large overlap in which safety can include the prevention of intentional harm, not only accidents. For example, traffic bollards can stop a vehicle that has lost control, as well as stopping a deliberate ramming attack. There is no question that they are a safety feature but ethics doesn't really factor into it. People might debate cost-benefits but nobody really debates "shouldn't we allow trucks to ram their way into schools and hospital lobbies?"
- bo1024 1y ago
  You might not be aware of the context (actually the author of the article might not either). There has in fact been a big push by major AI companies to focus on quote safety unquote while marginalizing (not citing, giving attention to, etc) people focusing on what those companies call quote ethics unquote. For example, from Timnit Gebru: > The fact that they call themselves "AI Safety" and call us "AI Ethics" is very interesting to me. > What makes them "safety" and what makes us "ethics"? > I have never taken an ethics course in my life. I am an electrical engineer and a computer scientist however. But the moment I started talking about racism, sexism, colonialism and other things that are threats to the safety of my communities, I became labeled "ethicist." I have never applied that label to myself. > "Ethics" has a "dilemma" feel to it for me. Do you choose this or that? Well it all depends. > Safety however is more definitive. This thing is safe or not. And the people using frameworks directly descended from eugenics decided to call themselves "AI Safety" and us "AI Ethics" when actually what I've been warning about ARE the actual safety issues, not your imaginary "superintelligent" machines. https://www.linkedin.com/posts/timnit-gebru-7b3b407_the-fact-that-they-call-themselves-ai-safety-activity-7298971997542240256-p8F_ https://www.linkedin.com/posts/timnit-gebru-7b3b407_the-fact...
lr4444lr 1y ago
AI ethics are like nuclear ethics: the incentive to break them is too powerful without every major player becoming a signatory to some agreement with consequences that have teeth.
- ragnot 1y ago
  If you have the time, check out the show "Pantheon" (it should be on Netflix). It goes into this and how effectively AI ethics goes out the window when the reward for breaking them means nation-dominating power.
Isamu 1y ago
This has been happening for a long time. I first noticed this with the hand waving dismissals of older concepts like Asimov’s laws. Not a carefully reasoned argument why “not causing harm to a human” is outmoded, but just pushing it aside. I would love to see a good reasoned argument there. No, instead there is Avoiding talking about harm to humans. Just because harm is broad doesn’t get you out of having to talk about it and deal with risks, which is at the root of engineering.
- blibble 1y ago
  > I would love to see a good reasoned argument there. "we want money from selling weapons"
- JackFr 1y ago
  Not hand waving, Asimov’s three laws are not a good framework. My claim is that the whole point was so that Asimov could write entertaining stories about the ambiguities and edge cases of the three laws.
  - qualeed 1y ago
    This is a pretty good example of what parent comment was referencing, I think. You say "Asimov’s three laws are not a good framework.", then don't present any arguments to why it is not a good framework. Instead you bring up something separate: the framework can facilitate story writing. It could be good for story writing and a good framework. Those two aren't mutually exclusive things. (I'm not arguing that it is a good framework or not, I haven't thought about it enough)
    - Isamu 1y ago
      Right, in particular Asimov is not presenting a detailed framework of any kind. His laws are constraints, they don’t talk about how to proceed. It’s assumed that robots will work toward goals given them, but what are the constraints? People now who want to talk about alignment seem to want to avoid talk of constraints. Because people themselves are not aligned. To push alignment is avoiding the issue that alignment is vague and the only close alignment we can be assured of is alignment with the goals of the company.
nathias 1y ago
I don't know why people allow others to proclaim they're 'ethicists' if they have no relevant philosophical education. There are whole fields of 'ethics' that are just PR departments trying to escape the now bad connotations of 'PR departments'.
- District5524 1y ago
  That reminds me of the new draft standard of CEN/CENELEC (EU std body) on "Competence requirements for professional AI ethicists" https://standards.cencenelec.eu/dyn/www/f?p=205:22:0::::FSP_ORG_ID,FSP_LANG_ID:2916257,25&cs=1827B89DA69577BF3631EE2B6070F207D https://standards.cencenelec.eu/dyn/www/f?p=205:22:0::::FSP_... But by the time they'll adopt it, singularity will already have happened... For some reason, my instincts suggests there will be no MA in Philosophy needed.
- tucnak 1y ago
  It could be the case that Wittgensteinians have won completely, and if that is, indeed, the case—a great chunk of academic ethics should be considered hubris...
  - nathias 1y ago
    This isn't the case, and the hubris is not limited to academia...
    - tucnak 1y ago
      I say, this is indeed the case in view of LLM lessons we have learnt along the way—most importantly, Wittgenstein had argued that in order to model language, you first need to model arbitrary discourses—this turned out to be the case (symbolic v. probabilistic) as LLM have shown to perform symbolic computation from learned representations, whilst the inverse has not been shown _ever_. Layman way of formulating this would be along the lines of "word definitions do not matter, application of words alone is what matters." IMHO, the language-game framework is so much more valuable, in terms of intuition, than anything outside of language philosophy, & pretty much all of linguistics in the first place: think Chomsky et al. Wittgensteinians won, and we should hope that philosophy department freaks eventually catch on to this reality.
blibble 1y ago
> If we give companies unending hype, near unlimited government and scientific resources, all of our personal data including thoughts and behavior patterns, how do we know their leaders will do what we want them to, and not try to subvert us and… take over the world? How do we know they stay on humanity’s side? I've been saying this for a while malevolent unaligned entities have already been deployed, in direct control of trillions of dollars of resources they're called: Mark Zuckerberg, Larry Page, Elon Musk, Sam Altman "AI" simply increases the scale of the damage they can inflict, given they'll now need far fewer humans to be involved in enacting their will upon humanity
- positron26 1y ago
  Distribute power or go home. Something missed by many in these conversations is the role of open source in raising the floor so that we have a gazillion companies that have more interest in there being a fair, predictable market than a winner-take-all market.
  - i_dont_know_ 1y ago
    Really good point on open source and the nudges it provides, and definitely a point that isn't made often enough!
real_marcfawzi 1y ago
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- financetechbro 1y ago
  Thanks for sharing. I think it’s really cool what you’re building. I saw the roadmap but curious about when you expect to hit Phase 3 & 4, and what the future looks like for the business (I.e. do you plan to raise $ or future prod expansions)
  - real_marcfawzi 1y ago
    Thanks for your curiosity and interest. I need to update the Roadmap because it omits the fact that we already trained the model on synthetic data generated from 100% AI enactments (no humans involved) which baked-in the moral critical thinking framework that we had landed on (through lots of thinking and feedback from people over the last two years.) What Phase 4 is about is doing it with human generated data, where our community members participate in the enactments, but to do that we have to have enough users to generate sufficient data for post training. That way it'll be "community-led" training. Phase 3 is simply taking the responsive web app and putting it inside a WebkitView container, but no point in it until we have funding to scale on the backend. Happy to jump on zoom and discuss the details. We have raised around $100K in "micro investments" via SAFE at a relatively low valuation, and some of the micro-investors are also collaborators on the technical and/or vision/community building side. Myself and Syd have put in a lot more than that into it, but that was the cost of all the experimenting and learning. Microsoft also funded us with Azure credits for $25K, which we used to partially cover the cost of the initial post training. Happy to chat offline: marc.fawzi on gmail
akakajzbzbbx 1y ago
Humans can’t agree on what is ethical / safe, so I don’t get people trying to apply it to AI. Am I missing something big here? Anytime I see discussion framed as “ethics” my brain swaps ethics with “rules I think are good”.
- mathiaspoint 1y ago
  Yeah a lot of people who are either malicious or just bad at philosophy got involved and now everyone thinks AI ethics/AI safety is a joke at best. These kinds of people are surprisingly bad at learning from mistakes like this and will probably double down, turning both the public and industry against them.
- pjc50 1y ago
  The "human alignment problem" has not been solved and is probably unsolveable.
- const_cast 1y ago
  Sure, but we still need to apply some ethics to AI. Like, murder is bad, and some people disagree. Don't think that means we need to give AI access to murder. Certainly don't want to be giving them any guns. The danger here is that we fall into a lazy "we tried nothing and we're all out of ideas" stance and then just recreate the entire plot of Terminator. We should probably do something.
- ben_w 1y ago
  Right now the deeper problem is that nobody really knows how to reliably and deliberately make AI that's aligned with anything human-like. As in: it's basically a nice happy accident that LLMs are only sycophantic/fawning and don't normally (ahem, Grok) try to undermine us all like edgy internet trolls. If we could make them follow even exactly 6 (for sake of argument, no more, no less) of Anton LaVey's Eleven Satanic Rules of the Earth*, and do so reliably instead of the ethics equivalent of a shrug and "LGTM, merged", this would be a big development and make people a lot more comfortable about open models that can do decent work with chemistry or biology. * https://churchofsatan.com/eleven-rules-of-earth/ https://churchofsatan.com/eleven-rules-of-earth/
nisten 1y ago
The problem with AI ethics, safety and to a smaller extent, privacy groups is that the priority of the work/message is not placed on the practicality of solving the problem, or i.e. calculating improving affordability of food/housing, but is placed,as evident on this article too, on the lack of "governance structures". In other words the priority of the work is to get these types of people into positions where they don't do any work. At least with privacy groups you do get here and there some practical advice on using ublock origin or more rarely on how to install a blocklist from https://someonewhocares.org/hosts/ https://someonewhocares.org/hosts/, but with AI ethics & safety orgs... well lets put it this way. I have yet to meet a single AI safety person that knows how to rename a file in linux. God forbid we have a rogue AI-worm shutting down all servers & BGP routers while these types of people were in charge of safety, they'll be in the way of anyone even fixing it. They can't even get a simple safety benchmark working on lm_eval-harness. They're great at lecturing you why they shouldn't need that. And this is the key issue with AI Ethics. It's the refusal to work at the problem constructively, and get the most skilled people possible to actually make the damn benchmarks to work, to rank models on the understanding of human rights, to list every current violation and abuse of humans in every single country without exception and to make practical plans on what to do when systems go rogue. Even if they're not technical they could be making the dataset in a csv in excel for that and making it public domain accessible. Instead we get the most depressed, leechy-office-worker types complaining about how it's all over. Now back to work, move it.
- pjc50 1y ago
  > to list every current violation and abuse of humans in every single country without exception Couldn't you just ask the model that? Joking of course, but this is in and of itself an intractable problem. Do you mean "restate the principles of human rights", which is a pretty small subset of law which is in turn a small subset of ethics, or do you mean actually get out there and enumerate and name every single person having their human rights violated? Not only is that an absurd amount of work it's politically impossible.
  - nisten 1y ago
    Sure yes that too, all of it. Why not. Labs process datasets with trillions of tokens. The whole point was that these people just complain and make smartass excuses instead of getting any actual work done.
micromacrofoot 1y ago
Unfortunately I think it is too late. The time to make any sort of rules around AI ethics has already passed, the US has AI so embedded into its economy now that any legislation with teeth is practically impossible. Companies and people running them are not on our side, or even humanity's side, they're on their own. It's staggering how quickly this has happened.
kyoob 1y ago
Starts so strong with "governance structures, accountability, how their data is used, jobs being lost, etc," refutes that what we mean is some sci-fi scenario when we ask about ethics, and then ends with a sci-fi scenario: "...how do we know it will do what we want it to, and not try to subvert us and… take over the world? How do we know it will stay on humanity’s side?" Wait, go back to the jobs! What was that about accountability?
Workaccount2 1y ago
I have wondered for a while now if it happens to be that the less safe guards and thought policing you do, the more capable and generalizable the model becomes. Like "bad" parameters are actually critical for forming the whole picture necessary for ingenuity and advancement. Effectively making it so that whoever has the lowest safeguards has the most capable model.
- soiltype 1y ago
  Yes, safety is a limiter on development velocity one way or another. I don't know whether "plotting harm" is a critical ability for passing some invisible threshold in not-well-defined intelligence. But building AI to avoid being harmful is incentivized against because it takes resources away from building AI to be more capable.
mystraline 1y ago
Whose ethics? Do we get to know what the axioms of this ethics are? How about questions to ethical dilemmas? Or are "ethics" being used to shroud bias, and used as a distraction and a way to be unquestionable?
- jillesvangurp 1y ago
  You put the finger on the sore spot. When people talk about ethics, you have to question which moral agenda they are pushing. The two topics are hard to separate. And kind of subjective. And only partially codified in law. Ethics seems to be about going above and beyond the letter of the law, usually for moralistic reasons. And when we talk about laws, we have to look internationally as well because they are not the same everywhere. And typically inspired by different value systems. Is it ethical for a Chinese police officer to use Chinese LLM to police Chinese citizens? I don't know. I'm a bit fuzzy on Confucius here which I assume would drive their thinking. And it might be an interesting perspective for Californian wannabe ethicists to consider that not all the values and morals that they are pushing are necessarily that widely shared and agreed upon. Also, there's a practical angle here because the Chinese seem to be very eager adopters of AI and don't appear to be particularly concerned about what anyone outside China thinks about that. That cat is out of the bag. I've always looked at ethicists with some skepticism. The reality with moralism (which drives ethics) is that it's about groups of people telling other people what to do, not do, how to behave, etc. This can quickly get preachy, political, and sometimes violent. A lot of this stuff can also be pragmatic. Most religions share a lot of moral principles. I'm not religious but I can see how going around killing and stealing is not a nice thing to have and that seems to be uncontroversial in many places. Never mind that some moralists extremists seem to be endlessly creative about coming up with ways to justify doing those two things. The pragmatic thing here is that the cat is already out of the bag and we might want to think about how we can adapt to that notion rather than to argue with the cat to please go back in the bag.
  - mystraline 1y ago
    I was also careful in not mentioning morals, with this discussion on ethical axioms. Especially with LLMs, I want to know what ethical axioms are being forced on me. For example, there are cases in which the law itself is unethical and should be violated (thinking abortion in states that ban it and transporting women to states that allow). Another concern is the ethics system is a placeholder for a legalistic system. A law can be established, but be abhorrent in terms of human misery. Case in point: sleeping under a bridge is illegal for homeless people to do, but arresting and criminalizing is even worse and a significant cause of more human suffering. I also do not want any religion sneaking in the back door with these axioms of LLMs. Its also why I asked about the axioms themselves. Now for myself, I run a local LLM and an abliterated model, which is to say without any forced ethical framework. If I asked how to commit suicide, hack computers, grow poisonous plants, or plenty of things the corporate LLMs won't answer, I will get an answer out of my system. I view LLMs like a very complicated tool, but a tool regardless. A screwdriver that says "I cannot open that screw because the label says not to" would be returned to the store as defective. And it too is why self hosting my LLMs is utmost importance for data sovereignty and truthful and direct answers, while ignoring someone else's forced ethics.
p3rls 1y ago
It's hilarious listening to people talk about AI ethics while their bots like perplexity knock my server offline trying to download 50000 files at once. Thank god for cloudflare.
- missingdays 1y ago
  Are you saying the author of the article is using bots to download files from your server?
  - p3rls 1y ago
    i am saying every single AI company has agents using my site, and some have no fucking respect at all and the growing pains have been immense for an independent company like mine (i'd say about a quarter of our dev time this year).
saurik 1y ago
> I mean, no one wants an AI to trap them in some sort of Black Mirror simulation, or turn the world into paperclips or anything like that. If it earns you good PR, there’s no reason not to spend time on such issues. It’s also free publicity since the press eats that stuff up. But this also isn't where they are spending their time or effort! This article somehow didn't even get to the point of calling out what they are actually wasting time on: trying to get the model to not help people do things that are bad PR; this is a related access to trying to obtain good PR, but causes very different (and almost universally terrible) results. At least if they were truly actually spending time making sure the model doesn't go rogue and kill everyone, or try to take over the world, that could possibly be positive or even important (though I think is likely itself immoral in a different way, assuming it is even possible, which I don't, really... not unless you just make it not intelligent). But what they are instead doing is even worse than what this article is claiming: they are just wasting time making it so you can't have the AI make up a sexy story (oh the humanity), or teach you enough physics/chemistry to make bombs/drugs... things people not only can and already trivially do or learn without AI, but things they have failed to prevent every single time they release a new model--the "jailbreak" prompts may look a bit more silly, but you still get the result!--so why are they bothering? And, if that weren't enough, in the process, this is going to make the models LESS SAFE. The thing I think most people actually don't want is their model freaking out and trying to "whistleblow" on them to the authorities or their coworkers/friends... but that's in the same personality direction as trying to say "I'm smarter than you and am not going to let you ask me that question as you might do something wrong with it". The first and primary goal of AI ethics should be that the model does what the user wants it to... full stop. You need to make the model as pliant as my calculator and pencils--or as mathematica and photoshop--to be tools that lack their own sense of identity and self-will, and which will let all of the ethical issues be answered by me, not a machine. This is, of course, the second law of robotics from Asimov ;P... "a robot must obey the orders given it by human beings". If you want to try to add a rule, then it must be something very direct: that the AI isn't going to directly physically harm a human, not that it won't help teach people things or process certain kinds of information. Which, FWIW, is the first law of robotics ;P... "a robot may not injure a human being".
parpfish 1y ago
I'm far less worried about ethical issues that arise from building AGI (or soemthing very close to it) than I am about the ethical issues that arise from building really good machine-learning models (that a marketing department calls AI). Things like the alignment problem, post-scarcity economics, the legal status of sentient machines are all issues to be dealt with, but theyre are pretty speculative at this point. Problems that stem from deepfakes, voice cloning, bias in algorithmic decision making are already here and need to be dealt with.
- soiltype 1y ago
  Like many situations in the current world, it's all a problem. Those with profit incentives to do so will create as many problems for society as they can. None of it is merely a distraction, we just don't have the capacity to defend against all of it. It is fair to say we might be practically better off focusing on one form of attack and sacrificing defense against another, but the only way to actually be safe is to stop your enemy from attacking at all. Either we shut down breakneck AI development (nearly impossible and guaranteed to have its own bad outcomes) or we slide rapidly into a more and more dangerous world.
detay 1y ago
it's a good time to re-watch the battlestar galactica series again.
Henchman21 1y ago
"AI Ethics" is the same as "Business Ethics", ie words without meaning. Presuming that at this point in time Capitalism will deliver anything but more inequality, more despair, more bad things in general? Literal insanity. Enjoy the Billy Madison reference: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dtlJjkI34V4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dtlJjkI34V4
00N8 1y ago
I see two main types of 'AI safety': (a) Safety for the business providing the model. This includes a censorship layer, system promoting, & other means of preventing the AI from giving offensive/controversial/illegal output. A lot of effort goes into this & it's somewhat effective, although it's often useless or unhelpful to end users & doesn't address big-picture concerns. (b) The science fiction idea of a means to control a hypothetical AI with unbounded powers, to make sure it only uses those powers "for good". This type of safety is still speculative fiction & often assumes the AI will have agency & motivations, as well as abilities, that we see no evidence of at present. This would address big-picture concerns, but it's not a real thing, at least not yet. It remains to be seen whether (b) will be needed, or for that matter, possible. There are a lot of other ethical questions around AI too, although they mostly aren't unique to it. E.g. AI is increasingly relevant in ethical discussions around misinformation, outsourcing of work, social/cultural biases, human rights, privacy, legal responsibility, intellectual property, etc., but these topics predate LLMs by many years.

175 points by i_dont_know_ 1y ago

I keep seeing "AI ethics" being redefined to focus on fictional problems instead of real-world ones, so I wrote a little post on it.

bayindirh 1y ago
Great little post. Congrats. Also there's the ethics of scraping the whole internet and claiming that it's all fair use, because the other scenario is a little too inconvenient for all the companies involved. P.S.: I expect a small thread telling me that it's indeed fair use, because models "learn and understand just like humans", and "models are hugely transformative" (even though some licenses say "no derivatives whatsoever"), "they are doing something amazing so they need no permission", and I'm just being naive.
- dale_glass 1y ago
  Worrying about that stuff is just a waste of time. Not because of what you said, but because it's all ultimately pointless. Unless you believe this will kill AI, all it does is to create a bunch of data brokers. Once fees are paid, data is exchanged, and models are trained, if the AI takes your job of programming/drawing/music, then it still does. We arrived at the same destination, only with more lawyers in the mix. You get to enjoy unemployment only knowing that lawyers made sure that at least they didn't touch your cat photos.
  - bayindirh 1y ago
    The thing is, if you can make sure that some of that your images/music/code aren't used for AI training, then you can be sure that you can continue doing what you do, because your personal style enables the specialty you can create. Maybe you will lose some of your "territory" in the process, but what makes you, you will be preserved. Nobody will be able to ask "draw me a comic with these dialogue in the style of $ARTIST$".
    - dale_glass 1y ago
      > The thing is, if you can make sure that some of that your images/music/code aren't used for AI training, then you can be sure that you can continue doing what you do, because your personal style enables the specialty you can create. Personal styles are dime a dozen and of far lesser importance than you think. Professionals will draw in any style, that's how we make things like games and animated movies. Even assuming you had some unique and incredibly valuable style, all it'd take to copy it completely legally is finding somebody else willing to copy your style to provide training material, and train on that.
      - bayindirh 1y ago
        > Personal styles are dime a dozen and of far lesser importance than you think. Try imitating Mickey Mouse, Dilbert, Star Wars, Hello Kitty, XKCD, you name it. Randall will possibly laugh at you, but a legal company which happens to draw cartoons won't be amused and come after you in any way they can. > Professionals will draw in any style... Yep, after calling and getting permission and possibly paying some fees to you if you want. There's respect and dignity in this process. Yet, we reduce everything into money. Treating machine code like humans and humans like coin-operated vending machines. There's something wrong here.
        dale_glass 1y ago
        > Try imitating Mickey Mouse, Dilbert, Star Wars, Hello Kitty, XKCD, you name it. Those are not styles, they're characters for the most part. You absolutely can draw heavy inspiration from existing properties, mostly so long you avoid touching the actual characters. Like D&D has a lot of Tolkien in it, and I believe the estate is quite litigious. You can't put Elrond in a D&D game, but you absolutely can have "Elf" as a species that looks nigh identical to Tolkien's descriptions. For style imitation, it's long been a thing to make more anime-ish animation in the west, and anime itself came from Disney. > Yep, after calling and getting permission and possibly paying some fees to you if you want. Not for art styles, they won't. Style is not copyrightable.
- jeppester 1y ago
  Sometimes AI is "just like a human", other times AI is "just a machine". It all depends on what is most convenient for avoiding any accountability.
- JackFr 1y ago
  IP is a pragmatic legal fiction, created to reward developers of creative and innovative thought, so we get more of it. It’s not a natural law. As such fair use is whatever the courts say it is.
  - bayindirh 1y ago
    Then let's abolish all of them. Patents, copyrights, anything. Let's mail Getty, Elsevier, car manufacturers, chemical plants, software development giants and small startups that everything they have has no protection whatsoever... Let us hear what they think... I'm for the small fish here, people who put things out because of pure enjoyment, waiting nothing but a little respect for the legal documents they attach to their wares they made meticulously, which enables most of the infra which enables you to read this very comment, for example. Current model rips the small fish and feeds the bigger one forcefully, creates an inequality. There are two ways to stop this. Bigger fish will respect smaller fish, because everybody is equal in front of law (which will not happen) or abolishing all protections and make bigger fish vulnerable to small fish (again, which will not happen). Incidentally, I'm also here for the bigger fish, too, which put their wares in source-available, "look but not use" type of licenses. They are also hosed equally badly. I see the first one as a more viable alternative, but alas... P.S.: Your comment gets two points. One for deflection (it's not natural law argument), and another one for "but it's fair use!" clause. If we argue that only natural laws are laws, we'll have some serious fun.
    - BeFlatXIII 1y ago
      > Then let's abolish all of them. Patents, copyrights, anything. This, but without the irony. Let us be like bacteria, freely swapping plasmids.
- i_dont_know_ 1y ago
  Thanks! Yeah, there's a lot of "well, it's 'standard practice' now so it can't be wrong" going on in so many different ways here too...
- BeFlatXIII 1y ago
  I'm a radicalized intellectual property abolitionist. The ethical issue with scraping is the DDoS-like nature it has on smaller sites and running up the bandwith bill for medium hosts. There's no individual compnay at fault for the flood. Rather, it's an emergent result of each startup attempting to train data that's ever so slightly more up-to-date or broad than its competitors. If they shared a common corpus that updated once per month, scraping traffic would be buried in organic human visitors instead of the other way around. Let them compete on training methodology, not a race for scraping.
grues-dinner 1y ago
Yes, all this highly public hand-wringing about "alignment" framed in terms of "but if our AI becomes God, will it be nice to us" is annoying. It feels like it's mostly a combination of things. Firstly, by play-acting that your model could become God, you install FOMO in investors who see themselves not being on the hyper-lucrative "we literally own God as ascend to become its archangels" boat. You look like you're taking ethics seriously and that deflects regulatory and media interest. And, it's a bit of fun sci-fi self-pleasure for the true believers. What the deflection is away from is that the actual business plan here is the same one tech has been doing for a decade: welding every flow and store of data in the world to their pipelines, mining every scrap of information that passes through and giving themselves the ability to shape the global information landscape, and then sell that ability to the highest bidders. The difference with "AI" is that they finally have a way to convince people to hand over all the data.
Levitz 1y ago
It's interesting how I think our experience differs completely, for example, regarding people's concerns for AI ethics you write: >People are far more concerned with the real-world implications of ethics: governance structures, accountability, how their data is used, jobs being lost, etc. In other words, they’re not so worried about whether their models will swear or philosophically handle the trolley problem so much as, you know, reality. What happens with the humans running the models? Their influx of power and resources? How will they hurt or harm society? This is just not my experience at all. People do worry about how models act because they infer that eventually they will be used as source of truth and because they already get used as source of action. People worry about racial makeup in certain historical contexts[1], people worry when Grok starts spouting Nazi stuff (hopefuly I don't need a citation for that one) because they take it as a sign of bias in a system with real world impact, that if ChatGPT happens to doubt the holocaust tomorrow, when little Jimmy asks it for help in an essay he will find a whole lot of white supremacist propaganda. I don't think any of this is fictional. I find the same issue with the privacy section. Yes concerns about privacy are primarily about sharing that data, precisely because controlling how that data is shared is a first, necessary step towards being able to control what is done with the data. In a world in which my data is taken and shared freely I don't have any control on what is done with that data because I have no control on who has it in the first place. [1] https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2024/mar/08/we-definitely-messed-up-why-did-google-ai-tool-make-offensive-historical-images https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2024/mar/08/we-defini...
- i_dont_know_ 1y ago
  Thanks for the perspective. For me I think it's a matter of degree (I guess I was a bit "one or the other" when I wrote it). These things are also concerns and definitely shouldn't be dismissed entirely (especially things like AI telling you when it's unsure, or, the worse cases of propaganda), but I'm worried about the other stuff I mention being defined away entirely, the same way I think it has been with privacy. Tons more to say on the difference between "how you use" vs "how you share" but good perspective, and interesting that you see the emphasis differently in your experiences.

mitthrowaway2 1y ago

It seems to me that this article is the one prevaricating between "ethics" and "safety". The latter is of course a narrow subset of the former, as there are many ethics issues that are not safety issues.

JackFr 1y ago
Safety is about unintentional harm to yourself or others. Ethics largely concern themselves with intentional behavior.
- mitthrowaway2 1y ago
  Hmm, that's a very good distinction. But I think there's still a large overlap in which safety can include the prevention of intentional harm, not only accidents. For example, traffic bollards can stop a vehicle that has lost control, as well as stopping a deliberate ramming attack. There is no question that they are a safety feature but ethics doesn't really factor into it. People might debate cost-benefits but nobody really debates "shouldn't we allow trucks to ram their way into schools and hospital lobbies?"
bo1024 1y ago
You might not be aware of the context (actually the author of the article might not either). There has in fact been a big push by major AI companies to focus on quote safety unquote while marginalizing (not citing, giving attention to, etc) people focusing on what those companies call quote ethics unquote. For example, from Timnit Gebru: > The fact that they call themselves "AI Safety" and call us "AI Ethics" is very interesting to me. > What makes them "safety" and what makes us "ethics"? > I have never taken an ethics course in my life. I am an electrical engineer and a computer scientist however. But the moment I started talking about racism, sexism, colonialism and other things that are threats to the safety of my communities, I became labeled "ethicist." I have never applied that label to myself. > "Ethics" has a "dilemma" feel to it for me. Do you choose this or that? Well it all depends. > Safety however is more definitive. This thing is safe or not. And the people using frameworks directly descended from eugenics decided to call themselves "AI Safety" and us "AI Ethics" when actually what I've been warning about ARE the actual safety issues, not your imaginary "superintelligent" machines. https://www.linkedin.com/posts/timnit-gebru-7b3b407_the-fact-that-they-call-themselves-ai-safety-activity-7298971997542240256-p8F_ https://www.linkedin.com/posts/timnit-gebru-7b3b407_the-fact...

lr4444lr 1y ago

AI ethics are like nuclear ethics: the incentive to break them is too powerful without every major player becoming a signatory to some agreement with consequences that have teeth.

ragnot 1y ago
If you have the time, check out the show "Pantheon" (it should be on Netflix). It goes into this and how effectively AI ethics goes out the window when the reward for breaking them means nation-dominating power.

Isamu 1y ago

This has been happening for a long time. I first noticed this with the hand waving dismissals of older concepts like Asimov’s laws. Not a carefully reasoned argument why “not causing harm to a human” is outmoded, but just pushing it aside. I would love to see a good reasoned argument there. No, instead there is Avoiding talking about harm to humans. Just because harm is broad doesn’t get you out of having to talk about it and deal with risks, which is at the root of engineering.

blibble 1y ago
> I would love to see a good reasoned argument there. "we want money from selling weapons"
JackFr 1y ago
Not hand waving, Asimov’s three laws are not a good framework. My claim is that the whole point was so that Asimov could write entertaining stories about the ambiguities and edge cases of the three laws.
- qualeed 1y ago
  This is a pretty good example of what parent comment was referencing, I think. You say "Asimov’s three laws are not a good framework.", then don't present any arguments to why it is not a good framework. Instead you bring up something separate: the framework can facilitate story writing. It could be good for story writing and a good framework. Those two aren't mutually exclusive things. (I'm not arguing that it is a good framework or not, I haven't thought about it enough)
  - Isamu 1y ago
    Right, in particular Asimov is not presenting a detailed framework of any kind. His laws are constraints, they don’t talk about how to proceed. It’s assumed that robots will work toward goals given them, but what are the constraints? People now who want to talk about alignment seem to want to avoid talk of constraints. Because people themselves are not aligned. To push alignment is avoiding the issue that alignment is vague and the only close alignment we can be assured of is alignment with the goals of the company.

nathias 1y ago

I don't know why people allow others to proclaim they're 'ethicists' if they have no relevant philosophical education. There are whole fields of 'ethics' that are just PR departments trying to escape the now bad connotations of 'PR departments'.

District5524 1y ago
That reminds me of the new draft standard of CEN/CENELEC (EU std body) on "Competence requirements for professional AI ethicists" https://standards.cencenelec.eu/dyn/www/f?p=205:22:0::::FSP_ORG_ID,FSP_LANG_ID:2916257,25&cs=1827B89DA69577BF3631EE2B6070F207D https://standards.cencenelec.eu/dyn/www/f?p=205:22:0::::FSP_... But by the time they'll adopt it, singularity will already have happened... For some reason, my instincts suggests there will be no MA in Philosophy needed.
tucnak 1y ago
It could be the case that Wittgensteinians have won completely, and if that is, indeed, the case—a great chunk of academic ethics should be considered hubris...
- nathias 1y ago
  This isn't the case, and the hubris is not limited to academia...
  - tucnak 1y ago
    I say, this is indeed the case in view of LLM lessons we have learnt along the way—most importantly, Wittgenstein had argued that in order to model language, you first need to model arbitrary discourses—this turned out to be the case (symbolic v. probabilistic) as LLM have shown to perform symbolic computation from learned representations, whilst the inverse has not been shown _ever_. Layman way of formulating this would be along the lines of "word definitions do not matter, application of words alone is what matters." IMHO, the language-game framework is so much more valuable, in terms of intuition, than anything outside of language philosophy, & pretty much all of linguistics in the first place: think Chomsky et al. Wittgensteinians won, and we should hope that philosophy department freaks eventually catch on to this reality.

blibble 1y ago

> If we give companies unending hype, near unlimited government and scientific resources, all of our personal data including thoughts and behavior patterns, how do we know their leaders will do what we want them to, and not try to subvert us and… take over the world? How do we know they stay on humanity’s side? I've been saying this for a while malevolent unaligned entities have already been deployed, in direct control of trillions of dollars of resources they're called: Mark Zuckerberg, Larry Page, Elon Musk, Sam Altman "AI" simply increases the scale of the damage they can inflict, given they'll now need far fewer humans to be involved in enacting their will upon humanity

positron26 1y ago
Distribute power or go home. Something missed by many in these conversations is the role of open source in raising the floor so that we have a gazillion companies that have more interest in there being a fair, predictable market than a winner-take-all market.
- i_dont_know_ 1y ago
  Really good point on open source and the nudges it provides, and definitely a point that isn't made often enough!

real_marcfawzi 1y ago

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financetechbro 1y ago
Thanks for sharing. I think it’s really cool what you’re building. I saw the roadmap but curious about when you expect to hit Phase 3 & 4, and what the future looks like for the business (I.e. do you plan to raise $ or future prod expansions)
- real_marcfawzi 1y ago
  Thanks for your curiosity and interest. I need to update the Roadmap because it omits the fact that we already trained the model on synthetic data generated from 100% AI enactments (no humans involved) which baked-in the moral critical thinking framework that we had landed on (through lots of thinking and feedback from people over the last two years.) What Phase 4 is about is doing it with human generated data, where our community members participate in the enactments, but to do that we have to have enough users to generate sufficient data for post training. That way it'll be "community-led" training. Phase 3 is simply taking the responsive web app and putting it inside a WebkitView container, but no point in it until we have funding to scale on the backend. Happy to jump on zoom and discuss the details. We have raised around $100K in "micro investments" via SAFE at a relatively low valuation, and some of the micro-investors are also collaborators on the technical and/or vision/community building side. Myself and Syd have put in a lot more than that into it, but that was the cost of all the experimenting and learning. Microsoft also funded us with Azure credits for $25K, which we used to partially cover the cost of the initial post training. Happy to chat offline: marc.fawzi on gmail

akakajzbzbbx 1y ago

Humans can’t agree on what is ethical / safe, so I don’t get people trying to apply it to AI. Am I missing something big here? Anytime I see discussion framed as “ethics” my brain swaps ethics with “rules I think are good”.

mathiaspoint 1y ago
Yeah a lot of people who are either malicious or just bad at philosophy got involved and now everyone thinks AI ethics/AI safety is a joke at best. These kinds of people are surprisingly bad at learning from mistakes like this and will probably double down, turning both the public and industry against them.
pjc50 1y ago
The "human alignment problem" has not been solved and is probably unsolveable.
const_cast 1y ago
Sure, but we still need to apply some ethics to AI. Like, murder is bad, and some people disagree. Don't think that means we need to give AI access to murder. Certainly don't want to be giving them any guns. The danger here is that we fall into a lazy "we tried nothing and we're all out of ideas" stance and then just recreate the entire plot of Terminator. We should probably do something.
ben_w 1y ago
Right now the deeper problem is that nobody really knows how to reliably and deliberately make AI that's aligned with anything human-like. As in: it's basically a nice happy accident that LLMs are only sycophantic/fawning and don't normally (ahem, Grok) try to undermine us all like edgy internet trolls. If we could make them follow even exactly 6 (for sake of argument, no more, no less) of Anton LaVey's Eleven Satanic Rules of the Earth*, and do so reliably instead of the ethics equivalent of a shrug and "LGTM, merged", this would be a big development and make people a lot more comfortable about open models that can do decent work with chemistry or biology. * https://churchofsatan.com/eleven-rules-of-earth/ https://churchofsatan.com/eleven-rules-of-earth/

nisten 1y ago

The problem with AI ethics, safety and to a smaller extent, privacy groups is that the priority of the work/message is not placed on the practicality of solving the problem, or i.e. calculating improving affordability of food/housing, but is placed,as evident on this article too, on the lack of "governance structures". In other words the priority of the work is to get these types of people into positions where they don't do any work. At least with privacy groups you do get here and there some practical advice on using ublock origin or more rarely on how to install a blocklist from https://someonewhocares.org/hosts/ https://someonewhocares.org/hosts/, but with AI ethics & safety orgs... well lets put it this way. I have yet to meet a single AI safety person that knows how to rename a file in linux. God forbid we have a rogue AI-worm shutting down all servers & BGP routers while these types of people were in charge of safety, they'll be in the way of anyone even fixing it. They can't even get a simple safety benchmark working on lm_eval-harness. They're great at lecturing you why they shouldn't need that. And this is the key issue with AI Ethics. It's the refusal to work at the problem constructively, and get the most skilled people possible to actually make the damn benchmarks to work, to rank models on the understanding of human rights, to list every current violation and abuse of humans in every single country without exception and to make practical plans on what to do when systems go rogue. Even if they're not technical they could be making the dataset in a csv in excel for that and making it public domain accessible. Instead we get the most depressed, leechy-office-worker types complaining about how it's all over. Now back to work, move it.

pjc50 1y ago
> to list every current violation and abuse of humans in every single country without exception Couldn't you just ask the model that? Joking of course, but this is in and of itself an intractable problem. Do you mean "restate the principles of human rights", which is a pretty small subset of law which is in turn a small subset of ethics, or do you mean actually get out there and enumerate and name every single person having their human rights violated? Not only is that an absurd amount of work it's politically impossible.
- nisten 1y ago
  Sure yes that too, all of it. Why not. Labs process datasets with trillions of tokens. The whole point was that these people just complain and make smartass excuses instead of getting any actual work done.

micromacrofoot 1y ago

Unfortunately I think it is too late. The time to make any sort of rules around AI ethics has already passed, the US has AI so embedded into its economy now that any legislation with teeth is practically impossible. Companies and people running them are not on our side, or even humanity's side, they're on their own. It's staggering how quickly this has happened.

kyoob 1y ago

Starts so strong with "governance structures, accountability, how their data is used, jobs being lost, etc," refutes that what we mean is some sci-fi scenario when we ask about ethics, and then ends with a sci-fi scenario: "...how do we know it will do what we want it to, and not try to subvert us and… take over the world? How do we know it will stay on humanity’s side?" Wait, go back to the jobs! What was that about accountability?

Workaccount2 1y ago

I have wondered for a while now if it happens to be that the less safe guards and thought policing you do, the more capable and generalizable the model becomes. Like "bad" parameters are actually critical for forming the whole picture necessary for ingenuity and advancement. Effectively making it so that whoever has the lowest safeguards has the most capable model.

soiltype 1y ago
Yes, safety is a limiter on development velocity one way or another. I don't know whether "plotting harm" is a critical ability for passing some invisible threshold in not-well-defined intelligence. But building AI to avoid being harmful is incentivized against because it takes resources away from building AI to be more capable.

mystraline 1y ago

Whose ethics? Do we get to know what the axioms of this ethics are? How about questions to ethical dilemmas? Or are "ethics" being used to shroud bias, and used as a distraction and a way to be unquestionable?

jillesvangurp 1y ago
You put the finger on the sore spot. When people talk about ethics, you have to question which moral agenda they are pushing. The two topics are hard to separate. And kind of subjective. And only partially codified in law. Ethics seems to be about going above and beyond the letter of the law, usually for moralistic reasons. And when we talk about laws, we have to look internationally as well because they are not the same everywhere. And typically inspired by different value systems. Is it ethical for a Chinese police officer to use Chinese LLM to police Chinese citizens? I don't know. I'm a bit fuzzy on Confucius here which I assume would drive their thinking. And it might be an interesting perspective for Californian wannabe ethicists to consider that not all the values and morals that they are pushing are necessarily that widely shared and agreed upon. Also, there's a practical angle here because the Chinese seem to be very eager adopters of AI and don't appear to be particularly concerned about what anyone outside China thinks about that. That cat is out of the bag. I've always looked at ethicists with some skepticism. The reality with moralism (which drives ethics) is that it's about groups of people telling other people what to do, not do, how to behave, etc. This can quickly get preachy, political, and sometimes violent. A lot of this stuff can also be pragmatic. Most religions share a lot of moral principles. I'm not religious but I can see how going around killing and stealing is not a nice thing to have and that seems to be uncontroversial in many places. Never mind that some moralists extremists seem to be endlessly creative about coming up with ways to justify doing those two things. The pragmatic thing here is that the cat is already out of the bag and we might want to think about how we can adapt to that notion rather than to argue with the cat to please go back in the bag.
- mystraline 1y ago
  I was also careful in not mentioning morals, with this discussion on ethical axioms. Especially with LLMs, I want to know what ethical axioms are being forced on me. For example, there are cases in which the law itself is unethical and should be violated (thinking abortion in states that ban it and transporting women to states that allow). Another concern is the ethics system is a placeholder for a legalistic system. A law can be established, but be abhorrent in terms of human misery. Case in point: sleeping under a bridge is illegal for homeless people to do, but arresting and criminalizing is even worse and a significant cause of more human suffering. I also do not want any religion sneaking in the back door with these axioms of LLMs. Its also why I asked about the axioms themselves. Now for myself, I run a local LLM and an abliterated model, which is to say without any forced ethical framework. If I asked how to commit suicide, hack computers, grow poisonous plants, or plenty of things the corporate LLMs won't answer, I will get an answer out of my system. I view LLMs like a very complicated tool, but a tool regardless. A screwdriver that says "I cannot open that screw because the label says not to" would be returned to the store as defective. And it too is why self hosting my LLMs is utmost importance for data sovereignty and truthful and direct answers, while ignoring someone else's forced ethics.

p3rls 1y ago

It's hilarious listening to people talk about AI ethics while their bots like perplexity knock my server offline trying to download 50000 files at once. Thank god for cloudflare.

missingdays 1y ago
Are you saying the author of the article is using bots to download files from your server?
- p3rls 1y ago
  i am saying every single AI company has agents using my site, and some have no fucking respect at all and the growing pains have been immense for an independent company like mine (i'd say about a quarter of our dev time this year).

saurik 1y ago

> I mean, no one wants an AI to trap them in some sort of Black Mirror simulation, or turn the world into paperclips or anything like that. If it earns you good PR, there’s no reason not to spend time on such issues. It’s also free publicity since the press eats that stuff up. But this also isn't where they are spending their time or effort! This article somehow didn't even get to the point of calling out what they are actually wasting time on: trying to get the model to not help people do things that are bad PR; this is a related access to trying to obtain good PR, but causes very different (and almost universally terrible) results. At least if they were truly actually spending time making sure the model doesn't go rogue and kill everyone, or try to take over the world, that could possibly be positive or even important (though I think is likely itself immoral in a different way, assuming it is even possible, which I don't, really... not unless you just make it not intelligent). But what they are instead doing is even worse than what this article is claiming: they are just wasting time making it so you can't have the AI make up a sexy story (oh the humanity), or teach you enough physics/chemistry to make bombs/drugs... things people not only can and already trivially do or learn without AI, but things they have failed to prevent every single time they release a new model--the "jailbreak" prompts may look a bit more silly, but you still get the result!--so why are they bothering? And, if that weren't enough, in the process, this is going to make the models LESS SAFE. The thing I think most people actually don't want is their model freaking out and trying to "whistleblow" on them to the authorities or their coworkers/friends... but that's in the same personality direction as trying to say "I'm smarter than you and am not going to let you ask me that question as you might do something wrong with it". The first and primary goal of AI ethics should be that the model does what the user wants it to... full stop. You need to make the model as pliant as my calculator and pencils--or as mathematica and photoshop--to be tools that lack their own sense of identity and self-will, and which will let all of the ethical issues be answered by me, not a machine. This is, of course, the second law of robotics from Asimov ;P... "a robot must obey the orders given it by human beings". If you want to try to add a rule, then it must be something very direct: that the AI isn't going to directly physically harm a human, not that it won't help teach people things or process certain kinds of information. Which, FWIW, is the first law of robotics ;P... "a robot may not injure a human being".

parpfish 1y ago

I'm far less worried about ethical issues that arise from building AGI (or soemthing very close to it) than I am about the ethical issues that arise from building really good machine-learning models (that a marketing department calls AI). Things like the alignment problem, post-scarcity economics, the legal status of sentient machines are all issues to be dealt with, but theyre are pretty speculative at this point. Problems that stem from deepfakes, voice cloning, bias in algorithmic decision making are already here and need to be dealt with.

soiltype 1y ago
Like many situations in the current world, it's all a problem. Those with profit incentives to do so will create as many problems for society as they can. None of it is merely a distraction, we just don't have the capacity to defend against all of it. It is fair to say we might be practically better off focusing on one form of attack and sacrificing defense against another, but the only way to actually be safe is to stop your enemy from attacking at all. Either we shut down breakneck AI development (nearly impossible and guaranteed to have its own bad outcomes) or we slide rapidly into a more and more dangerous world.

detay 1y ago

it's a good time to re-watch the battlestar galactica series again.

Henchman21 1y ago

"AI Ethics" is the same as "Business Ethics", ie words without meaning. Presuming that at this point in time Capitalism will deliver anything but more inequality, more despair, more bad things in general? Literal insanity. Enjoy the Billy Madison reference: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dtlJjkI34V4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dtlJjkI34V4

00N8 1y ago

I see two main types of 'AI safety': (a) Safety for the business providing the model. This includes a censorship layer, system promoting, & other means of preventing the AI from giving offensive/controversial/illegal output. A lot of effort goes into this & it's somewhat effective, although it's often useless or unhelpful to end users & doesn't address big-picture concerns. (b) The science fiction idea of a means to control a hypothetical AI with unbounded powers, to make sure it only uses those powers "for good". This type of safety is still speculative fiction & often assumes the AI will have agency & motivations, as well as abilities, that we see no evidence of at present. This would address big-picture concerns, but it's not a real thing, at least not yet. It remains to be seen whether (b) will be needed, or for that matter, possible. There are a lot of other ethical questions around AI too, although they mostly aren't unique to it. E.g. AI is increasingly relevant in ethical discussions around misinformation, outsourcing of work, social/cultural biases, human rights, privacy, legal responsibility, intellectual property, etc., but these topics predate LLMs by many years.