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> 2. There is no fire alarm for AGI[1]. Is this thing the key to really dangerous AI? Will the next thing be? No one knows. It's better to be conservative.

This is certainly a point worth discussing, but it's odd for OpenAI to suddenly stand on principle about this specific result.

OpenAI was founded on the idea that public access to AI tools and research would improve and democratize them. Their website and founders make statements like "Are we really willing to let our society be infiltrated by autonomous software and hardware agents whose details of operation are known only to a select few? Of course not." and "...empower as many people as possible to have AI. If everyone has AI powers, then there's not any one person or a small set of individuals who can have AI superpower." Meanwhile, their view on AGI risk seems to be that more access will improve scrutiny and oversight. Since day one, they've taken flak from people like Nick Bostrom and Scott Alexander (https://futureoflife.org/2015/12/17/should-ai-be-open) who argued that their stance amounted to publicly sharing untested, hazardous tools.

And now they balked because... they built an essay generator that's not quite good enough to compete with cheap troll farms that governments can already afford? I don't think they're necessarily wrong to not share this, and I know Sam Altman said a while back that they might not release all their source code. But I don't think this should be looked at in isolation.

If the people going to bat for democratized access to AI suddenly decided that the public can't be trusted with access to AI tools, that's worth talking about.

I think they did change their mind on this after considering the AGI risk more and getting a better understanding of it.

I'm not sure where I read a discussion about this, but I do think it was something they've talked about before.

Is OpenAI anywhere near AGI such that it would warrant such concerns?

It's hard to know what near is and what the timeline is.

This article digs into some historical evidence of this: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/BEtzRE2M5m9YEAQpX/there-s-no...

From the post:

"Two: History shows that for the general public, and even for scientists not in a key inner circle, and even for scientists in that key circle, it is very often the case that key technological developments still seem decades away, five years before they show up.

In 1901, two years before helping build the first heavier-than-air flyer, Wilbur Wright told his brother that powered flight was fifty years away.

In 1939, three years before he personally oversaw the first critical chain reaction in a pile of uranium bricks, Enrico Fermi voiced 90% confidence that it was impossible to use uranium to sustain a fission chain reaction. I believe Fermi also said a year after that, aka two years before the denouement, that if net power from fission was even possible (as he then granted some greater plausibility) then it would be fifty years off; but for this I neglected to keep the citation.

And of course if you're not the Wright Brothers or Enrico Fermi, you will be even more surprised. Most of the world learned that atomic weapons were now a thing when they woke up to the headlines about Hiroshima. There were esteemed intellectuals saying four years after the Wright Flyer that heavier-than-air flight was impossible, because knowledge propagated more slowly back then."

Maybe it's hundreds of years out, but maybe it's not. Since it's hard to know probably better to try and work on the safety aspects now.

Of course, I'm sure you can find plenty of examples where things that are decades away, are described as decades away.

Sure - this isn’t to imply that that can’t happen or even that that isn’t the more common case.

It’s only to say that just because something may seem far away it may not be - even if you’re the person that will invent it only two years later (and therefore are probably in the best position to know).

Given the high stakes of unsafe AGI and this uncertainty it’s probably worth some people working on goal alignment.

This is somewhat unrelated to the recent release though.

You don’t need AGI to have a problem though.

And even before we Have AGI, it may be that we have hybrid human and AI which would come earlier and be equivalent to AGI.

There's an interesting Slate Star Codex interpretation of this question:

https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/02/19/gpt-2-as-step-toward-g...

(It's not AGI, but it's more of a step than it seems at first.)

I, for one, welcome our new OpenAI overlords.

NLP researcher here.

Leaving aside the discussion on whether the model is really dangerous or not, the paper gives enough details that the model can be reasonably reproduced (and even if it couldn't, it's an incremental result built on other research that is public, the novelty is mainly in scale). Any big company, government or lab with enough compute can recreate it (and maybe improve it) in six months, maybe less.

Not releasing the model doesn't prevent misuse. It just restricts the set of entities that can afford it: only those with enough resources can build it and misuse. Those with less resources cannot, because training it is very expensive.

I personally don't feel very reassured by knowing that only the powerful have access to this. The actors I fear the most are powerful and could train it, anyway. I'd rather it be public so the community can scrutinize it, find out if it's really worth worrying about, and find ways to detect/fight it.

Thanks for laying out your reasoning here :)

However, I don’t think you have fully adressed the worrying point. The concern here is that good quality faking will become less expensive, thus, more faking will happen. Making it even just marginally more expensive means that there will be less faking overall (no matter the resources of actors) which is seen as good.

Thus, your argument towards more equitable access seems to have to explain, how it provides more value than the harm that may be caused by this dynamic, which would in my opinion require some argument for the potential good that could be done by this technology vs. the harm it could cause - which you haven‘t really done. Just arguing for the „balancing of scales“ doesn‘t go far enough.

For example, you can draw an analogy to weapons regulation. Just trying to balance the scales by giving people easy access to weapons has shown to not work too well in practice. The rich still have more money to buy better, bigger weapons or defenses while the poor shoot themselves almost regularly.

So, to make a convincing case for open sourcing this stuff you should provide a good argument for why we are not talking about weapons here but positive, productive goods with low potential for abuse.

Welcome to the post-information world.

We're going to have to get used to this new reality. Just as those living in the era before recorded pictures or words didn't have reliable records to lean on, we'll grow to distrust all of the things that are posted. This will happen naturally as the volume of fakes increases; people will start to develop a doubtfulness around recorded media.

I don't think we need to worry about propaganda and fake news if the Facebooks and Instagrams become flooded with fake posts from the people we know. It'll become expected and mundane. This seems good for the development of a skeptical public.

When we do need to rely on audiovisual records, such as for court cases, we'll have experts that can investigate and verify.

Perhaps as a byproduct we'll end up with more value placed on human-curated and generated information. Just because there's a lot of noise in the world doesn't mean there aren't objective truths. If FB and Insta get shunted off as sources of news, maybe the good ones will be all that remains trusted. Dare to dream.

The idea of Reputation Economy, yea? Combined with the need for good technology that "guarantees" that https://www.washingtonpost.com really is the washington post.

Reminds me of that theory of the mind stuff around trying to figure out if we're really brains in jars or not - we need to find ways to measure our trust of the source, and the means by which the source is transmitted to us.

I wanted to suggest a crypto enclave built into recording devices that could sign recordings with private keys controlled by the manufacturer but even that wouldn't be too hard to circumvent by piping fake images/audio into such an enclave so long as you have hardware access.

Then maybe we've found the limit of miniaturisation - this could mean that we need devices that could be routinely inspected by the users, hardware-wise. Maybe not every device owned by a person would be like that - this would be something you keep in your safe.

>if the Facebooks and Instagrams become flooded with fake posts from the people we know. It'll become expected and mundane. This seems good for the development of a skeptical public.

This is not how people or trust networks work.

What you are looking at is a sliver of human behavior- the silver lining on the cloud.

Most people instead will be confused, believe incorrect things, get frustrated when it’s wrong and then begin to trust their gut instincts in an information poor environment.

It would be very natural for people in this scenario to switch to old school centralized trust and truth organizations like clans, states and nations.

People need to understand the world and we regularly pay money to find out truth.

Investigation takes time and when the rate at which we can make believable content outstrips the rate at which investigators can be hired to debunk it, then even courts can’t keep up - which happens today.

FurhTher by leaving it to just the courts we also are saying that the casual consumer will not have access to a safe internet.

I argued yesterday that Chinese style great firewalls seem to be the likely model for our future, as opposed to the future democracies hoped to create.

This view of the future is based in fear. We don't need to be "protected" by big brother. Let's see how it plays out.

Calling it based on fear or based on optimism is a luxury of the disconnected.

I am telling you how it is currently playing out on the ground in chat rooms, forums, facebook, Twitter and elsewhere, because I worked part time on moderating these places and saw first hand what was going on.

I’ve spoken to people who do policy for FAANGs and with activists on the ground. This is what is happening, and has happened in third world countries and developing nations without the man power to investigate most crimes.

This is a genuine concern - as long as engagement driven social media exists.

For 1. you only need a few bored grads at MIT/Stanford/another top school (where did the DeepFake come from?) that think it's a cool idea and no resistance from OpenAI et al. would matter (it should be fairly simple to reverse engineer small model they released and augment it with more data/layers/loss functions). Soon the "next cool chat app" will have a shitpost generator as its main feature, possibly trained on humor/sarcasm to make people ROTFLing, like Snapchat used to blow people away with (whatever) face filters, making this technique extremely popular.

Nonproliferation strategies do not work with software.

By not open sourcing the model, OpenAI merely slows the proliferation of weaponized language models. Furthermore it insures a temporary period of power imbalance whereby only the most capable can wield these.

The result is the rest of the internet is not equally forced to come up with solutions to increase the resiliency and safety of their online communities.

The internet will need a “captcha for weaponized language models”. We need a level playing field so Google needs a solution as much as any phpBB.

> A way to automate the production of median-literacy shitposts on the internet tuned to whatever you want to propagandize

We already have this: it's called mechanical turk (or the 50 Cent army, if you prefer) and it's happening all over the place. I'm not sure computer-generated posts would make much difference.

it makes it virtually cost less to do...

that is a big deal

50 cents is the difference between real mail spam and email spam.

This is nowhere close to AGI

And nowhere close to "Open," either. They need to change their name if they're going to take this stance.

This model will probably be reproduced quite quickly with in 2-3 months if there is an entity that has the resource and enough incentive to do it. They did release the paper and that should be enough to get to even close

> A way to automate the production of median-literacy shitposts on the internet tuned to whatever you want to propagandize would be a devastating blow.

It would be Shiri's Scissor[1].

[1]: https://slatestarcodex.com/2018/10/30/sort-by-controversial/

Awesome, that belongs on /r/nosleep.

Um, it is fiction, right?

Wow. Thanks. Nice read. As a concept it’s intetesting.

A statement controversial, such that it activates only after discussing it with someone else.

Would Shiri's scissor also be a scissor?

Wow. This looks it would belong on r/nosleep with how close it comes to crossing the uncanny valley.

I agree with you, and would suggest that language based AI research needs to be slowed down.

It allows computation owners to scan and therefore create content faster than humans would naturally. That would allow them to pollute and crowd the conversation streams we have used since we learnt to talk, in a way and scale, no predator or propagandist has before.

Who knows, maybe we’d go back to valuing face-to-face communication.

Thanks for your comments!

On 1) photo manipulation. If "dangerous" means that random, relatively harmless fake facts easily spread, I'm inclined to agree. I'm sure I've been tricked by a whole host of random facts which are probably actually BS based on random stuff I've read online.

On the other hand, if "dangerous" means that a malicious agent can systematically manipulate the public via propaganda a la 20th century Stalin, I think this is basically impossible. Given widespread knowledge of photoshop, changing someone's mind about something significant with a doctored photo seems difficult (it is hard enough to change someone's mind with the truth!). Doctored photographs aren't completely harmless in that they can reinforce existing held beliefs (confirmation bias) and random fake facts aren't totally harmless either, I just think that the danger here is far below what has been implied in other places. In a nutshell, the effects are indeed wide spread, but perhaps not so insidious.

On 2) there being no fire alarm, I'm actually very thankful to OpenAI for raising this discussion. While I disagree with their decision not to open source, this discussion was certainly worth having.

> On 1) photo manipulation. If "dangerous" means that random, relatively harmless fake facts easily spread, I'm inclined to agree.

No, I think it is even more insidious what they were referring to. I think they meant that Photoshop has enabled and continues to enable unrealistic physical standards of beauty and BMI (mostly for women) that are transmitted in advertisements and news articles.

In other words, Photoshop has enabled an alternative visual reality that is not realistic.

But still much less dangerous than stuff like nuclear fallout or orwellian propaganda? This isn't to say that unrealistic beauty standards aren't a problem, just one that isn't worth trying to stop the march of technology for. Also, I think advertisements are more to blame here than photoshop. Do you think the ancient Greeks and Romans look like Michelangelo's David or any of their other statues? They weren't bombarded by ads though.

Can't disinformation campaigns lead to instability and increase the risk of nuclear weapon use?

I think the damage that disinformation can cause to democracy is real and we've already seen some of its effects without the ability to automate these things.

Any kind of art that's good enough could also create an alternative visual reality.

> "dangerous" means that a malicious agent can systematically manipulate the public via propaganda a la 20th century Stalin

You don't need total control to succeed.

The same way that early VOIP calls didn't need perfect sound to be better than normal dial up.

All you need is an economic, efficiency, quality or quantity advantage to create a new weapon/tool.

India is facing a spate of lynchings over child kidnappings - driven by whatsapp forwards that combine videos from brutal mexican gang killings of children, pakistani safety warnings among others. I've seen them, they are being disseminated to people who have never had to harden themselves to the internet or behavior on the net. (There are many people who don't have knowledge of photoshop, and getting the knowledge to them is Hard. Even getting the knowledge to them can be used to weaken Facts instead of propaganda.)

As a result villagers have lynched strangers, mental handicapped people, widows and anyone they suspect of kidnapping or potentially harming children.

And I have NO idea, why or who is cutting up and making these videos to share on whatsapp. Evil manipulators, people who are doing it for laughs, well intentioned but misguided good samaritans? As a result of such forwards, whatsapp rolled out a limit on how many times a message can be forwarded - a feature they have pushed worldwide recently.

We don't need perfection to do damage, we need efficiency. We already have other systems which can make up the difference in results.

> unrealistic standards propagate at full speed nonetheless

"Propagate"? If you mean e.g. unrealistic physical standards, it seems that (at least in the US) in recent years, there has been more and more fat people, and more and more acceptance of "different" bodies (trans, fat, alternative styles - in fashion and society), so if anything, I'd say the reverse...