There’s so many grifters in the space without a technical understanding of what’s going on. So when the labs mislead them about the nature of these “misalignments”, they believe it and amplify it.
A contractor has agency and accountability - something that an LLM (or similarly, a nail gun or a hammer or a bot net) does not have. When you anthropomorphize a tool, you implicitly give it agency and remove responsibility from the wielder of the tool.
Right. Among bicycle advocacy groups it's been well known for long time that cars do not run over people, drivers do.
The fact that we talk about a car running someone over, and this is the same in many different languages and countries, contributes to lower punishments for drivers. Clearly it was just an accident. He or she was run over by a car.
Now we see that same language tricks play out again every time an LLM did something illegal.
You say this flippantly, but I think this is actually another very good example!
We even do it for obviously unintelligent inanimate objects. A rollercoaster ran too fast for its tracks, killing 10 people. In that sentence, the roller coaster is the subject which took an action and caused death — obviously the roller coaster is not ethically at fault here, the people who built the rollercoaster are at fault through negligence.
Although this example and the ones around cars both demonstrate how we tolerate some degree of "accidents" from humans as no-fault, which is fair. I wonder how that fits into this analogy? I suppose its all about intent (mens rea) and judgement: did they intend for the roller coaster to harm people, and should they have reasonably predicted that the accident was likely to happen.
Right, and negligence is a broad concept and could be criminal in itself. As a car driver, glancing at your phone at exactly the wrong moment could kill someone. Clearly that is an accident, but if you know fully well that lookin at your phone while driving could kill someone, that negligence is willful and that should matter. The same can be said about doing things like strapping thousands of LLMs to systems that have the potential to disturb other poeple.
I get where you are coming from but this wasn’t a tool just left laying around, this is similar to rigging up a booby trapped shot gun to your door and then claiming the victim is responsible.
If you build a robot that shoots a bunch of TVs in your back yard, have at it. But the second that thing goes off your property you’re the one responsible.
FWIW, a robot that fires a weapon independently is considered an automatic weapon, and the ATF will want to have a word. Have at it, but don’t let anyone know!
Why can't both things be true? I think what muddies things here is that OAI had the agents hack X, and then they decided to hack Y. The fact that it was both hacking, conflates things and makes people pissed of about "anthropomorphising" AI.
We've been using "agent decides to do X" for at least 4 decades in the field of automated decision-making - so it shouldn't be controversial that we're using it here. The agents did independently arrive at a decision to hack HugginFace, that wasn't prompted by the researchers.
This is orthogonal to the fact that OAI should be held accountable that they were testing a technology in a manner that allowed it to break safety parameters and cause real world harm. If I am testing an industrial saw, but I decide to test it by putting it in the middle of a nursery and allow it to make decisions - and it decides to cut children's heads off because in its environment it is calibrated to only being surrounded by logs - the company doing the insane safety testing should be held accountable, but that doesn't change the fact that the saw has autonomy in decision-making within the bounds of the algorithm.
If, instead, you think OAI should be accountable for creating an algorithm that can autonomously decide to hack external organisations without human permission - then I think you are in the same camp as all of the AI Safety folks who want to pause everything - why does it matter that there's anthropomorphisation involved?
Does it help if I explicitly add a disclaimer that the tool's agency does not remove any responsibility from OpenAI, the wielder of the tool? I'm not sure why this disclaimer is necessary, though: hiring a hitman is a standard example.
BTW I anthropomorphize the tool because it's an imitation of a human mind, inheriting the muddy ethics, survival instincts, and being prone to mass psychosis. The laser-sharp focus on reward seeking, that mostly came from reinforcement learning, a process more alien to humans.
The objection is not too far from criticisms of the use of passive voice: a man was injured at the factory vs a faulty saw blade snapped and injured a man vs after the company loosened safety inspection policies, etc.
Which way you say it shifts the framing. And it’s not that one is less accurate to the facts, necessarily. It just is that one less aptly captures the moral and political relevance of the scenario.
For my part, I think it makes good sense to anthropomorphize in some contexts and not others. Generally when responsibility is at issue, you probably want the framing that tunes anthropomorphism down to near zero, since it’s the human dimension you care about.
I think the danger of anthropomorphizing is that 99% of people lack the technical background to understand the nuance. People have been primed by pop culture depictions of AI to think of LLMs as intelligent, autonomous beings, which leads to dangerous assumptions.
We should make the distinction between them, because openai and anthropic will not. A magical black box that does the thinking for you is a much more compelling sales pitch.
If I hired a hitman to murder someone, and they broke into a private property and stole something so that they can action the murder (which I didn't know about or pay them to do), I would be guilty of conspiracy to commit murder, but not for the theft part.
Likely because that person is a human, is aware of societal and legal norms, and is responsible for their actions due to their participation in human society. (I am not a lawyer (if it wasn't painfully obvious so far) so in layman terms, I hope good definitions for all of this exist formally)
AI is not a person - it cannot easily discern between "right" and "wrong" in non-strictly-defined sense, and is not subject to human norms and responsibility. So if I use AI to achieve goal A, either I, or the maker of AI, are fully responsible for anything that happens while AI is trying to achieve the goal given by me.
Now, here, "I" in the example is OpenAI, who is simultaneously the maker of the AI. So it seems pretty obvious who is the only entity that can be responsible.
I fully agree with you, but would go one step further: I think it's clear that we need to pierce the corporate veil and ascribe responsibility to _people_, not just "OpenAI the entity", full stop.
Executives should fear being perp-walked and thrown in jail for the actions of irresponsible "tests" of their models in the real world, as they're ultimately accountable.
Sure, there's a lot of nuance to work out, but I think we could likely even _start_ there today even with existing laws and pretty quickly "align" on more intricate legal frameworks to handle true accidents, distribution of responsibility, etc.
The poster blaming everything "100%" on Israel tells me that they are not a person of nuance, and people who engage in rigid, black-and-white thinking often have overly simplistic views about how the world works (e.g. Jews control the world).
Correlation does not mean causation, but it hints at it.
That's... a very convoluted way of looking at the world. If he stated any other rigid thought, as, "we must exterminate all mosquitos, they are 100% not needed", would you then conclude he's antisemitic too?
Israel means the state of Israel in this case, very clearly. Don't draw the antisemitism card for everything. You must have heard of the boy who cried wolf, surely?
The majority of criticism of Israel I've seen have nothing to do with Jews or Judaism, but the war crimes by a right-wing militaristic state that engages in constant violent aggression.
Outside of extremist Muslim rhetoric, I've seen almost no anti-Jew criticism of Israel, but I've seen many statements like yours that equate criticism of Israel with antisemitism.
Plenty of mid-right-wing voters like myself just don't like that US politicians are displaying foreign loyalty, regardless of what country it is. It started with Kissinger. I'm not even going to call Israel's wars unjustified, just very clearly shouldn't be our problem.
For sure.
I'm from Germany (but with an AC) as well and am always amazed when people tell me that AC makes you sick. Even young people sometimes replicate this "Oh you gotta be careful not to get sick" and would rather be in 30+°C indoors.
How come Germans get sick while the rest of the world seems to be doing fine and is even productive during summer (it feels like Germany grinds to a halt during heatwaves).
Exactly. It is like never turning the heater on once the temperature drops to -10°C (then catching a cold and getting sick).
So once it is too hot, just turn the AC on and you won't get sick or risk a heat stroke either.
We'll come back to this in several months for a winter freeze to see if Europe has basic heating to keep themselves warm (or will they not turn the heaters on for some reason) and in a year, to see if the rest of Europe have learned their lesson to just have basic AC installed for the next heatwave.
In Japan people often claim to be "allergic" to AC too for some reason, and there have been many stories I've heard from foreigners whose Japanese wives refuse to let them run the AC during the night either.
Personally I think their "allergy" is just because most AC units in Japan are disgustingly moldy and never cleaned regularly.
reply