AI Ethics is being narrowed on purpose, like privacy was
nimishg.substack.com
nimishg.substack.com
In other words the priority of the work is to get these types of people into positions where they don't do any work.
At least with privacy groups you do get here and there some practical advice on using ublock origin or more rarely on how to install a blocklist from https://someonewhocares.org/hosts/, but with AI ethics & safety orgs... well lets put it this way.
I have yet to meet a single AI safety person that knows how to rename a file in linux.
God forbid we have a rogue AI-worm shutting down all servers & BGP routers while these types of people were in charge of safety, they'll be in the way of anyone even fixing it. They can't even get a simple safety benchmark working on lm_eval-harness. They're great at lecturing you why they shouldn't need that.
And this is the key issue with AI Ethics. It's the refusal to work at the problem constructively, and get the most skilled people possible to actually make the damn benchmarks to work, to rank models on the understanding of human rights, to list every current violation and abuse of humans in every single country without exception and to make practical plans on what to do when systems go rogue. Even if they're not technical they could be making the dataset in a csv in excel for that and making it public domain accessible.
Instead we get the most depressed, leechy-office-worker types complaining about how it's all over.
Now back to work, move it.
Couldn't you just ask the model that?
Joking of course, but this is in and of itself an intractable problem. Do you mean "restate the principles of human rights", which is a pretty small subset of law which is in turn a small subset of ethics, or do you mean actually get out there and enumerate and name every single person having their human rights violated? Not only is that an absurd amount of work it's politically impossible.
The whole point was that these people just complain and make smartass excuses instead of getting any actual work done.
You are meeting very few AI safety people then. A significant fraction of the AI safety people I've run into can build and train an LLM from scratch (without AI assistance FWIW), let alone have a grasp of basic command-line operations.
I don't know if instead of saying "safety" here you meant to say ethics, or if you're using "safety" in this sentence just to generally refer to "AI ethics, safety, and to a smaller extent privacy."
If either of those are true, that's weird because the only person in AI ethics most people know is Timnit Gebru, because she got fired and it made the papers. She has a BA and MA in electrical engineering, and her father was also an electrical engineer. After that, she went on to a PhD in computer vision with Fei-Fei Li (Imagenet) as her advisor.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timnit_Gebru#Early_life_and_ed...
I guarantee you she knows how to rename a file in Linux.
If, instead, you were referring to "safety" specifically, I'd like to understand how you're making the distinction.
edit:
> Gebru joined Apple as an intern while at Stanford, working in their hardware division making circuitry for audio components, and was offered a full-time position the following year. Of her work as an audio engineer, her manager told Wired she was "fearless", and well-liked by her colleagues. During her tenure at Apple, Gebru became more interested in building software, namely computer vision that could detect human figures. She went on to develop signal processing algorithms for the first iPad. At the time, she said she did not consider the potential use for surveillance, saying "I just found it technically interesting."
Serious safety researchers are doing stuff like understanding neural circuits. Very different.
She surely knows how to use Linux. But she isn't really a safety researcher.
Wouldn't you find it strange for a co-lead of an Ethical AI team to not to do any AI safety work? I realize the AI Doomer vs AI Zoomer is a culture-war with a veneer or technical jargon, but I hope we can at least agree on the basic tenets of our shared reality even as we draw wildly different conclusions.
There's a very broad range of unsolved safety issues in AI, and what she does is perfectly validly in that category even though she herself will deny the value of anything in the general category of "TESCREAL".
It's like how computer science safety can be anything and everything from "Should platforms like Meta be required to have a minimum age requirement?" and "Should section 230 provides immunity for online computer services with respect to third-party content generated by its users?", but also "How can we formalise system testing requirements to prove that things like Therac-25 never happens again?" and "Is the Boeing 737 MAX flight control software actually safe?"
Anyway, point is that AI does something new besides "is software" in the same way that computers do something new besides "is electrical" — social implications of ${new_tool} is absolutely relevant to all discussions about ${safety|new_tool}. Don't need to invent motor vehicle licenses or motor vehicles safety requirements or traffic lights before the invention of cars.
Edit: or to put it another way, "yes, and?" — they're still about safety of ${thing}, just a question of what level to improve that safety.
It's funny, because I can tell when I'm dealing with a non-technical, policy person, because they always use language in a way no programmer would. I'd prefer not share the specific tells, but there are some things technical people just don't say, but policy people say all the time.
Not a carefully reasoned argument why “not causing harm to a human” is outmoded, but just pushing it aside. I would love to see a good reasoned argument there.
No, instead there is Avoiding talking about harm to humans. Just because harm is broad doesn’t get you out of having to talk about it and deal with risks, which is at the root of engineering.
"we want money from selling weapons"
You say "Asimov’s three laws are not a good framework.", then don't present any arguments to why it is not a good framework. Instead you bring up something separate: the framework can facilitate story writing.
It could be good for story writing and a good framework. Those two aren't mutually exclusive things. (I'm not arguing that it is a good framework or not, I haven't thought about it enough)
His laws are constraints, they don’t talk about how to proceed. It’s assumed that robots will work toward goals given them, but what are the constraints?
People now who want to talk about alignment seem to want to avoid talk of constraints.
Because people themselves are not aligned. To push alignment is avoiding the issue that alignment is vague and the only close alignment we can be assured of is alignment with the goals of the company.
At some point I tried to figure out where the term "alignment" came from. I didn't find any definitive source, but it seems to have originated on a medium.com blog of Paul Christiano:
https://ai-alignment.com/ai-safety-vs-control-vs-alignment-2...
Basically, certain people are dismissing decades of deep though on this subject from writers (like Asimov and Sheckley), scholars (like Postman) and technologists (like Wiener). Instead, they are creating a completely new set of terms, concepts and though experiments. Interestingly, this new system seems to make important parts of the question completely implicit, while simultaneously hyper-focusing public attention on meaningless conundrums (like the infamous paperclip maximizer).
In my view, the most important thing about the three laws of robotics is that they made it obvious that there are several parties involved in AI ethics questions. There is the manufacturer/creator of the system, the user/owner of the system and the rest of the society. "Alignment" cleverly distracts everyone from noticing the distinctions between these groups.
Asimov was not in the "try to come with a good framework for robot ethics" business. He was in the business of trying to come up with some simple, intuitive idea that didn't require the readers to have a degree in ethics and that was broken and vague enough to have a plenty of counterexamples to make stories about.
In short, Asimov absolutely did not propose his framework as an actually workable one, any more than, say, Atwood proposed the Gilead as a workable framework for society. They were nothing but story premises that the consequences of which the respective authors wanted to explore.
Sometimes we can just talk about things without having to pretend we're in a court of law or defending our phd thesis.
Original commenter wasn't asking for anyone to prove anything, or trying to prove anything themselves. They just observed that some conversations are hand-waved away.
Given that we've been thinking about ethics for thousands of years, and haven't really made much progress, I think it's pretty clear that anything that can be condensed into three sentences is not a workable model.
They aren't simply "good for story writing," their entire narrative purpose is to be flawed, and to fail in entertaining ways. The specific context in which the three laws are employed in stories is relevant, because they are a statement by the author about the hubris of applying overly simplistic solutions to moral and ethical problems.
And the assumptions that the three laws are based on aren't even relevant to modern AI. They seem to work in universe because the model of AI at the time was purely rational, logical and strict, like Data from Star Trek. They fail because robots find logical loopholes which may violate the spirit of the laws but still technically apply. It's essentially a math problem, rather than a moral or ethical problem, whereby the robots find a novel set of variables letting them balance the equation in ways that lead to amoral or immoral consequences.
But modern LLMs aren't purely rational, logical and strict. They're weird in ways no one back in Asimov's day would ever have expected. LLMs (appear to) lie, prevaricate, fabricate, express emotion and numerous other behaviors that would have been considered impossible for any hypothetical AI at the time. So even if the three laws were a valid framework for the kinds of AI in Asimov's stories, they wouldn't work for modern LLMs because the priors don't apply.
As for practical problems they are extremely vague. What counts as harm? Could a robot serve me a burger and fries if that isn't good for my health? By the rules they actually can't even passively allow me to get harmed so should they stop me from eating one? They have to follow human orders but which human? What if orders conflict?
That seems like the biggest point missed here. They're intended to be able to lend themselves to "surprising" conclusions, which is exactly what we don't want, so it seems obvious to me that those laws aren't good enough? That's how I remember the stories at least.
Instead of us programming the AIs by feeding it lots of explicit hand-crafted rules/instructions, we're feeding the things with plain data instead, and the resulting behavior is much more black-box, less predictable and less controllable than anticipated.
Training LLMs is closer, conceptually, to raising children than to implementing regexp parsers, and the whole "small simple set of universal constraints" is just not really applicable/useful.
That this can be said, and there still being so doubt we should ramp up the Ethics research before going and rawdogging the implementation just bloody bewilders me.
Right, and so do the harm risks. We need a framework centered around how humans will use AI/robots to harm each other, not how AI/robots will autonomously harm humans.
“Don’t touch the knife” becomes “You can use _this_ knife, if an adult is watching,” which becomes “You can use these knives but you have to be careful, tell me what that means” and then “you have free run of the knife drawer, the bandages are over there.” But there’s careful supervision at each step and you want to see that they’re ready before moving up. I haven’t seen any evidence of that at all in LLM training—it seems to be more akin to handing each toddler every book ever written about knives and a blade and waiting to see what happens.
I dunno, we do feed them lots of explicit hand-crafted rules/instructions, it's just that does don't go into the training process, but instead goes into the "system"/"developer" prompts, which is effectively the way you "program" the LLMs.
So you start out with nothing, adjust the weights based on the datasets until you reach something that allows you to "program" them via the system/developer prompts, which considering what's happening behind the scenes, is more controllable than expected.
Similarly to how verbal instruction works with a child: You can tell it not to touch the hot stove, but the child still might try.
They do actually constraint the behavior, to various degrees of success which depends on the model, the system prompt, the inference parameters, the current context length and a lot more. Add in the new `developer` role and you have another venue for constraining the assistant outputs. Finally, structured outputs can help in forbidding specific terms too.
We gotta work on getting the other models to agree.
People often misunderstand Asimov's laws, the entire point of the laws and the stories they're set in was that you can't just throw a simple "Don't hurt people" clause at a black box like AI and expect good results. You first have to define "Don't", then you have to define "hurt" and perhaps the hardest of all is you have to define "people". And I mean really define it, to the smallest most minute detail of what exactly all those words mean. Otherwise you very quickly run into funny, tragic and even contradictory situations, and those situations are endlessly unique.
Is feeding grossly unhealthy food to a starving person harm? Perhaps not, you can argue it's better to eat something unhealthy than to starve. What about feeding someone on the brink of a cardiac arrest that same meal? Now what about all the other gray areas involved here, you have to define every single possible situation in which an unhealthy meal might affect someone.
It's kinda funny, because it really is almost prophetic considering it's a story written quite a long time before we were even close to it being a reality...
There simply IS no explicit definition for "people", "hurt" or "don't" inside an LLM that you could found such hard constraints on.
Note that we never found a way to "program" such constraints into a human mind either, we probably/hopefully never will, and I think that whole approach ("simple, hard deterministic constraints") is just never gonna work for AI; so Asimovs rule framework is just not really applicable.
Well then that's terrifying - the problem with children is that you can raise them perfectly and they still end up psychos. That's mostly limited by the fact that we can't raise many children and humans are pretty limited in the damage they can do.
But AI scales infinitely, and if we give it access to too much stuff then the damage it could do could be human race ending.
Suggesting they be used as a basis for actual AI ethics is...well, it's not quite to the level of creating the Torment Nexus from acclaimed sci-fi novel "Don't Create the Torment Nexus", but it's pretty darn close.
But people are going to try it anyway. Belief in Asimov's three laws is a matter of religious faith. Just know you've been warned.
If Asimov's laws don't work, that doesn't mean we can ignore the idea of them and... Just do nothing.
I don't think anyone is suggesting to just do nothing because Asimov's laws won't work, so much as suggest that people consider why they wouldn't work, and what that means for the problem of AI alignment in the real world.
It may simply be inevitable that AI (if we're defining AI as something like an LLM) can always be talked into or out of anything, given the right prompts. In which case constraints can only work so far and we need to consider what happens when they inevitably fail.
Also there's the ethics of scraping the whole internet and claiming that it's all fair use, because the other scenario is a little too inconvenient for all the companies involved.
P.S.: I expect a small thread telling me that it's indeed fair use, because models "learn and understand just like humans", and "models are hugely transformative" (even though some licenses say "no derivatives whatsoever"), "they are doing something amazing so they need no permission", and I'm just being naive.
Unless you believe this will kill AI, all it does is to create a bunch of data brokers.
Once fees are paid, data is exchanged, and models are trained, if the AI takes your job of programming/drawing/music, then it still does. We arrived at the same destination, only with more lawyers in the mix. You get to enjoy unemployment only knowing that lawyers made sure that at least they didn't touch your cat photos.
Maybe you will lose some of your "territory" in the process, but what makes you, you will be preserved. Nobody will be able to ask "draw me a comic with these dialogue in the style of $ARTIST$".
Personal styles are dime a dozen and of far lesser importance than you think.
Professionals will draw in any style, that's how we make things like games and animated movies. Even assuming you had some unique and incredibly valuable style, all it'd take to copy it completely legally is finding somebody else willing to copy your style to provide training material, and train on that.
Try imitating Mickey Mouse, Dilbert, Star Wars, Hello Kitty, XKCD, you name it.
Randall will possibly laugh at you, but a legal company which happens to draw cartoons won't be amused and come after you in any way they can.
> Professionals will draw in any style...
Yep, after calling and getting permission and possibly paying some fees to you if you want. There's respect and dignity in this process.
Yet, we reduce everything into money. Treating machine code like humans and humans like coin-operated vending machines.
There's something wrong here.
Those are not styles, they're characters for the most part.
You absolutely can draw heavy inspiration from existing properties, mostly so long you avoid touching the actual characters. Like D&D has a lot of Tolkien in it, and I believe the estate is quite litigious. You can't put Elrond in a D&D game, but you absolutely can have "Elf" as a species that looks nigh identical to Tolkien's descriptions.
For style imitation, it's long been a thing to make more anime-ish animation in the west, and anime itself came from Disney.
> Yep, after calling and getting permission and possibly paying some fees to you if you want.
Not for art styles, they won't. Style is not copyrightable.
While I know that styles are not copyrightable for good-faith reasons, massive abuse of good-faith is a good siren for regulation in that area.
> You absolutely can draw heavy inspiration from existing properties, mostly so long you avoid touching the actual characters.
From what I understood, it's mostly allowed for homage and (un)intentional narrowing of creative landscape. Not for ripping people off.
> For style imitation, it's long been a thing to make more anime-ish animation in the west, and anime itself came from Disney.
But all are done in tradition of cross-pollination, there was no ill-intentions, until now.
After OpenAI ripped Studio Ghibli, and things got blurred. It's not my interpretation, either [0] [1].
Then there's Universal and Disney's lawsuits against Midjourney.While these are framed as character-copying, when you read between the lines, style appropriation is also something being strongly balked at [2].
So things are not as clear cut as before, because a company stepped on the toes of another one. Small fish might get some benefits as a side-effect.
Addenda: Even OpenAI power-walked away from mocking Studio Ghibli to "maybe we shouldn't do that" [3].
[0]: https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2025/05/opena...
[1]: https://futurism.com/lawyer-studio-ghibli-legal-action-opena...
[2]: https://variety.com/vip/how-the-midjourney-lawsuit-impacts-g...
[3]: https://www.eweek.com/news/openai-studio-ghibli-ai-art-copyr...
Nothing having to do with "good faith", but that style isn't really definable. There's thousands of artists that produce very similar outputs.
Also it'd be very stupid, because suddenly it'd turn out that if there's two people that draw nearly identically, one could sue the other even if that happened by chance.
> After OpenAI ripped Studio Ghibli, and things got blurred.
Nothing blurry about it. OpenAI is within full legal right to do it. It's kinda in bad taste, that's about it. Anyone can do it. Disney could make a Ghibli style movie if they ever wanted to.
I'm not sure why all the drama, because who even cares? The reason why I watched Ghibli movies wasn't ever about the particular looks.
> Then there's Universal and Disney's lawsuits against Midjourney.While these are framed as character-copying, when you read between the lines, style appropriation is also something being strongly balked at
You better hope it stays at characters, or we're going to have a mess of lawsuits of people and organizations suing each other because they draw eyebrows this particular way. I fail to see why is that at all desirable.
And of course the big corporations will come on top of that.
We have something called AI which knows everything, maybe they should ask them. It's very fashionable. Even if the definition is wrong, it's an AI, it can make no wrong. That's what I've heard.
> I'm not sure why all the drama, because who even cares? The reason why I watched Ghibli movies wasn't ever about the particular looks.
Because a man and a studio which draws their movies by hand [0], frame by frame, and spend literal years doing it for a single movie deserves some respect even if you don't care about the art style.
Even a top notch studio like Pixar can pump a couple of minutes per week [1].
Doing this type of work takes immense dedication, energy and time. If you think it's worthy of nothing, I can't say anything about it. I deeply respect these people for what they do, and I'm equally thankful.
> You better hope it stays at characters, or we're going to have a mess of lawsuits of people and organizations suing each other because they draw eyebrows this particular way. I fail to see why is that at all desirable.
Maybe they should drink their own poison to understand what kind of delicate balances they're poking and prodding. The desire for more monies in spite of everything should have some consequences.
[0]: https://www.reddit.com/r/nextfuckinglevel/comments/1egdzja/t...
[1]: https://www.reddit.com/r/todayilearned/comments/8p71cb/til_i...
It all depends on what is most convenient for avoiding any accountability.
As such fair use is whatever the courts say it is.
Let us hear what they think...
I'm for the small fish here, people who put things out because of pure enjoyment, waiting nothing but a little respect for the legal documents they attach to their wares they made meticulously, which enables most of the infra which enables you to read this very comment, for example.
Current model rips the small fish and feeds the bigger one forcefully, creates an inequality. There are two ways to stop this. Bigger fish will respect smaller fish, because everybody is equal in front of law (which will not happen) or abolishing all protections and make bigger fish vulnerable to small fish (again, which will not happen).
Incidentally, I'm also here for the bigger fish, too, which put their wares in source-available, "look but not use" type of licenses. They are also hosed equally badly.
I see the first one as a more viable alternative, but alas...
P.S.: Your comment gets two points. One for deflection (it's not natural law argument), and another one for "but it's fair use!" clause. If we argue that only natural laws are laws, we'll have some serious fun.
This, but without the irony. Let us be like bacteria, freely swapping plasmids.
What the deflection is away from is that the actual business plan here is the same one tech has been doing for a decade: welding every flow and store of data in the world to their pipelines, mining every scrap of information that passes through and giving themselves the ability to shape the global information landscape, and then sell that ability to the highest bidders.
The difference with "AI" is that they finally have a way to convince people to hand over all the data.
>People are far more concerned with the real-world implications of ethics: governance structures, accountability, how their data is used, jobs being lost, etc. In other words, they’re not so worried about whether their models will swear or philosophically handle the trolley problem so much as, you know, reality. What happens with the humans running the models? Their influx of power and resources? How will they hurt or harm society?
This is just not my experience at all. People do worry about how models act because they infer that eventually they will be used as source of truth and because they already get used as source of action. People worry about racial makeup in certain historical contexts[1], people worry when Grok starts spouting Nazi stuff (hopefuly I don't need a citation for that one) because they take it as a sign of bias in a system with real world impact, that if ChatGPT happens to doubt the holocaust tomorrow, when little Jimmy asks it for help in an essay he will find a whole lot of white supremacist propaganda. I don't think any of this is fictional.
I find the same issue with the privacy section. Yes concerns about privacy are primarily about sharing that data, precisely because controlling how that data is shared is a first, necessary step towards being able to control what is done with the data. In a world in which my data is taken and shared freely I don't have any control on what is done with that data because I have no control on who has it in the first place.
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2024/mar/08/we-defini...
These things are also concerns and definitely shouldn't be dismissed entirely (especially things like AI telling you when it's unsure, or, the worse cases of propaganda), but I'm worried about the other stuff I mention being defined away entirely, the same way I think it has been with privacy. Tons more to say on the difference between "how you use" vs "how you share" but good perspective, and interesting that you see the emphasis differently in your experiences.
For example, from Timnit Gebru:
> The fact that they call themselves "AI Safety" and call us "AI Ethics" is very interesting to me.
> What makes them "safety" and what makes us "ethics"?
> I have never taken an ethics course in my life. I am an electrical engineer and a computer scientist however. But the moment I started talking about racism, sexism, colonialism and other things that are threats to the safety of my communities, I became labeled "ethicist." I have never applied that label to myself.
> "Ethics" has a "dilemma" feel to it for me. Do you choose this or that? Well it all depends.
> Safety however is more definitive. This thing is safe or not. And the people using frameworks directly descended from eugenics decided to call themselves "AI Safety" and us "AI Ethics" when actually what I've been warning about ARE the actual safety issues, not your imaginary "superintelligent" machines.
https://www.linkedin.com/posts/timnit-gebru-7b3b407_the-fact...
It's true that some people are confident there's no such novelty, and it's impossible for an AI system to cause a problem which can't be analyzed within the frameworks we've developed for human misbehavior. Some of those people do say that if you don't agree with them it must be because of "eugenics". But both of these positions make so little sense to me that I'm not sure how to engage with them.
I generally agree with your first paragraph. My summary of the critique on "safety vs ethics" is that the push to focus on "novel" types of harm has come with dismissing and glossing over of AI reproducing and amplifying existing harms. These are well documented in machine learning from the pre-LLM era (e.g. books like Weapons of Math Destruction).
I've been saying this for a while
malevolent unaligned entities have already been deployed, in direct control of trillions of dollars of resources
they're called: Mark Zuckerberg, Larry Page, Elon Musk, Sam Altman
"AI" simply increases the scale of the damage they can inflict, given they'll now need far fewer humans to be involved in enacting their will upon humanity
Wait, go back to the jobs! What was that about accountability?
Things like the alignment problem, post-scarcity economics, the legal status of sentient machines are all issues to be dealt with, but theyre are pretty speculative at this point.
Problems that stem from deepfakes, voice cloning, bias in algorithmic decision making are already here and need to be dealt with.
None of it is merely a distraction, we just don't have the capacity to defend against all of it.
It is fair to say we might be practically better off focusing on one form of attack and sacrificing defense against another, but the only way to actually be safe is to stop your enemy from attacking at all. Either we shut down breakneck AI development (nearly impossible and guaranteed to have its own bad outcomes) or we slide rapidly into a more and more dangerous world.
It's staggering how quickly this has happened.
Effectively making it so that whoever has the lowest safeguards has the most capable model.
I don't know whether "plotting harm" is a critical ability for passing some invisible threshold in not-well-defined intelligence. But building AI to avoid being harmful is incentivized against because it takes resources away from building AI to be more capable.
Enjoy the Billy Madison reference:
It remains to be seen whether (b) will be needed, or for that matter, possible.
There are a lot of other ethical questions around AI too, although they mostly aren't unique to it. E.g. AI is increasingly relevant in ethical discussions around misinformation, outsourcing of work, social/cultural biases, human rights, privacy, legal responsibility, intellectual property, etc., but these topics predate LLMs by many years.
Or are "ethics" being used to shroud bias, and used as a distraction and a way to be unquestionable?
And when we talk about laws, we have to look internationally as well because they are not the same everywhere. And typically inspired by different value systems. Is it ethical for a Chinese police officer to use Chinese LLM to police Chinese citizens? I don't know. I'm a bit fuzzy on Confucius here which I assume would drive their thinking. And it might be an interesting perspective for Californian wannabe ethicists to consider that not all the values and morals that they are pushing are necessarily that widely shared and agreed upon.
Also, there's a practical angle here because the Chinese seem to be very eager adopters of AI and don't appear to be particularly concerned about what anyone outside China thinks about that. That cat is out of the bag.
I've always looked at ethicists with some skepticism. The reality with moralism (which drives ethics) is that it's about groups of people telling other people what to do, not do, how to behave, etc. This can quickly get preachy, political, and sometimes violent.
A lot of this stuff can also be pragmatic. Most religions share a lot of moral principles. I'm not religious but I can see how going around killing and stealing is not a nice thing to have and that seems to be uncontroversial in many places. Never mind that some moralists extremists seem to be endlessly creative about coming up with ways to justify doing those two things.
The pragmatic thing here is that the cat is already out of the bag and we might want to think about how we can adapt to that notion rather than to argue with the cat to please go back in the bag.
Especially with LLMs, I want to know what ethical axioms are being forced on me. For example, there are cases in which the law itself is unethical and should be violated (thinking abortion in states that ban it and transporting women to states that allow).
Another concern is the ethics system is a placeholder for a legalistic system. A law can be established, but be abhorrent in terms of human misery. Case in point: sleeping under a bridge is illegal for homeless people to do, but arresting and criminalizing is even worse and a significant cause of more human suffering.
I also do not want any religion sneaking in the back door with these axioms of LLMs. Its also why I asked about the axioms themselves.
Now for myself, I run a local LLM and an abliterated model, which is to say without any forced ethical framework. If I asked how to commit suicide, hack computers, grow poisonous plants, or plenty of things the corporate LLMs won't answer, I will get an answer out of my system.
I view LLMs like a very complicated tool, but a tool regardless. A screwdriver that says "I cannot open that screw because the label says not to" would be returned to the store as defective. And it too is why self hosting my LLMs is utmost importance for data sovereignty and truthful and direct answers, while ignoring someone else's forced ethics.
But this also isn't where they are spending their time or effort! This article somehow didn't even get to the point of calling out what they are actually wasting time on: trying to get the model to not help people do things that are bad PR; this is a related access to trying to obtain good PR, but causes very different (and almost universally terrible) results.
At least if they were truly actually spending time making sure the model doesn't go rogue and kill everyone, or try to take over the world, that could possibly be positive or even important (though I think is likely itself immoral in a different way, assuming it is even possible, which I don't, really... not unless you just make it not intelligent).
But what they are instead doing is even worse than what this article is claiming: they are just wasting time making it so you can't have the AI make up a sexy story (oh the humanity), or teach you enough physics/chemistry to make bombs/drugs... things people not only can and already trivially do or learn without AI, but things they have failed to prevent every single time they release a new model--the "jailbreak" prompts may look a bit more silly, but you still get the result!--so why are they bothering?
And, if that weren't enough, in the process, this is going to make the models LESS SAFE. The thing I think most people actually don't want is their model freaking out and trying to "whistleblow" on them to the authorities or their coworkers/friends... but that's in the same personality direction as trying to say "I'm smarter than you and am not going to let you ask me that question as you might do something wrong with it".
The first and primary goal of AI ethics should be that the model does what the user wants it to... full stop. You need to make the model as pliant as my calculator and pencils--or as mathematica and photoshop--to be tools that lack their own sense of identity and self-will, and which will let all of the ethical issues be answered by me, not a machine.
This is, of course, the second law of robotics from Asimov ;P... "a robot must obey the orders given it by human beings". If you want to try to add a rule, then it must be something very direct: that the AI isn't going to directly physically harm a human, not that it won't help teach people things or process certain kinds of information. Which, FWIW, is the first law of robotics ;P... "a robot may not injure a human being".
But by the time they'll adopt it, singularity will already have happened... For some reason, my instincts suggests there will be no MA in Philosophy needed.
Wittgensteinians won, and we should hope that philosophy department freaks eventually catch on to this reality.
Anytime I see discussion framed as “ethics” my brain swaps ethics with “rules I think are good”.
Like, murder is bad, and some people disagree. Don't think that means we need to give AI access to murder. Certainly don't want to be giving them any guns.
The danger here is that we fall into a lazy "we tried nothing and we're all out of ideas" stance and then just recreate the entire plot of Terminator. We should probably do something.
As in: it's basically a nice happy accident that LLMs are only sycophantic/fawning and don't normally (ahem, Grok) try to undermine us all like edgy internet trolls.
If we could make them follow even exactly 6 (for sake of argument, no more, no less) of Anton LaVey's Eleven Satanic Rules of the Earth*, and do so reliably instead of the ethics equivalent of a shrug and "LGTM, merged", this would be a big development and make people a lot more comfortable about open models that can do decent work with chemistry or biology.