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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

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/

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/