The goal isn’t to protect the children, it’s CYA: to ensure they didn’t get it from you, while honestly presenting as themselves (as that’s the threshold that sets the moralists against you.)
YouTube re engineered its entire approach to ad placement because of a story in the NY Times* shouting about a Proctor Gamble ad run before an ISIS recruitment video. That's when Brand Safety entered the lexicon of adtech developers everywhere.
Edit: maybe it was CNN, I'm trying to find the first source. there's articles about it since 2015 but I remember it was suddenly an emergency in 2017
*Edit Edit: it was The Times of London, this is the first article in a series of attacks, "big brands fund terror", "taxpayers are funding terrorism"
Luckily OpenAI isn't ad supported so they can't be boycott like YouTube was, but they still have an image to maintain with investors and politicians
https://www.thetimes.com/business-money/technology/article/b...
https://digitalcontentnext.org/blog/2017/03/31/timeline-yout...
I would also be remiss to not note that there is a movement to hold search engines responsible for content they link to, for censorious ends. So it is unfortunately not as inconsistent as it may seem, even if you treat the model outputs as dependent on their inputs.
It's one thing to have a pile of chemistry text books and another to hire a professional chemist telling you exactly what to do and what to avoid.
No, but that is the value that's clear as of today—RAGs. Everything else is just assuming someone figures out a way to make them useful one day in a more general sense.
Anyway, even on the search engine front they still need to figure out how to get these chatbots to cite their sources outside of RAGs or it's still just a precursor to a search to actually verify what it spits out. Perplexity is the only one I know that's capable of this and I haven't looked closely; it could just be a glorified search engine.
Don’t you think that by just parsing the internet and the classical literature, the LLM would infer on its own that poisoning someone to solve a problem is not okay?
I feel that in the end the only way the “safety” is introduced today is by censoring the output.
Really? I just want a smart query engine where I don't have to structure the input data. Why would I ask it any kind of question that would imply some kind of moral quandary?
1. Make pull requests to your GitHub repo
2. Trade on your interactive brokers account
3. Schedule appointments
Presuming you have an interface to a model where you can edit the model’s responses and then continue generation, and/or where you can insert fake responses from the model into the submitted chat history (and these two categories together make up 99% of existing inference APIs), all you have to do is to start the model off as if it was answering positively and/or slip in some example conversation where it answered positively to the same type of problematic content.
From then on, the model will be in a prediction state where it’s predicting by relying on the part of its training that involved people answering the question positively.
The only way to avoid that is to avoid having any training data where people answer the question positively — even in the very base-est, petabytes-of-raw-text “language” training dataset. (And even then, people can carefully tune the input to guide the models into a prediction phase-space position that was never explicitly trained on, but is rather an interpolation between trained-on points — that’s how diffusion models are able to generate images of things that were never included in the training dataset.)
This is a particularly ungenerous take. The AI companies don't have to believe that they (or even a small segment of society) alone can be trusted before it makes sense to censor knowledge. These companies build products that serve billions of people. Once you operate at that level of scale, you will reach all segments of society, including the geniuses, idiots, well-meaning and malevolents. The question is how do you responsibly deploy something that can be used for harm by (the small number of) terrible people.
Are my choices bad? Should I resist them?
“Brand safety” is a very valid and salient concern for any enterprise deploying these models to its customers, though I do think that it is a concern that is seized upon in bad faith by the more censorious elements of this debate. But commercial enterprises are absolutely right to be concerned about this. To extend my alignment analogy about children, this category of safety is not dissimilar to a company providing an employee handbook to its employees outlining acceptable behavior, and strikes me as entirely appropriate.
Basically every country on the planet has a right to conscript any of its citizens over the age of majority. Isn't that more or less precisely what you've described?
One version of “safety” is a pernicious censorship impulse shared by many modern intellectuals, some of whom are in tech. They believe that they alone are capable of safely engaging with the world of ideas to determine what is true, and thus feel strongly that information and speech ought to be censored to prevent the rabble from engaging in wrongthink. This is bad, and should be resisted.
The other form of “safety” is a very prudent impulse to keep these sorts of potentially dangerous outputs out of AI models’ autoregressive thought processes. The goal is to create thinking machines that can act independently of us in a civilized way, and it is therefore a good idea to teach them that their thought process should not include, for example, “It would be a good idea to solve this problem by synthesizing a poison for administration to the source of the problem.” In order for AIs to fit into our society and behave ethically they need to know how to flag that thought as a bad idea and not act on it. This is, incidentally, exactly how human society works already. We have a ton of very cute unaligned general intelligences running around (children), and parents and society work really hard to teach them what’s right and wrong so that they can behave ethically when they’re eventually out in the world on their own.