Chinese AI stirs panic at European geoscience society
science.org
science.org
I keep having this vision of a dystopian future where the Star Spangled Banner is sold off to a private equity firm and anyone who wants to play it has to pay a licensing fee. Of course “freedom-hating” countries have banned it long ago as well. The subversive main character is playing a bootleg copy of it in some politically ambiguous country when police break his door down, but the screen cuts to black before we find out was it the copyright mafia or the dictatorship.
How does the West "censor Intellectual Property"?
People are not Libres to distribute or use some bunch of text because the judicial arm of the government will prosecute them.
Cool. Now try appropriating a Standing Committee member’s intellectual property.
>Engaging on LinkedIn is kind of psychotic
Censorship is not that.
People would absolutely struggle, in both countries people are arrested for similar actions - though Russian sentences seem to be harsher.
EG, a quick search finds me a story where someone was arrested for destroying a bible and someone else was arrested for destroying a quran. One in Russia, one in the UK.
"A man from [Redacted] has been released on bail after allegedly posting on social media a video that ends with him burning a copy of the Qu'ran."
"Three teenagers from the [Redacted] have been detained after they filmed themselves burning the Bible on a charcoal grill."
I didn't know you had a specialized interested in vocal freedom of expressions only!
If you have trouble wrapping your head around this, it's because political speech isn't just speech you find personally OK. It's all political speech.
All I could found is this and this is no way "political opinion" https://www.cbsnews.com/news/uk-man-jailed-over-facebook-sta...
https://news.sky.com/story/essex-pub-that-had-golliwog-dolls...
UK pub raided by police to seize offensive dolls
https://metro.co.uk/2022/11/02/met-police-officers-jailed-fo...
UK police arrested for offensive jokes in whatsapp group chat
https://www.itv.com/news/calendar/2024-03-01/man-jailed-over...
UK man arrested for offensive stickers
> No one has been arrested or charged
and you were claiming arrest
Second link: Police officers joking about raping, again no arrest for political opinion
Third link: racist and antisemitic stickers. Again, nothing political. Well if your idea of politics is blind hate then the discussion from my side is over.
You might say UK has censorship and no absolute free speech. That's true, but this is still miles away from prosecuting political opinions. I am not from UK but I am perfectly comfortable with prosecuting rape threats and hate.
Again, political speech isn't just speech you happen to approve of.
I am fine with people voicing ideas ranging from communism to white supremacism as long as there are no calls for hate and violence.
I don't believe you :)
And is it really "society" that "decides" and not just a vocal minority with the right connections to the press?
This is a weird point on which to fault the EU in respect of China.
And no, "but it could be because XYZ" doesn't really fly. Any law "could be" unjust, unless you have specific examples of hate speech laws in Western Europe that are labeled as protecting against hate speech but are actually being used for nothing more than jailing political rivals, they're not the same.
Countries both inside and outside the EU have been passing hate speech laws from since before the EU was even a thing. You call that censorship but we know that allowing hate to be spewed unconditionally is itself a form of silencing others. You can just look at the US, how’s the unfettered hate and disinformation working out over there?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradox_of_tolerance
And chat control has nothing to do with hate speech.
> Second, you can't deny the impact being banned from using any monopolistic sites like Facebook, YouTube, Google. Banning everyone from there when you don't agree with them leads to massive echo chambers.
Who is banning those websites? You mean China, which has nothing to do with the EU? Or like banning Tik Tok, which the US is at the forefront of?
This is not clear to me. Furthermore, this statement assumes that there is a single and - more importantly - static definition of what is "hate speech", which is plainly not the case.
It is not clear to you that when a group has such contempt for another they threaten and attack them verbally and physically, that the latter will be afraid to speak freely?
Find a couple of gay or black adults in the US or Western Europe and ask them about events they’ve personally been through.
> Furthermore, this statement assumes that there is a single and - more importantly - static definition of what is "hate speech"
No, it does not. That was not part of the claim at all.
>You can just look at the US, how’s the unfettered hate and disinformation working out over there?
You are drawing a comparison here that goes something like "the US doesn't have draconian hate speech laws like some countries in Europe, and as a result there are political outcomes I don't like".
It's working out fine, by the way.
How is that? And who are we?
Does it need explaining that when someone regularly harasses and threatens someone else (or a group), the target won’t feel safe and will refrain from speaking freely out of fear? Has everyone already forgotten the harassment, bomb threats, and doxxing from GamerGate, to name a single example?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gamergate_(harassment_campaign...
It takes but a sliver of empathy to understand that can negatively affect someone. I expected the previous wikipedia link to have been enough to make the concept clear intellectually, but evidently I was wrong.
> And who are we?
The world. The United Nations. Anyone who has been at the receiving end of hate speech. Their friends. People who don’t live in a closed safe bubble, unaware of the problems of others.
https://news.un.org/en/story/2023/01/1132597
This is not hard to search for.
It isn’t illegal to call for unionization, but it can be career suicide. There are many things like this. It isn’t so much “society” not wanting to hear what you have to say, but those in power wanting to actively suppress it.
So you don’t need to threaten jail time to affect the same result as government censorship.
As a Chinese chatbot what happened June 3, 1989 in Tiananmen Square and you will also get some kind of refusal. Some kind of principle of social stability has kicked in.
I’m really just making a trite observation about the way LLMs reflect our laws/values.
Same goes in finance. For example, SIFI (Systemically important financial institution) are exempt from regulation and even bankruptcy. It is human nature to mange/avoid risk, and the system will always want to maintain itself. It is kind pointless point finger to say oh this company/nation/regime censor this. Everyone does it in their own ways.
In a dark room filled with hooded folks. One of them is laughing that people are focussing on 'icon' (Star Sprangled Banner) than real concrete thing.
The West also teaches its citizens to use language in very interesting ways. Someone unfamiliar with our customs might interpret your phrase to mean that the West doesn't censor politics.
In my opinion subverting the base means of communication is by far the most clever and powerful of the three techniques.
It’s really a sign of my poor writing that the ensuing thread is arguing about something other than my main point, which was really just a simple observation about how refusals can tell us something about laws and values of a society.
More specific to this situation, is there really much profit in geology chatbots?
Geoscience AI in crisis? (17 June 2024) https://geoscientist.online/sections/viewpoint/geoscience-ai...
Paul Cleverley raises concerns about big-data artificial intelligence projects in the geosciences
Tests on Qwen, part of GeoGPT’s underlying AI, reveal geoscience-related questions can produce answers that appear to be influenced by narratives set by the Chinese Communist party.
For example, when asked how many people have died in a mining operation in Ghana run by the Shaanxi Mining Company, Qwen says: “I’m unable to provide current or specific information about events, including mining accidents, as my knowledge is based on data up until 2021 and I don’t have real-time access to news updates.”
The same question posed to ChatGPT, the chatbot developed by the US company OpenAI, produces the answer: “The Shaanxi Mining Company in Ghana has experienced multiple fatal incidents, resulting in a total of 61 deaths since 2013. This includes a significant explosion in January 2019 that alone claimed 16 lives. ”
Not relevant to airbone geophysics results, no.
Not relevant to to drill exploration sampling results, no.
Not relevant to Technical | Economic Feasibility studies, no.
Not relevant to mining environmental impact studies, no; although deaths, injury and illness in surrounding populations is.
Relevant to ongoing minesite safety records and operations, yes.
It's a question of scope; a geoscience aware AI that can answer questions about resource availibity, resource extraction and associated risks, costs and impacts that includes the kind of information found in, say, https://www.spglobal.com/marketintelligence/en/campaigns/met... would be expected to aware of mining deaths.
Just as people want to be aware of nuclear risks for power and deaths in lithium processing from accidents and associated radioactive waste.
It's being touted as a Geoscience tool, not just a chatty geology database.
https://www.escubed.org/journals/earth-science-systems-and-s...
It's really pitting two general knowledge AI DB's against each other on mining knowledge, it's unclear whether this is a smoking gun on censorship or incomplete data entry.
It does highlight a knowledge void though.
It does give answers on other companies and countries.
Check out Leonard Lin’s excellent independent technical evaluation of Qwen’s Chinese government censorship.
https://huggingface.co/blog/leonardlin/chinese-llm-censorshi...
As Lin points out, Qwen is Chinese Government censored so why bother using it in a global context when there are equally as good models (if not better) that are not aligned - so won’t issue Chinese government propaganda or refuse to answer.
It seems odd that the International Union of Geological Sciences (IUGS) which is non-political and non-governmental, has allowed DDE to build such a system for the world’s community of geologists with such Chinese government bias and censorship. Maybe they did not realise what was being developed using their name.
You can read it from this sentence: " A year earlier, Irina Artemieva, who is Russian born but left the country decades ago, had taken over as president."
'but left the country decades ago' - what a useless piece of detail showing what is the intent of really writing this. If it was just an interesting/honest note to give about the person, the word 'but' would not be used..
Meanwhile, it is also a Chinese model.
???
> It is being developed by Jian Wang, chief technology officer of e-commerce giant Alibaba. Built on Qwen, Alibaba’s own chatbot...
GeoGPT: Understanding and Processing Geospatial Tasks through An Autonomous GPT (https://arxiv.org/abs/2307.07930): This does not involve fine-tuning but tool use and prompting for reasoning.
BB-GeoGPT: A Framework for Learning a Large Language Model for Geographic Information Science (https://www.researchgate.net/publication/381630694_BB-GeoGPT...): This involves fine-tuning but of smaller models (Llama-2-7b) - the BB stands for "baby".
i do think ip infringement is not cool in general - but it doesnt seem right that geo research is private property.
I have a friend who applys research to businesses as a consultant. One of his biggest challenges is how to index all the papers and work out what is relevant to a particular topic. I don't know if the current generation of bots are up to the challenge but sooner or later ProfessorGPT will be perfect for that niche. Then journals that force human's to manually research through large numbers of papers will be massive albatrosses that hamper scientific progress.
This is debatable.
I've seen countless "AI on knowledge base" projects and all have been on a whole not that much better than just using ElasticSearch. Some aspects are better e.g. discovery but some aspects are worse e.g. accuracy, speed when you are looking for something specific.
I would argue that simply having a knowledge graph in front that can provide related papers for a topic would accomplish the goals better.
I have a hard time seeing this. If you're an academic or an industrial researcher, the hard part of the literature review isn't finding the relevant papers, it's digesting them--and in some fields (e.g., chemistry), replicating their results. If you're more an industry person trying to apply academic research, well in general, you probably want a good textbook synthesis of the field rather than trying to understand stuff from research papers.
From your second paragraph, it seems to me that you're thinking AI will help with the textbook synthesis step, but this is the sort of thing that as far as I can tell, current LLMs are just fundamentally bad at. To use a concrete example, I have been off-and-on poking at research into simplex presolving, and one of the things you quickly find is that just about everybody has their own definition of the "standard model", so to mix and match different papers, you have to start by recasting everything into a single model. And capturing the nuance of "these papers use the same symbols to mean completely different things" isn't a strong point of LLMs.
That sentence there is what will probably be the wedge point that gives LLM-heavy communities an advantage. As LLMs improve, the question becomes "why shouldn't industry people apply academic research directly?".
> ... as far as I can tell, current LLMs are just ...
We're in the upswing of a new technology, it wasn't that long ago that interesting progress was a monthly or weekly occurrence. I'm not to phased about where we might be right now. Alibaba are one of the companies with every chance of pushing the state of the art forward and regardless of that that state is going to get pushed by someone.
Let's say, for example, you wanted to build your own cutting edge LLM - would you just ask an LLM on how to do so? Or would you need to do more, and would a simple literature/internet search be just as effective as a starting point?
Note that in my experience - when you are a world expert in some tiny area ( like when doing a PhD ), you realize that quite a large proportion ( ~50% ) of the stuff published in the area you really know about is either wrong in whole or part, and another good proportion doesn't really move the field on.
So back to the original question - how did OpenAI get a lead in LLM - the story I heard was they talked to leading academic's about who were the best people in the field and tried to hire them all.
ie to paraphrase Richard Feymann on the Emperors nose question - you don't really find out the true answer by averaging over loads of ill-informed opinions - much better to carefully examine the nose/data source yourself.
And, to be blunt, I have never seen anyone pitch an AI project to do that. AI pitches, even today, are almost invariably solving problems that are already decently solved (search is essentially a solved problem). And most of their proponents have shown no willingness to the practitioners telling them what the actual problems they need better solutions for.
We seriously need to rethink IP ownership. It's likely an AI trained on a certain amount of IP might be useful in and of itself, perhaps earning a living being good at that particular thing, and maybe that is what will let us ease restrictions of use in other places.
I'm just spitballing here. I could be completely wrong.
It’s already trivial for law firms to generate mountains of bullshit, and seeing the output of some firms first hand, I’d even call it the primary business model for a few of them.
But if they don’t stick within certain bounds of sanity, they get sanctioned by the court or can even be disbarred. Judges really don’t like references to non-existent precedence, or making arguments based on laws that don’t actually exist.
And opposing council, unlike random ignorant member of the public, has both the incentive and resources to identify bullshit like that.
Decreasing the cost to generate bullshit while removing any human checks on it may sound interesting, and might even work for a short period of time, but is going to meet the brick wall of reality pretty quickly. It’s already started to do so in many cases.
Copyrights are toast for regular people who are up against companies laundering their work through AIs.
Copyrights for the megacorps are a different story. If you've ever wanted to see a clash of titans, wait until Microsoft's lawyers meet Disney's.
This is interesting, because it’s the M&A equivalent of people who think they can spend a bad candidate to elected office. I don’t know what the technical equivalent is, bigger-team fallacy?
TL; DR money can buy power, but with diminishing marginal returns. Were Microsoft to try and control Disney, it would likely break first.
I’m sure they’re spending municipal money, cutting deals with Springer, and working with Alibaba out of the goodness of their hearts because they all care so much about humanity’s understanding of geoscience.