Their goals were never about openness at all though. From the beginning I’ve felt like they should’ve called themselves something like “SafeAI”, since their stated goal was basically to develop advanced AI first, then keep a lid on it until they could somehow ensure it was “safe” or would only be used by “good” people.
Sure, OpenAI might sound nicer, but it also drags this contradiction into the foreground whenever someone says their name.
---
(2015) OpenAI's original "Introducing OpenAI Post" : https://openai.com/blog/introducing-openai/ : "As a non-profit, our aim is to build value for everyone rather than shareholders. Researchers will be strongly encouraged to publish their work, whether as papers, blog posts, or code, and our patents (if any) will be shared with the world. We’ll freely collaborate with others across many institutions and expect to work with companies to research and deploy new technologies."
(2018) OpenAI's "Charter" : https://openai.com/charter/ :
"We are concerned about late-stage AGI development becoming a competitive race without time for adequate safety precautions. Therefore, if a value-aligned, safety-conscious project comes close to building AGI before we do, we commit to stop competing with and start assisting this project."
"We are committed to providing public goods that help society navigate the path to AGI. Today this includes publishing most of our AI research, but we expect that safety and security concerns will reduce our traditional publishing in the future, while increasing the importance of sharing safety, policy, and standards research."
---
Provides some interesting context to the fact that Elon left the company's board in February 2018 over "disagreements about the company's development."
Haha, and then they would proceed to get told to politely piss off.
removing "Vandyke" from the prompt lets it go through[1], but doesn't result in the style I want. Because there's no artist that I'm aware of that goes by "Henry Carter". The middle name is important.
It reminds me of the old 2D Runescape days where the language filter would convert "dictionary" to "**tionary".
-We are the world's most advanced AI company.
-Our filter verifiably acts as a simple blacklist.
-You aren't allowed to see the blacklist because it's really a "contextual" filter, so you'll have to guess.
-If you guess wrong too many times you'll be banned.
-Using our service more often increases the chance you'll hit the number of wrong guesses.
-No, you can't know what that number is.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scunthorpe_problem
[2] https://www.techdirt.com/2018/08/31/scunthorpe-problem-why-a...
(That second link describing how AI can't understand language well enough to solve the problem predates GPT-3 by 2 years)
I'm actually on a 3 day Facebook ban because I posted a very legit medical NIH link that looked quite innocent (despite dealing with sexual organs- it was an article about a case of urethral intercourse, which I was including to demonstrate how little people, or perhaps just Americans, seem to understand human anatomy) and unbeknownst to me, the preview card picked a closeup of some kind of vaginal surgery to feature, and that resulted in an instaban. Fffffuuuuuuuuu
It was basically the visual version of this
This religion definitely has a parentalist bent to it that rubs a lot of people the wrong way. I vaguely recall them floating on Twitter the theoretical idea of whether murdering people to prevent AI-takeover is acceptable, due to how bad AI-takeover is.
Not surprising limiting access, spying on what its users are using their tools for, etc, is acceptable to them.
This is much in the same vein as how for Lenin, the eventual triumph of the working class is so important as to justify a little bit of interim violence, dictatorship, and summary executions.
The AI safety crowd's main concern isn't that an "unaligned" superintelligence will have some other people's values. It's that an unaligned AI might kill everyone.
Of course, that isn't a concern with DALL-E. It's like if the safety crowd was worried about a ferocious tiger and OpenAI was like, "we got a kitten. Let's keep the public safe from it while we develop better kitten-handling gloves."
Then Midjourney and Stable Diffusion get their own kittens and let everyone play with them and OpenAI finally says, "Okay, everyone can safely play with our kitten now because we carefully developed great kitten-handling gloves" and proceeds to hand you plain dollar store gloves.
In my view, speculating on AGI ethics is at best pointless. It's like trying to write laws for the Internet during the invention of the telephone. If you imagine how it could operate, you'll be wrong, and the details change the whole problem.
We had a Greens candidate here running for election, and his main campaign promise was to shut down a 10+ billion dollar motorway underpass that was 99% completed at the time of the election.
His approach for "saving the environment" is to convert efficient motorway travel into inefficient stop-start traffic. And to throw away tens of billions of dollars of already spent resources.
Banning plastic packaging and waterproofing.
My bet is that just like before i was born, after I’m gone these things will only increase.
This is something that is pretty well addressed in their writings and is definitely a heavily considered topic. It gets quite heavily into philosophy because ideally you want to count future-you's preferences as well as current-you and you want to avoid, say, genocide just because most people dislike a certain group.
A good place to start is here: https://www.lesswrong.com/tag/coherent-extrapolated-volition but there is a LOT of discussion of this topic.
"In calculating CEV, an AI would predict what an idealized version of us would want, "if we knew more, thought faster, were more the people we wished we were, had grown up farther together". It would recursively iterate this prediction for humanity as a whole, and determine the desires which converge. This initial dynamic would be used to generate the AI's utility function."
This is too detached from the reality of AI development to be useful. I can't make a utility function like this, nor can you, nor can humanity. There's no reason to think a human-equivalent AI could either - the data for such a function doesn't exist, and can't exist because of how vague all the terms are. The current ML revolution is built on statistical pattern recognition. This definition would better fit a genie.
The fact that MIRI does no ML research and has no dialogue with the state of the craft only furthers my impression that it produces a lot of words with little substance.
Even if one still accepts the ultimate conclusions of the movement, using its AGI-focused rhetoric to justify restrictions on a simple image generator is silly.
That being said, the absolute majority of AI safety theory seems to fall into the same pothole where philosophy falls; modelling the world through language-logic rather than probabilities. The example you quoted fits this category - it's way too specific and thus unlikely to be useful in any way, even though its wording may deceive its author to believe it to be an inescapable outcome.
We are quite literally watching the world burn before our eyes, and we are too stupid and self-centered to do anything about it.
> it will kill a million people yearly
And it's even more outlandish that such a number and atrocity upon mankind is brushed away. That is one million humans.
I'm not trying to crucify any group here by the way. This is just how I see the issue.
I wish there were enough naturally curious people willing to dive into the data and come to their own conclusions. When you look at the history of Earth's climate, and the speed with which greenhouse gases natural release into the environment, and compare it to the speed with which they now release (due to burning of fossil fuels, reduction of trees/plants that trap it) it is really quite common sense that what we're doing is not a good idea to continue indefinitely.
Where? I probably believe you but it almost makes me worried about the well being of the stability ai founders (on a long term horizon)
I've modified my OP to clarify that.
That was the stated made up bullshit they spun because "we're keeping this walled to figure out how to squeeze the most profit out of it" doesn't go as well with their focus groups.