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Comment by TaylorAlexander | Hacker News Reader

Congrats on the release.

On Twitter someone asked you if you would provide any risk assessment reflection, and you replied that the risk would be similar to the release of a new model of pen or pencil.

That reply, while cute, isn’t accurate. A new pencil does not mean new capabilities for humanity, while the whole point of your release is that it does afford new capabilities and therefore new risks.

The woman, a professor working on the societal impacts of AI, asked a straightforward question in apparent good faith [1]. Your reply did not seem to me to be in good faith.

Can you explain the apparent disconnect? I’m less concerned as to whether or not you would release an assessment and more concerned at the dismissive attitude, especially towards a female professor studying societal impacts of AI, a fellow researcher.

[1] https://x.com/dr_atoosa/status/1765874818283385071

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I believe my answer is accurate. I don't know on what basis you claim otherwise. This is my work, and I'm well placed to make the assessment. My response is based on reading a great many papers and doing many experiments over the last few years, and I am confident of it.

By way of background: I studied the philosophy of ethics at university, I co-authored a book chapter on AI/ML ethics, my wife and I quit our jobs and worked for free for years entirely focused on trying to help society adapt to and benefit from AI, I wrote the actual article we're commenting on, and the article is about LLM fine-tuning -- a field I to some extent created by developing the ULMFiT algorithm.

The person in question is, IIRC, at Governance AI, a group whose work I spent months studying in depth -- work which I believe is more likely to cause harm to society than to benefit it, as I explained here:

https://www.fast.ai/posts/2023-11-07-dislightenment.html

Above your scientific and technical contributions to humanity, thank you for being a source of light in front of these shadow philia, dark minds.

"I'm an expert and the other person isn't as knowledgeable as me" doesn't make your point very well. And mentioning that you worked for free for years seems irrelevant.

I think the power concentration problem, the successor species problem, and the harmful content problem are not particularly aligned in how they would be solved. Am I correct in guessing you believe the power concentration problem is important and the others are much less so?

> especially towards a female professor studying societal impacts of AI

> especially towards a professor studying societal impacts of AI

I can't help but feel like you're trying to load this question with some expectation that sex/gender should change how people react and respond. It shouldn't, at all, positively or negatively. Everyone is human (for now).

I completely get your take on this and don't disagree. IMO it reads as a flippant response to a potentially serious question, and I am going to assume this is unintentional, which does not mean it is unfair to call it out.

Stepping back, this is the kind of discourse that Twitter can sometimes reinforce: short responses that, lacking context, can be interpreted in polarizing ways. After a bit of reading on the participants (because both of them are working in interesting areas), my belief is that the "pencil" response is actually shorthand for a whole set of beliefs that provide a lot of context and nuance to the discussion, but if you don't know that, it sounds like saying "AI is as dangerous as a new brand of chewing gum".

In addition, without defining what risks we're talking about, it's really hard to know the scope the answer is addressing. E.g., societal risk due to AI in general? vs. say, the risks of affecting the quality an existing model with fine-tuning?

So, I am chalking this up to a misunderstanding due to the limitations of the platform as well as the short-hand used in the response. And I could be completely wrong :)

You are reading a lot into a tweet....

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