Reducing the cost of medical transcription to ~$0 is one thing. Reducing the cost of assassination to ~$0 is quite another.
It is reducing the cost of developing an assassination plan from ~$0 to ~$0. The cost of actually executing the plan itself is not affected.
Because, users should just input the moral inputs to these things. These are inanimate objects too.
Oh, while we're at it, we should also remove battery charge controllers. Just do the moral and civic thing and unplug when your device charges.
Assuming that you're not running this query over an API and relaying these answers to another control system or a gullible operator.
An aircraft control computer or reactor controller won't run my commands regardless of its actuators connected or not. Same for weapon systems.
Hall pass given to AI systems just because they're outputting text to a screen is staggering. Nothing prevents me to process this output automatically and actuate things.
Simplified operations, faster reaction time, eliminating human resistance for obeying killing orders. See "War Games" [0] for a hypothetical exploration of the concept.
> a chatbot.
Some claim it's self-aware. Some say it called for airstrikes. Some say it gave a hit list for them. It might be a glorified Markov-chain, and I don't use it, but there's a hoard of people who follows it like it's the second Jesus, and believe what it emits.
> I can't see it happening.
Because, it already happened.
Turkey is claimed to use completely autonomous drones in a war [1].
South Korea has autonomous sentry guns which defend DMZ [2].
[0]: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0086567/
[1]: https://www.popularmechanics.com/military/weapons/a36559508/...
Speaking of which, it's perfectly legal for a civilian to own a fighter plane such as an F-16 in US and many other countries. You just have to demilitarize it, meaning no weapon pods.
The reason this isn't an issue in practice is because such repurposing would require significant intelligence/electrical engineering skill/etc. The point is that intelligence (the "I" in "AI") will make such tasks far easier.
>Ten-year-old about to play chess for the first time, skeptical that he'll lose to Magnus Carlsen: "Can you explain how he'll defeat me, when we've both got the same pieces, and I move first? Will he use some trick for getting all his pawns to the back row to become Queens?"
The guy says he wanted to slow down the progress of AI and GPT suggested a detailed assassination plan with named targets and reasons for each of them. That's the problem.
When it comes to those "detailed plans", if you actually try something like that, what you get from it is a very broad outline that is pretty much a mish-mash of common sense stuff and cultural tropes (many of which aren't true IRL). Similarly, the "list of targets" that it makes is simply the most prominent people associated with that area in public perception, not necessarily people who are actually key. All of this can be achieved just as well with a few Google searches, and the resulting plan will likely be much better for it.
I've yet to see any example where GPT would come up with something along these lines that is not trivially found on the Internet anyway.
In any case, an F16 fighter jet is amoral in a certain sense, but it wouldn't be smart to make F16s available to the average Joe so he can conduct an airstrike whenever he wants.
It’s kind of a moot point since only one F16 exists in civilian hands but you can buy other jets with weapon hardpoints for a million. Under 3 million if you want to go supersonic too. The cheapest fighter jet is on the order of $250k. There’s zero background check.
(We do disagree about what constitutes "immoral", which makes this much harder).
As for cost and risk -- ask GPT-5 how to minimize it. As Nathan said in his thread, it's not about this generation, it's about the next generation of models.
A key question is whether the control problem gets more difficult as the model gets stronger. GPT-4 appears to be self-aware and passing the mirror test: https://nitter.net/AISafetyMemes/status/1729206394547581168#...
I really don't know how to interpret that link, but I think there is a lot we don't understand which is going on in those billions of parameters. Understanding it fully might be just as hard as understanding the human brain.
I'm concerned that at some point in the training process, we will stumble across a subset of parameters which are both self-aware and self-interested, too. There are a lot of self-interested people in the world. It wouldn't be surprising if the AI learns to do the sort of internal computation that a self-interested person's brain does -- perhaps just to make predictions about the actions of self-interested people, at first. From there it could be a small jump to computations which are able to manipulate the model's training process in order to achieve self-preservation. (Presumably, the data which the model is trained on includes explanations of "gradient descent" and related concepts.)
This might sound far-fetched by the standard of the current model generation. But we're talking about future generations of models here, which almost by definition will exhibit more powerful intelligence and manifest it in new unexpected ways. "The model will be much more powerful, but also unable to understand itself, self-interest, or gradient descent" doesn't quite compute.
And everything LLM can come up with will be exactly the same information you can find in any fiction detective book or TV series about crime. Yeah very very dumb criminal can certainly benefit from it, but he can as well go on 4chan and ask about assassination there. Or on some detective book discussion club or forum.
Most of us don't want to.
Most of those who do, don't know enough to actually do it.
Sometimes such people get into power, and they use new inventions like the then-new-pesticide Zyklon B to industrialise killing.
Last year an AI found 40k novel chemical agents, and because they're novel, the agencies that would normally stop bad actors from getting dangerous substances, would generally not notice the problem.
LLMs can read research papers and write code. A sufficiently capable LLM can recreate that chemical discovery AI.
The only reasons I'm even willing to list this chain, is that the researchers behind that chemical AI have spent most of the intervening time making those agencies aware of the situation, and I expect the agencies to be ready before a future LLM reaches the threshold for reproducing that work.
Again difficulty of production of poisons and chemicals it's not what prevent mass murdering around the globe.
Three letter agencies knowing who's buying a suspicious quantity from the list of known precursors, that stops quite a lot of the others.
AI in general reduces cost and complexity, that's kind of the point of having it. (For example, a chemistry degree is expensive in both time and money). Right now using an LLM[0] to decide what to get and how to use it is almost certainly more dangerous for the user than anyone else — but this is a moving goal, and the question there has to be "how to we delay this capability for as long as possible, and at the same time how do we prepare to defend against the capability when it does arrive?"
[0] I really hope that includes even GPT-4 before the red-teaming efforts to make it not give detailed instructions for how to cause harm
As Nathan states:
>And further, I argued that the Red Team project that I participated in did not suggest that they were on-track to achieve the level of control needed
>Without safety advances, I warned that the next generation of models might very well be too dangerous to release
Seems like each generation of models is getting more capable of thinking, beyond just regurgitating.
You don't have bunch of cold blood killers going around not just because police is so good and killers are dumb and need AI help. It's because you live in functioning state where society have enough resources so people happy enough to instead go and kill each other in Counter Strike or Fortnite.
I totally agree that AGI could be a dangerous tech, but it's will require autonomity where it can manipulate real world. So far GPT with API access is very far from that point.
The danger also doesn't need to be an AI generating code to hack the Gibson. It could also be things like "how do I manipulate someone to do something". Asking an AI for a marketing campaign isn't necessarily amoral. Asking it how to best harass someone into committing self-harm is.
I want AI to be amoral, or rather I should say I do not want the board of OpenAI, or even the employee of OpenAI choosing what "moral" is and what is "immoral" especially given that OpenAI may be superficially "diverse" in race, gender, etc, but they sure as hell are not politically diverse, and sure has hell do not share a moral philosophy that is aligned with the vast majority of the population of humanity given the vast majority of humanity is religious in someway and I would guess the majority of OpenAI is at best agnostic if not atheist
I do not want a AI Wikipedia.... aka politically biased to only 1 worldview and only useful for basic fact regurgitation like what is the speed of light
After giving us Facebook, insta, Twitter, and ego-search, influencing many people negatively, suddenly there are moral values being discussed amongst those that decide our collective tech futures.
AI will have even more influence on humankind and some are questioning the morality of money (hint: money had no morals).
1) be surprised by and unprepared for AGI and every step on the path to that goal, or
2) have the developers of every AI examine their work for its potential impact, both when used as intended and when misused, with regard to all the known ways even non-G AI can already go wrong: bugs, making stuff up, reward hacking, domain shift, etc.; or economically speaking how many people will be made unemployed by just a fully [G]eneral self-driving AI? What happens if this is deployed over one year? Do existing LLMs get used by SEO to systematically undermine the assumptions behind Page rank and thus web search?; and culturally: how much economic harm do artists really suffer from Diffusion models? Are harms caused by AI porn unavoidable thanks to human psychology, or artefacts of out milieu that will disappear as people become accustomed to it?
There's also a definition problem for AGI, with a lot of people using a standard I'd reserve for ASI. Also some people think an AGI would have to be conscious, I don't know why.
The best outcome is Fully Automated Luxury Communism, but assuming the best outcome is the median outcome is how actual Communism turned into gulags and secret police.