Do you feel the same way about nuclear weapons tech?

That "the more powerful, the more important it is that everyone has access"?

Especially considering that the biggest killer app for AI could very well be smart weapons like we've never seen before.

I feel this is a false equivalence.

Nukes aren’t even close to being commodities, cannot be targeted at a class of people (or a single person), and have a minutely small number of users. (Don’t argue semantics with “class of people” when you know what I mean, btw)

On the other hand, tech like this can easily become as common as photoshop, can cause harm to a class of people, and be deployed on a whim by an untrained army of malevolent individuals or groups.

So if someone discovered a weapon of mass destruction (say some kind of supervirus) that could be produced and bought cheaply and could be programmed to only kill a certain class of people, then you'd want the recipe to be freely available?

This poses no direct threat to human life though. (Unlike, say, guns - which are totally fine for everyone in the US!)

The direct threat to society is actually this kind of secrecy.

If ordinary people don't have access to the technology they don't really know what it can do, so they can't develop a good sense of what could now be fake that only a couple of years ago must have been real.

Imagine if image editing technology (Photoshop etc) had been restricted to nation states and large powerful corporations. The general public would be so easy to fool with mere photographs - and of course more openly nefarious groups would have found ways to use it anyway. Instead everybody now knows how easily we can edit an image and if we see a shot of Mr Trump apparently sharing a loving embrace with Mr Putin we can make the correct judgement regarding a probable origin.

I understand your perspective regarding the potential risks associated with freely available research, particularly when it comes to illegal weapons and dangerous viruses. However, it's worth considering that by making research available to the world, we enable a collaborative effort in finding solutions and antidotes to such threats. In the case of Covid, the open sharing of information led to the development of vaccines in record time.

It's important to weigh the benefits of diversity and open competition against the risks of bad actors misusing the tools. Ultimately, finding a balance between accessibility and responsible use is key.

What guarantee do we have that OpenAI won't become an evil actor like Skynet?

I'm not advocating for or against secrecy. I'm just not understanding the parent comment I replied to. They said nukes are different than AI because they aren't commodities and can't target specific classes of people, and presumably that's why nukes should be kept secret and AI should be open. Why? That makes no sense to me. If nukes had those qualities, I'd definitely want them kept secret and controlled.

The bottleneck for bioterrorism isn't AI telling you how to do something, it's producing the final result. You wanna curtail bioweapons, monitor the BSL labs, biowarfare labs, bioreactors, and organic 3D printers. ChatGPT telling me how to shoot someone isn't gonna help me if I can't get a gun.

This isn't related to my comment. I wasn't asking what if an AI invents a supervirus. I was asking what if someone invents a supervirus. AI isn't involved in this hypothetical in any way.

I was replying to a comment saying that nukes aren't commodities and can't target specific classes of people, and I don't understand why those properties in particular mean access to nukes should be kept secret and controlled.

An AI video generator can't kill billions of people, for one. I'd prefer it if access wasn't limited to a single corporation that's accountable to no one and is incentivized to use it for their benefits only.

> accountable to no one

What do you mean? Are you being dramatic or do you actually believe that the US government will/can not absolutely shut OpenAI down, if they feel it was required to guarantee state order?

For the US government to step in, they'd have to do something extremely dangerous (and refuse to share with the government). If we're talking about video generation, the benefits they have are financial, and the lack of accountability is in that they can do things no one else can. I'm not saying they'll be allowed to break the law, there's plenty of space between the two extremes. Though, given how things were going, I can also see OpenAI teaming up with the US government and receiving exclusive privileges to run certain technologies for the sake of "safety". It's what Altman has already been pushing for.

I think it could. The right sequence of videos sent to the right people could definitely set something catastrophic off.

> The right sequence of videos sent to the right people could definitely set something catastrophic off.

...after amazing public world wide demos that show how real the AI generated videos can be? How long has Hollywood had similar "fictional videos" powers?

Flat earth Billy can now make videos with a $20 subscription.

I think that's great. Billy will feed his flat earther friends for a few weeks or months and pretty soon the entire world will wise up and be highly skeptical of any new such videos. The more of this that gets out there, the quicker people will learn. If it's 1 or 2 videos to spin an election... People might not get wise to it.

Given the last 10 years I have no such faith in the common person.

which will only continue to convince people if the technology stays safely locked away in possession of a single corp.

if it were opened to public faking such videos would lose (nearly) all of its power

> ...after amazing public world wide demos that show how real the AI generated videos can be?

How quickly do you think our gerontocracy will adapt to the new reality?

Make it high-enough fidelity, and it will be used to convince people to kill billions.

Video can convince people to kill each other now because it is assumed to show real things. Show people a Jew killing a Palestinian, and that will rile up the Muslims, or vice versa.

When a significant fraction of video is generated content spat out by a bored teenager on 4chan, then people will stop trusting it, and hence it will no longer have the power to convince people to kill.

You don't need to generate fake videos for that example. State of Isreal have been killing Palestinians en masse for a long time and intensified the effort for the last 4 months. The death toll is 29,000+ and counting. Two thirds are children and women.

Isreal media machinery parading photographs of damaged houses that could only be done by heavy artillery or tank shells blaming on rebels carrying infantry rifles.

But I agree, as if the current tools were not enough to sway people they will have more means to sway public opinion.

Hamas has similarly been shooting rockets into Israel for a long time. Eventually people get tired and stop caring about long-lasting conflicts, just like we don't care about concentration camps in North Korea and China, or various deadly civil wars in Sub-Saharan Africa, some of which have killed way more civilians than all wars in Palestinian history. One can already see support towards Ukraine fading as well, even though there Western countries would have a real geopolitical interest.

> An AI video generator can't kill billions of people, for one.

Not directly. But I won't be surprised if AI video generators aren't somewhere in the chain of causes of gigadeaths this century.

> Especially considering that the biggest killer app for AI could very well be smart weapons like we've never seen before.

A homing missile that chases you across continents and shows you disturbing deepfakes of yourself until you lose your mind and ask it to kill you. At that point it switches to encourage mode, rebuilds your ego, and becomes your lifelong friend.

Oof, imagine if our safeguard for nuclear weapons was that a private company kept it safe.

On a geopolitical level 'everyone' does have access.

I don't think it's really that hard to make a nuclear weapon, honestly. Just because you have the plans for one, doesn't mean you have the uranium/plutonium to make one. Weapons-grade uranium doesn't fall into your lap.

The ideas of critical mass, prompt fission, and uranium purification, along with the design of the simplest nuclear weapon possible has been out in the public domain for a long time.

While it's probably too idealistic to be possible, I'd rather try and focus on getting people/society/the world to a state where it doesn't matter if everyone has access (i.e. getting to a place where it doesn't matter if everyone has access to nuclear weapons, guns, chemical weapons, etc., because no-one would have the slightest desire to use them).

As things are at the moment, while supression of a technology has benefits, it seems like a risky long-term solution. All it takes is for a single world-altering technology to slip through the cracks, and a bad actor could then forever change the world with it.

Do you feel the same way about electricity?

As long as destroying things remains at least two magnitudes easier than building things and defending against attacks, this take (as a blanket statement) will continue to be indefensible and irresponsible.

Should nukes be open source?

I humbly refer you to this comment:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39389262

ML models of this complexity are just as accessible as nuclear weapons. How many nations possess a GPT-4? The only reason nuclear weapons are not more common is because their proliferation is strictly controlled by conventions and covert action.

The basic designs for workable (although inefficient) nuclear weapons have been published in open sources for decades. The hard part is obtaining enough uranium and then refining it.

If you have two pieces of plutonium and put them too close together you have accidentally created a nuclear weapon… so yeah nukes are open source, plutonium breeding isn’t.

I love it when people make this “nuke” argument because it tells you a lot more about them than it does about anything else. There are so many low information people out there, it’s a bit sad the state of education even in developed countries. There’s people trotting around the word “chemical” at things that are scary without understanding what exactly the word means, how it differs from the word mixture or anything like that. I don’t expect most people to understand the difference between a proton and a quark but at least a general understanding of physics and chemistry would save a lot of people from falling into the “world is magic and information is hidden away inside geniuses” mentality.

Should electricity?