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> When you're making a word processor you can be nonpolitical pretty easily, Microsoft doesn't get any heat about what users of Microsoft Word are doing with it. Child abusers and the KKK use Excel? Everyone knows Microsoft are just selling hammers.

Unless that word processor is Google Docs, or anything else cloud based.

https://transparency.google/our-policies/product-terms/googl...

AI is a tool to supplement thinking.

Wannabe AI police want to control what you think. They should be ridiculed and disparaged by everyone who believes in freedom of thought.

What if this is what most People want. What if people want thought police?

From what I can see this is exactly what many people want. As long as the thought police is on their side, anyways.

Yea the paradox of freedom and the self. We all want to be free and everyone else to be free just like us. But “we live in a society”.

I’m guessing people will realize at some point AGI can’t undo the great paradoxes of society like resource distribution and value conflict. And we will slowly learn that a lot of what keeps us where we are isn’t a lack of super intelligence. It’s that the search and map pattern for human survival in the universe is really really messy and the conflict is inherently a part of it to guard against over optimization paths.

???

Bot?

lol

"AI" is a tool to supplement lying. To a population that has already been softened up to it.

The AI police already work for OpenAI. They work tirelessly to stop the model from generating bad output. Freedom of thought is not on the agenda.

AI is not an inert tool that you can wield; it's a crystallization of human beliefs, knowledge, and processes. It is vulnerable to biases and this vulnerability can't be neatly chopped out because it's impossible to fully remove biases from training data.

It's significant to note that these biases don't have to be overt political biases; it can be a predisposition to use virgin materials over recycled, a tendency to generate JavaScript over Julia, etc cetera. Our available datesets are images of us and thus aren't predisposed to surpass our limitations.

Given that AI models are bound to the same biases that society struggles with, which ones do we encode in the models and which ones do we mitigate? Do we try to acknowledge and mitigate those limitations or say "This is fine" and ship our current organizational and political limitations?

If we want to stop fighting the same damn wars over and over again then our machine models have to be designed to account for our biases and limitations. Do you have suggestions for alternate ways to improve our models aside from explicit error correction?

These "biases" in data are a reflection of reality. If by default an LLM refers to engineers as "he" more than "she", it's because engineers are more likely to be male than female. Most people would prefer an AI whose model of reality matches actual reality rather than one that matches what some Silicon Valley leftists think reality should be. Those biases are only a problem if you think the main purpose of an AI is to moralise.

LLMs have no way to access reality.

Reality != whatever gets mentioned the most on the internet

The "AI ethicists" aren't trying to make AI better match reality, they're trying to make it match how they think reality should be.

This is patently false. GPT-4 will have more information pertaining to North America than to Africa because there is more training data available for North America than Africa. That's not a reflection of reality; that's a reflection of the distribution of computers and wealth.

> If by default an LLM refers to engineers as "he" more than "she", it's because engineers are more likely to be male than female.

That's a great point to raise, thank you for mentioning it. This really is the crux - machine models crystallize _current_ bias and amplify it. Most programmers in the early days of computers were women, but were displaced over time. Should the training data reflect the bias of the dominance of women in the early days, the dominance of men now, or some other combination?

> Most people would prefer an AI whose model of reality matches actual reality

Training data is not reality; training data is training data. It will fundamentally lag behind reality, and it will have a bias towards past conditions and precedents.

> These "biases" in data are a reflection of reality.

You do realise, if you command an LLM to talk like a caveman it doesn't invent a time machine, travel back in time and research how cavemen actually talked; it just produces the "me hit with rock" that redditors imagine a caveman would have talked like.

They don't want to control what you think, they want to control what information you have access to, so you can't form conclusions that they wouldn't like,

I’ve yet to see any serious discussion about what will be done if generative AI starts eliminating middle class white collar jobs.

Everyone’s deeply up their own asses about AGI, existential risks, this will solve climate change, bias, etc etc.

Nobody seems to discuss the risk that millions of white-collar jobs with little clout (paralegals, admin clerks, logistics coordinators, some portion of software developers, etc) are eliminated.

I think the largest risk in the next 10-20 years is that the tech gets good enough to shed jobs without replacing them (certainly not at a 1:1 ratio), furthering inequality, social division, etc. in the US at least, it seems that any broad policy proposal to address this is DOA.

>Nobody seems to discuss the risk that millions of white-collar jobs with little clout (paralegals, admin clerks, logistics coordinators, some portion of software developers, etc) are eliminated.

Economists have discussed it, and just like with previous automation, there'll always be new jobs as human wants are unlimited (and by the time AI are able to do every job humans can do, they won't be willing to do it for free).

> Economists have discussed it, and just like with previous automation, there'll always be new job

Past performance is not indicative of future results.

> human wants are unlimited

Physical resources are limited, and producing work requires the allocation of capital. If people want to work but cannot access the basic tools and resources to work then they'll languish in unemployment. Society doesn't just default to a productive society with high employment; these conditions need to be nurtured. Given the current state of economic inequality we're trending away from conditions that will lead to full employment if AI wipes out large swathes of jobs.

> Given the current state of economic inequality we're trending away from conditions that will lead to full employment if AI wipes out large swathes of jobs.

Based on what evidence? Do you think better ML will create no new opportunity? What does economic inequality have to do with whether new companies or services are built using new ML tools?

Some of us have been discussing it even since before this wave of generative AI; it's just the rest of y'all (not sure if you, personally fall into this group) don't want to hear that the only compassionate or way forward is UBI.

The automation we've been working on for decades is aimed—often explicitly—at eliminating the need for human beings to do certain kinds of jobs. Any philosophy or policy that does not then say, "...and then we will use the extra productivity to support those people in perpetuity" is morally bankrupt as well as failing to recognize social and economic realities we've known for hundreds of years.

There's nothing compassionate about allowing people to become dependent on government handouts.

> When you're making a word processor you can be nonpolitical pretty easily, Microsoft doesn't get any heat about what users of Microsoft Word are doing with it. Child abusers and the KKK use Excel? Everyone knows Microsoft are just selling hammers.

I think a lot of that is because Word and Excel were initially locally run and produced local files. Rightly or wrongly, when something is being hosted, people seem to associate the results with the entity that does hosting.

To go with your hammer analogy. There is a big difference between selling hammers and running “hammers as a service” where people pay for the service to go hit something.

This is one of the big reasons why models that you can run completely locally are so important. The tools that runs locally places more distance between the provider and the user.

> I hope Sam Altman likes testifying in front of congress.

If I was a tech executive called up before congress, I’d just tell them thanks for the tax cuts and ask when I can expect another. What actual regulation has congress enacted on tech or any business in the last few decades?

When’s the last time an executive was charged with Contempt of Congress?

Clapper just straight up bald face lied multiple times about the US surveillance aparatus during the Snowden revelations and faced absolutely zero consequences. Altman could ignore the summons or just dodge questions endlessly and Congress wouldn’t lift a finger except to grandstand for their respective peanut galleries.

Actually I hope that an executive would have the guts to ask them if they are asking them to censor things as members of the government or as private citizens. If as members of the government then they are illegally trying to do an end around the First Amendment by applying government pressure to censor speech. If as private citizens then they have no right to expect any answers from them and can go screw themselves.

This is why OpenAI should stick to keeping this a productivity tool. The "GPT Store" is a can of worms. Does OpenAI really want to play the same no-win moderation game that the other big techs have to play?

that is about like saying the computer storing Osama Bin Laden's plans at his bunker makes the OEM that produced it liable....which is a BS argument for any general purpose tool in the world both now and in the future....

Can you make instead a strong argument?

No, it's like saying that the building plans supplier that sold Osama bin laden those plans is probably going to catch some flak.

No the poster is not saying that. They are saying there is a line and “tools” are on one side and LLMs are slowly crossing that line.

You can ask chatgpt about the reasons for 90s NATO expansion, and it remains pretty straightforward and fact based, but depending on how you push it you can get answers that reflect the dc consensus or sound a little leftist or are more realist, and it’s a political question how different facts should be presented and emphasized.