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Comment by RelativeDelta | Hacker News Reader

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I read it very differently. Recent AI developments have headed us into crazy town, towards a enevitable seeming break down of our social structures. A “Fake news 2.0” amongst other challenges.

It’s ludicrous to watch our tech leaders release new AI models without ethical consideration or any form of reponsibility.

I work within a university and socially impactful research goes through rigorous ethics committees before being approved. Where was this with Open AI’s release of ChatGPT for example? Sam Altman just tweets after release words to the effect of, oh regulators should probably be considering the ethics around this. What a farce! Where are the ethics of those releasing these half baked tools?

Having the White House step in and provide leadership and bring it’s power to bear is totally appropriate and responsible in this moment.

Edit: spelling

> I work within a university and socially impactful research goes through rigerous ethics committees before being approved

This is a gross exaggeration. Only a small portion of academic research requires IRB approval, and it's mostly limited to experiments on humans or animals.

If we were to start requiring IRB pre-approval for all research that might be "socially impactful", it would be the end of progress as we know it.

The first step would be to determine what counts as "socially impactful". You couldn't limit it to just AI. What about security and privacy? Why not all of CS? And then, why not Economics or History?

Source: worked for various universities doing research, first as graduate assistant, then scientist, then tenure-track professor, for 19 or 20 years.

I think there's a big difference between "socially impactful" and "enevitable seeming break down of our social structures"; that difference being the potential (direct) downside. It seems unlikely that most history or economic research would have the same downsides as AI.

Some things in CS are already regulated such as encryption via EAR: https://web.stanford.edu/group/export/encrypt_ear.html

Are you working in medical/health? There are very different ethics bars for different fields. Do you see no value in having ethics committees?

Is your argument that they took appropriate precautions before releasing their paid tools publically?

My point isn’t that these AI research houses should have the same ethics committee as a university, it’s that they should have ethics committee appropriate to the risks around the work they are doing.

The issue is that "ethics" are not universal.

By all means, if you believe (as it sounds like you do) that this will result in the affirmation and expansion of your worldview this is good news for you.

If you suspect, at any level, that maybe the current formulation of what is "ethical" and what is not may, at any point in the future, be called into question, than designing the fabric of super intelligent computational processes to presumptively adhere to your preconceptions is at best ill conceived at at worst malicious.

Enjoy the basilisk.

What kind of AI do you want employed in a government setting that doesn't follow the policies of the government?

Additionally it sounds like the capital is net new. Which means if the government took no action, the would be no capital. Is it inappropriate for the government to offer programs to encourage things it wants?

At the other end of the spectrum, the government punishes companies that do things the administration doesn't like. In the middle, the government does nothing. It would seem to me that the alternative here is something everybody doesn't want, no?

When it comes to the design of super intelligent models, it matters very much.

We're standing here designing neutron bombs and arguing about who gets to decide what the targeting criteria is.

That should matter to absolutely everyone.

Oh come on, LLMs are not neutron bombs, the hyperbole clouds the conversation...

Fair enough. I do hope it successfully sold the seriousness of the issue to our more emotionally driven readership.

It's not that serious, is my point.

It absolutely is.

LLMs are already being used as mediums of information access and will continue to grow in that role.

Information filters/access has a huge role in informing public sentiment, that makes LLMs a massive propaganda vector to be employed for whichever purpose it's controller's wish.

Their effectiveness IN that role is also likely to be beyond anything we've ever seen before.

Literally everything an LLM can do can also be done by a human (and substantially worse), but for some reason you inherently trust them?

Hammers are better at hitting nails into wood than a human hand, but we're not all losing our minds at the fact that you can also smash a human skull in with a hammer. The laws apply to the human not the object, and that remains true here.

Don't know if this [0] is where RelativeDelta pulled the rhetoric from but he's not alone.

[0] https://youtu.be/bhYw-VlkXTU

Almost, but not quite. I'm quite sure the government itself will run IA without any compromise against whatever problems it thinks it has (either foreign or domestic). So this would regulate privately run AI but not government run black/undisclosed AI.

You underestimate the degree to which the two are intermixed.

This would, for a completely random example, restrict what Palantir's AIs could do.

That would then effect results delivered to clients of Palantir, including other nationstates.

But that's not an issue, right? No government would ever contract out it's ultra-high end scale-of-observation intelligence tasks... Right?

In this scenario they would quite likely grant Palantir-GOV an exception to do whatever was necessary to give them a leg up no matter how indiscriminate or discriminating it were, but also stipulate that this is not to be shared with other nation states, except those the GOV okays.

Like when the GOV procures munitions it's not saying, "please be sure they don't kill the enemy's innocent livestock".

You are probably correct in that the government MUST recognize that non handicapped AI models are more useful, but to believe so requires looking past what the current representatives are actually saying and doing.

If a person repeatedly says they are going to close a door, walks over to the door, grabs the handle, and begins to pull it closed... Is it really outside the realm of possibility that they may, in fact, close the door?

Sure. But they’re showing you the front door being closed and aren’t letting you in that there is a back door they’re not telling you about which they intend to keep open. Politicians may shake ands and kiss babies, but they're total "killers" and not the nice people looking after you or their constituents as people think.

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