posted in Technology
One of AI’s Fiercest Critics Says All the Doom Talk Is ‘Meant to Distract Us’
www.wired.com/story/one-of-ais-fiercest-critics-says-all-the-doom-talk-is-meant-to-distract-us/
Replying to @Wurzl@lemmy.zip
(I want to preface by saying I don’t support AI, I don’t want to hype AI, I want AI research and development to stop immediately.)
Timnit Gebru argues that AI companies are stoking fears of extinction to avoid discussing actual harms, like autonomous weapons.
Huh? Pretty sure autonomous weapons are part of the fears of extinction. It’s very hard to imagine an AI safety advocate doing “all the doom talk” would in any way support AI autonomous weapons. She and other AI safety researchers are on the same side! They don’t need to and shouldn’t fight each other.
Timnit Gebru: Why are they choosing certain disciplines? Somehow these subjects, like programming and chess and math, were elevated to mean, OK, you solved this and thereby you’ve solved intelligence.
Well that’s simple. Because the output of chess, programming, and math can be easily checked mechanically. Chess has win or loss, programs either pass tests or not, math proofs can be checked with Lean, etc. This makes these discipline very easy to train an AI on with reinforcement learning.
I thought an AI researcher would know this?
Replying to @nialv7@lemmy.world
She answers that question right after the question in the same article, making it a rhetorical device rather than an open question.
Focusing on human responsibility for using a tool sounds like a good way to proceed in my opinion.
When AI steal open source code who is responsible? When an AI powered drone kills a civilian who is responsible? When the AI is shown to hire and fire in racist ways who is responsible? Someone has to be, AI is just a tool after all.
In my book I write, “Can a bridge decide to collapse?” The whole “Oh no, our models went rogue” thing … When a bridge collapses, you don’t analyze whether the bridge was ethical or sentient or why it decided to collapse. You ask, who is the person who built this bridge to be so flimsy? There are permits you have to acquire. There are supposed to be tests. When you ask about the bridge collapsing itself, you’ve lost the thread.
Meanwhile, what’s really existential is AI powering autonomous weapons, killing machines, that are actually being used in warfare. The climate catastrophe is a real thing that could be exacerbated by what these tech companies are building. Bosses are using AI as an excuse to get rid of their pesky workers. This machine-god narrative is, in my opinion, meant to distract us from these.
Replying to @anamethatisnt@sopuli.xyz
The problem is AI is created by rich people and rich people cannot be held legally liable. The Hugging Face hack is clear evidence of this legal principle.
Right, but that’s precisely the problem. We don’t need to be going around fearmongering about how dangerous AI itself is. We need to be regulating it and fining the actual people who are making decisions to use AI in ways that result in harm. Whether that harm is direct human injury, injury through negligence (like denying a health insurance claim that should have been approved), financial injury, reputational, whatever.
They need to be held accountable exactly the same as if a human had done it. Humans have been driven to suicide by the criminal response to hacking for far more noble a reason than “cheat on an AI evaluation test”. The weight of the law should be brought down on the executives responsible for the Hugging Face hack, too. But fearmongering about how this shows how amazeballs advanced the AI has become doesn’t accomplish that.
Replying to @Zagorath@quokk.au
Yes, but what I’m telling you this has absolutely nothing to do with AI and everything to do with the impunity of wealth.
All these AI companies MASSIVELY pirated the internet for training data, all very clearly illegal by the letter and spirit of the law, and they have not even been charged for it. The most that happens is that content companies sue in the hopes to get some shares in AI, or sue one AI company because their daddy owns a competing AI company, and those suits seem to ignore the piracy and instead are about whether they needed a separate license to train.
Meanwhile, AI companies are very carefully trying to put liability sponges between it and any lawsuits. Tesla tried (and recently failed) to dump 100% of liability on drivers of it’s “self-driving” cars, and every mission critical AI service is likely to have a human mindlessly rubber stamping AI decisions as fast as they can just so they can be held liable instead of the employer or the AI company.
All these AI companies MASSIVELY pirated the internet for training data
I think it’s worth being a little more careful with our phrasing here. AI companies definitely did illegal piracy to train their models, but that is a separate and distinct process from them trawling the web en mass. Anthropic, for example, recently settled a case with book publishers because it had pirated their books illegally. (Frustratingly, the second article that popped up when I searched to verify this was one that highlighted the fact that the TERF-in-chief is among the beneficiaries of that settlement.) But there is no clear legal answer to the question of whether crawling websites and training from their data constitutes even a civil tort, let alone illegal behaviour.
Other than that detail though, I think we’re in furious agreement. You’re simply restating my point, Cory’s point, and the subject of this article’s point, while doing so in a tone that implies disagreement. The problem isn’t the tech, it’s the humans using and creating the tech and the sociopolitical environment in which it happened.
Replying to @schipelblorp@sh.itjust.works
If they do go the route you describe, it seems like that would make operating an AI for an employer adjacent to a criminal enterprise, as your unspoken job title is “company scapegoat”. I imagine we’d begin to see refusal to perform those jobs if that becomes widespread enough to become publicly known, as people risk incarceration for essentially performing their assigned jobs.
Replying to @badgermurphy@lemmy.world
No, you wouldn’t go to jail probably, but you could be sued and you could lose your license.
My experience is that people are willing to take all manner of risks to get a pay check. I used to work in an industry so obsessed with metrics, that the only way to get promoted was to cheat, so people cheated, and some got caught & fired, and others got promoted, then caught, then fired, and still others got promoted into positions cozy with leadership and were immune.