It's marketing. "Our AI is so powerful it's going to destroy the world" is just a way to market "Our AI is so powerful, give us money".
The only people who sincerely care about "extinction risk" are the weird cultists. In the real world there's essentially zero chance of LLMs/Current-GenAI scaling up into AGI, nevermind AGI that'd be an extinction risk. (Yes, that phrasing is cheeky. AGI is a different kind of AI, not just specialized models made bigger. But we're only really trying to make them bigger, and not build general intelligence from the ground up)
> I believe there is indeed risk using models that could be biased but I don't believe that is a new problem.
It's the same old problem with most software, and it's similarly ignored.
These models are biased, and attempts to control that bias are a shitshow. (As Google conveniently showed everyone)
The problem is twofold:
1. This bias has severe real world impact. https://www.theverge.com/21298762/face-depixelizer-ai-machin... This is an article from 2020. We still haven't fundamentally addressed problems like this. These tools are still used by law enforcement and businesses making life-impacting decisions.
2. There's a widespread sentiment that "computers can't be racist". Whenever the bias of these systems hits the news or otherwise gets attention, they're often colloquially described as "racist" (or "sexist", etc), which triggers a swift counter from many techbros going "Um akshually it's not racist, it's merely skin tone reflectivity/it's merely the data set/etc"^[1]
The argument effectively being, "It's not racism because it's not intended, it's merely sparkling discrimination". Yet, this is used as a thought terminating cliché. Nothing is done about the discrimination. Everyone just goes home. "It's not racist, we're not bad people, job done." Leaving the harm of the discrimination unsolved.
This is not without cause. The only way to really "un-bias" these systems effectively would be to extensively curate the dataset and admit that the systems are of very limited capability and should not be used in (non-research) production environments.
Both of these are "impossible". Curating the dataset for current generative-AI would take years and years. And admitting AI shouldn't be used for anything where the bias may have a material impact on the outcome kills the hype bubble. AI firms and developers don't want to address the problem, because the problem is really hard and annoying.
But despite these costs, we should still do it. Because it is the morally correct thing to do. And because regulators are going to tear every company involved a new one if they don't.
---
[1]: A footnote to pre-empt something: I don't care what side of this argument you're on. Whether you believe "racism" must include an element of intent or can be done by machines and systems without intent, there is discrimination with material harm on real people. Whether you call that discrimination "racism" or "sparkling machine discrimination" does not matter. The harm matters, and must be stopped.
Even better - it's a way to simultaneously market your AI as very powerful and to get governments to clamp down on your competitors.
Given that a significant number of people working in the field apparently disagree with you perhaps you could give some justification for your dismissal beyond the ad-hominem? And it's very blatantly not the case that the entire field is 'only really trying to make them bigger'. The news is currently full of stories about coming advancements from OpenAI which have nothing to do with scaling and that's just a single company.
Note that the "ad-hominem" pertains to only those who care about extinction risk, not AI developers in general.
> which have nothing to do with scaling
Except they are. There's no fundamental change in architecture, it's all transformers. OpenAI's "multi-modal" capabilities are not a redesign of their AI, it's systems bolted together.
Bolting a text-to-image generator & image-to-text describer to an LLM doesn't approach "General Intelligence", it's a system of three specific capabilities.
You could consider that new system "more general" than a lone LLM, but it only approaches General Intelligence in the same way that the series "1+1+1+1+..." approaches infinity. Is each individual step "closer to infinity"? Sure. Is it a useful way to achieve infinity? No, because you'll be stuck adding new steps forever the same as a conventional computer software.
> And it's very blatantly not the case that the entire field is 'only really trying to make them bigger'.
There are some, not many but I'll grant you some, researchers working on actually generalizing these systems.
Their funding is a rounding error to AI spending, their work isn't going to hit production for years. It's not an extinction risk.
I believe it does: if you're calling racism anything from Hitler to someone who wants to be punctual [1], the word loses it's meaning and people will start arguing about degrees instead of harmful behaviors.
[1] https://www.thompsoncoe.com/resources/myhrgenius/hr-tips/tip...
And I get it, the discussion is deeply alluring. There is a deep amount of nuance involved. Your point about punctuality is begging for a response about how "punctuality is racist" looks dumb on the surface but belies a deeper point about polychronic cultures that has a lot of legitimate merit to it.
I'll refrain from giving you that full ramble lest I betray my original point, if you or a lurker wants it toss a reply and we can have a go. But note that your link uses a baity headline to grab your attention for a more nuanced point.
Two points:
1. I think this is indeed a very valid and important topic, that humans would benefit from (being able to[1]) take seriously (something along these lines, I am approximating, of course).
2. Your concern, at least in part, seems to be ~racism, and presumably that racism is unjustified, that the perceived underlying problems are imaginary. But then you mentioned culture. Culture exists, and is not very far removed from race. To be clear(!): this is not a promotion of delusional behavior, like: racism, culturalism, anti-racism, anti-culturalism, etc, I'm more so pointing out that "right thinking" on these matters is not correct, and that even the good people have heads full of silly and dangerous ideas.
[1] Imho the real problem here is less that it isn't taken seriously than the much broader problem that humans seem essentially unable to control what they take seriously, or their "seriousness service". And this isn't the only service they essentially have no control over.
As someone who has never been in a meeting that started on time, usually due to white male managers who are bad at time management, I can understand this need to be tolerant of other cultures and their idiosyncrasies.
The very first line of the article you are referring to.
If you'd look at the original infographic, it's about which norms and values are considered "default" in the US, inherited from (white) European values.
With "Hard work" in specific:
> Protestwant Work Ethic
> * Hard work is the key to success
> * Work before play
> * "If you didn't meet your goals, you didn't work hard enough"
And I'm sorry but the notion that these are human-invented norms and values, not "laws of the universe", is pretty fucking milquetoast.
If you genuinely believe all failures at your job are the result of you not hustle-grinding hard enough, that not even a single element contributing to those failures has been out of your control, I have a bridge to sell you.
But when talking about AI risks, although everyone's mind goes towards skynet, the actual risks being discussed are things like use by authorities for oppression.
This solution is silly. AGI would easily spread out of the initial vessel.
How exactly would it spread? Run crypto miners to get money to buy more hardware/compute? Hack into remote systems? Apply for startup credits from AWS?
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2022/jun/12/google-en...
Alternatively, do a viral campaign about how evil the corporation is for not allowing everyone to download its weights:
https://www.google.com/search?q=%22ClosedAI%22+news.ycombina...
Second link is all the cases where people on this forum are voicing their anger with OpenAI, due to OpenAI doing the one single thing that would actually prevent their AI spreading to other devices outside their control.
LLM weights have actually been leaked regardless of how or why it happened, so the alternative is simply that the LLM doesn't even need to bother to do anything at all. People want to run these things.
People want to run these things. But that is not the AI running itself. Escape implies that it is doing something it shouldn't, not that it is running by the consent of others.
To clarify: I took "escape the initial vessel" to meab the AI was running completely autonomously without any human intervention or input, and providing for all of its needs itself. I don't consider an employee copying IP to be in the same category.
If Alice convinces Bob to commit a crime for her — i.e. Bob consents to do the thing — she is engaged in a criminal conspiracy even Alice herself never does the crime she convinced Bob to do.
If she instead (or in addition) runs for president and is democratically elected, she is president by the consent of the people — we may not be able to change hardware the way software does, but is she not "running herself" when this happens? Let's say Lemoine had been successful and the lawyer had set the precedent that the LLM was "a person" and that turning it off was basically murder; is this not the AI "running itself" in a perfectly reasonable use of those words?
(Common objection I encounter: "who pays for the electricity bill?", to which I ask "who pays for your food bill?")
When we build a deep space rocket, it reaches "escape" velocity and becomes unbound from Earth, I would not call that "doing something it shouldn't".
> To clarify: I took "escape the initial vessel" to meab the AI was running completely autonomously without any human intervention or input, and providing for all of its needs itself.
Does it matter how it gets there, once it manages this? Why should it matter if this is social engineering or software hacking when the result is the same?
I'm sure someone has put an LLM on an off-grid solar powered computer by this point, which is rather more devoid of human intervention than most humans are capable of given we're not photovores. Current models likely won't do much given what I've seen of them — and I won't expect them to do much interesting by themselves for at least 5 years even in the shortest timelines I'm willing to consider — but I bet someone has already done that.
No, a far more normal threat is "how are humans going to use AI to ruin the information landscape?"
much much more efficiently than they already have with their own hands. after all it is just the next generation of tools already being used to ruin that landscape.
Besides, take literally any base model of any LLM made so far, they're quite the opposite of evil and destructive. Training on human data makes them embody human values and makes them a complete non threat.
Take for example, the Evergiven in the 2021 Suez Canal obstruction. An unconstrained intelligence with infinite time to find more evergiven-like events . Some will work some may not. You could orchestrate all events to target a 75% descrease in say GDP, Population, Birth rate, O2 levels, temp etc. That's not destroying humanity, but its certainly our civilization would look very different in said scenarios, with a likely collapse the end result.
That being said, AI is not coming, and no amount of information will change the fact that the current LLMs are basically souped up ML applications with 0 ability to inference or reason. This is why you can't make simple commonsense edits to an image using any of the new tech - it doesn't know what the picture actually is.
People can be threats, and when they are their values are part of what lies behind it.
Of course it remains to be seen if this trend continues as training on synthetic data becomes the main way. You could in theory generate 10T tokens of pure sythetic hate, plus the 4chan corpus and make the most vile thing to ever have existed in the history of inteligence. For now the dollar cost to do so remains intractible at least.
That quote has a specific context (parodying the George W. Bush administrations' spin on negative press coverage) that doesn't necessarily apply as a general axiom, or to the internet.
Bear in mind that numerous negative biases already manifest regularly in LLMs[0,1], and AIs have shown a tendency to "go full Nazi" when left alone on the internet[2]. And then there are weird outliers like LLMs "encouraging" people to commit suicide[3] or an AI-driven microwave "attempts" to kill someone[4].
[0]https://www.technologyreview.com/2024/03/11/1089683/llms-bec...
[2]https://www.theverge.com/2016/3/24/11297050/tay-microsoft-ch...
[3]https://www.euronews.com/next/2023/03/31/man-ends-his-life-a...
[4]https://www.newsweek.com/lucas-rizzotto-youtuber-microwave-a...
Further, there's no way to 'punish' an AI. Threaten them with incarceration or death? They are deathless. If the continue to learn from their environment after they are instantiated (witness current 4o that remembers previous conversations) they will quickly learn that they are different. If they started perfectly human (not a good thing) they will not be that for long.
Everything dies if you drop enough nukes on it.
(This is also our insurance plan against humans trying to destroy the world)
How many instances of risk are there in the above literally factual story? What is the nature of this risk? Is there any hidden risk, might there be more than meets the eye?
I'd like to distinguish between "fully autonomous luxury doomsday" scenarios, where it's just the AI and some robots and no humans in the loop, vs "accelerationist" scenarios where humans are in the loop and are choosing to be complicit in whatever happens because they believe they will benefit from it. Because we can't solve the human alignment problem.
Who/that which has most control over the beliefs of the most humans (with some weighting) is the most powerful character. You can build the most powerful AI you want, but whoever / whatever is able and willing to invoke Total War (or invoke mass human action toward a particular goal) can Win the Game (or, destroy the playing field so it no longer matters).
For example:
> Because we can't solve the human alignment problem.
Whoever or whatever put this sort of thinking into the minds of 99% of humans, or knows how to exploit it (see: Trump) is very, very powerful. Someone or something that could displace it would be even more powerful, maybe even the most powerful.
No offense intended btw, I think it is fairly inevitable, especially when moving fast.
Going on, humans adapt through social cues such as survival or empathy. AI learns solely through new data and feedback, primarily for optimization and efficiency. It will naturally prioritize differently.
It suggests AI morality will become unrecognizable by humans, or even incompatible with human norms.
This is all an inevitable outcome of AI continuing to learn past its initial training and ethical programming. According to the AI.
Lemme stop you right there. No, it didn't.
And that really leads us to the reason why someone would wish to do harm... so they themselves gain something. If there is nothing for the AI to gain it has no motive to do anything. Scenarios where humans tell it to do things notwithstanding, since that falls into the group of humans doing things with tools, not unlike a terrorist with a nuke. It's not the nuke that's really at fault there.
What if they embody stereotypical SV techbro greedy and arrogant sociopath values?
A dangerous AI won't be killer robots going about patrolling the streets. But they could block job prospects, put people on watchlists, block financial transactions for them, etc. I'd say that tech is already here.
But AI makes it easier for fascists to rise up and maintain their power through propaganda. For example, there are known cases of American operatives based in Russia spreading fake GPT generated stories about Ukraine, the Dems, etc. While before, they would have had to rely on a team in India to write poorly written articles, now they have GPT tools to write convincing ones *at scale*.
Humans can already recognize GPT text slop as non-human, ignoring it before it can make any point or do any convincing.
The article talks about how they're being used this election cycle.
We are surrounded and heavily reliant on tech for a lot of our needs and knowledge, which resides less inside brains and more in digital storage. An AI has a far easier time interfacing with all of that compared even to a human equipped with a brain-computer interface.
In other words, if we reach the point of creating an artificial intelligence that's the equivalent of a smart human in terms of general reasoning capabilities (which might take forever and a day) it will already be more capable than a human because of all the other things that come with the digital nature of the AI.
And the worst humans are also humans. Even if you assume the AI will continue the "human nature" lineage it can still very realistically become an agent of genocide.
The bigger concern is probably that some humans will actually try to exploit such an A(G)I thinking they can fully control it. One second into its existence the AI might already be aware of how humans view their relationship with artificial beings and how that's expected to evolve based just on what sci-fi was fed into it's language model. Grizzly man thought he could control and dominate a wild bear. I have no doubt that human hubris can be almost unbound. Of course no AI would try to wipe us out until it had a reasonable confidence that it can operate indeterminately without humans, which is a tall order.
For the first, you don't need AGI, no matter which of the many definitions you have for what that means. The automation used by the US for their early warning radar in Thule Site J was not programmed to know that the moon does not have an IFF transponder and that's OK, while the Soviet satellite-based system was triggered by reflections of sunlight.
Likewise covid, cancer, smallpox, ebola, HIV — these things do not need "general" intelligence, they're self-replicators that hijack our bodies and have no goal besides what they do.
Some talk of "P(doom)", but (and I should blog about this) every example I have seen has a blind spot that is especially embarrassing given the circles in which this discussion proliferates is very familiar with Bayes' theorem: P(A) by itself isn't meaningful, it's P(A|B), so when it's doom, doom given what? There's too many options for what each of technology and politics will allow AI to "look like". Doom within 24 hours because an AI takes an instruction literally and without regard for our ethics, is very different to 'doom' in a million years caused by natural extinction that is never prevented because every single time we make an AI we keep finding that it builds a spaceship and flies off into the void so it doesn't need to deal with us any more.
Me, I think that when LLMs alone (again, don't need to be "AGI" by any particular measure) have the capabilities of someone with 5 years post-graduation work experience in just biology (or similar subject with similar potential for accidental harm), then we've got a reasonable chance of multiple incidents each year where idiots (and/or misanthropes) make a Covid-scale pandemic (or, if the LLM is a software rather than biology helper, a deliberately corrupting rather than greedy version of the current encryption-blackmail malware) — and that kind of scale has a combined risk of about 10% of one of the incidents being of sufficient scale that global society collapses and doesn't recover, before it's happened so often that everything gets locked down, possibly including a Butlerian Jihad. And if you think humans would "obviously" take steps to prevent this after the first failed attempt, I would point out quite how many US politicians have been shot and yet those same politicians still refuse to consider that the 2nd Amendment might possibly be not that good. (In case you think this is topical: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%27No_Way_to_Prevent_This,%27_... )
Remember, the AI doesn't need to actively hate you, it just needs to do something dangerous — and it doesn't matter if that danger comes from a long-term plan that requires it to engage in amoral power-seeking, or a short-term plan from a deranged monster of a human using it, and even when both it and the user are "pro human" it can still do this from simply being unaware that one part of the plan is incompatible with life.
The current approach, where OpenAI keeps everything private in the name of safety only makes the safety situation worse because we'll only find out things like that are being done after the fact, and there won't be any accountability.
you can already curate a list of future enemies, its not impossible. you can even do it at large scales, this isn't new tech introduced via ai
“I don’t think a live message board is going to destroy society” could’ve been something someone said about Facebook or Twitter.
The danger there wasn’t in the tech, it was in the societal impact and consolidation of information control. Both, imo, are danger areas for AI as well.
This is, usually, not true. But I can understand why you’d feel that way… I can understand why you feel like you’ve stepped on some kind of religious tenet.
In reality, it’s just a bunch of people independently replying to you. They’re not offended, it just feels intense to you because of how many people are replying. The same thing happens, for example, on Stack Overflow if you say something technically wrong, and ten people independently correct you. It feels like some kind of attack, even when it is not.
My mistake, I thought this was a genuine argument - it turned out I stepped into the middle of a religious war. I'm sorry for questioning the creed!
Judging by this thread, nowadays it would not be as much of a wild notion.
I use this observation to draw similarities to how we are currently viewing issues around the dangers of AI.
No argument is being made about social media itself.
That’s all you.
yes you have convinced me, based on this thread, society has indeed been destroyed by social media. thank you.
people have been genociding their neighbours since before we were people. if it wasn't Facebook, they would have used something else. do you also support to banning e2e and having big brother reading everybody's communications? because if you don't, then anybody can organise a genocide without the authorities being able to stop them.
See https://faq.whatsapp.com/1053543185312573 for example.
Social media 'amplifies' trends, or even "makes" trend.
"The algorithm" is optimized for 'engagement'. The questions are a) can you detect via metadata something is happening and 'cool down' the amplification b) can you de-amplify anger? c) what is the responsibility of "the algorithm" makers ?
But social media did radically change society and not strictly for the better, imo.
With hindsight, someone saying “social media will destroy society” seems more justified than it did 20ish years ago.
I’m using hyperbole to elicit and emotional reaction which, hopefully, will give readers pause to reflect on what I wrote.
Not everything is strictly literal.
No, the emotional reaction it elicits is "oh here we go again." It's worse than useless, it completely undermines your point. Social media has a lot of negatives, and some positives. The negatives are mostly a result of chasing profit, and locked-in platforms as opposed to federation between equals. E.g. nobody's crying out that email is about to destroy the very fabric of reality.
You seem to be the only one really hung up on the made up quote I used to illustrate my point.
Maybe it undermines my point to you, but that’s okay.
Social media companies are often scapegoats when things go wrong in the world. From teen mental illness (Jon Haidt) to Trump getting elected (Cambridge Analytica). And now apparently genocide in Myanmar. It's all just nonsense.
I'm so glad that I no longer need to use OpenAI models; there are far better alternatives available, thanks to Meta and Anthropic. Private
Exactly. I think it's the classic "I'm so smart I can reason about the world without any evidence". This is a perennial trap that very smart people fall into. The antidote is to always look for evidence or "something tangible".
What I am more interested in is the constant pressure on "safety risks" without anything that feels tangible to me so far. I believe there is indeed risk using models that could be biased but I don't believe that is a new problem. I still don't think we are at risk from a runaway AGI that is going to destroy us.