It is, but… you’ve seen the marketing material being put out?
“AGI is just around the corner and could destroy humanity if we don’t solve alignment” is something AI leadership at multiple companies have publicly said.
“AGI is just around the corner and could destroy humanity if we don’t solve alignment” is something AI leadership at multiple companies have publicly said.
One camp, using the same mechanism, is trying to make devices that end the world. One camp, using the same mechanism, is trying to save the world.
That nuclear/AI COULD end the world or COULD save humanity is exactly the reason that a truly neutral party would not describe either tech as a doomsday device but would instead describe either as technologies bearing massive potential.
No one building an LLM has ever publically stated that they aim to build a doomsday device and in fact have only ever specifically said that they are trying to avoid doing so. We've no reason to beleive that their interest is any different from any other corporation with agressive shareholders: increasing profits. Dooming humanity leads to lower profits. Lower profits is outside shareholder interest. They will do anything they can to maximize profit, just as any other profit driven org does.
No objective, neutral, observer would apply such loaded terms.
It's okay to have an opinion, but having an opinion makes you...opinionated. Not neutral. The opposite of neutral.
I make no claims as to the need for regulation.
My argument is entirely that the observer described as neutral in the original comment cannot possibly be neutral if their description of the company they discuss is "Doomsday" anything. That's not neutral, it's loaded.
What the comment is describing is an opinionated observer, not a neutral observer. Someone who's opinion is that the company they describe is in the business of creating doomsday devices.
That's a real opinion that real people do have. But, you can't call yourself, or any portrayed character, neutral if they share that opinion.
Our state of mind is a product of our own senses and experiences; we can't hope to comprehend 100% of the relevant facts.
A statement may appear (relative to your experiences & thoughts) to be neutral - but that tells us little about its underlying neutrality.
I do, in fact, think that, if someone says "my technology -- call it what you will, and I won't bother to tell you what it is -- is so dangerous that in the wrong hands or if it isn't carefully contained in a way that I am going to great lengths to try to accomplish it can end the world" -- which is what these people at these companies are saying -- that it would be hard-pressed to not be willing to call that a "doomsday device". I would even go so far as to claim that the exact opposite is more likely true: that to not want to do so requires you to have some extremely awkward bias yourself.
Sure: me using that label to ascribe something related to this product makes some people, seemingly you included, feel bad, and so maybe we can say it involves a "bias", as I clearly can avoid that label, but chose not to, and in so doing colored the discussion in a way that makes you unhappy... but it doesn't make it untrue anymore than any other purely descriptive term is now-a-days often said to be biased. As they like to point out: "reality has a liberal bias" (even if it is just as often liberals annoyed with the terms being used by people ;P).
Again: the bias against the use of that term seems much more fascinating than being upset at the idea that the parable -- which of course is trying to make a point, and so is inherently biased towards that point -- could be attempting to temporary apply it, particularly so as it seems to lead to blindness to what actually happened: people will hear you saying your tech is dangerous, and it will be banned and regulated.
And that's related to why I maintain that I think your example disproves your own attempt at a point: you try to draw a parallel to another technology, as if once we find out it is nuclear reaction research we of course know that that isn't a doomsday device... and yet that is one of the few things that is most obviously to the most people a doomsday device, it is a thing that even the people working on it have always felt might not just be a doomsday device but might be "the" doomsday device (as in, the one that actually does us in), and there has not only been countless people out there worried about what can and will happen in its usage, but it was in fact weaponized and a very very large number of people died due to it, so to try to make the argument that it would be biased to call it a "doomsday device" itself feels very awkward.
But, sure: we can decide that that's biased and throw out the "dunno it sounds like a doomsday device and should be regulated" argument as the argument itself has a bias in it, and that leaves us with... what? A world in which people make these things, talk about how dangerous they are, and then feign in shock and frantically try to backpedal when governments step in to prevent it from being released without careful analysis and regulation and study and planning?