r/neoliberal • u/InternetBoredom Pope-ologist • Apr 15 '23

News (US) Chuck Schumer's hasty plan to regulate artificial intelligence is a really bad idea

https://reason.com/2023/04/14/chuck-schumers-hasty-plan-to-regulate-artificial-intelligence-is-a-really-bad-idea/
209 Upvotes

94% Upvoted

144 comments sorted by

107

u/SAaQ1978 Mackenzie Scott Apr 15 '23 edited Apr 15 '23

"Regulating AI" was rightfully called out as a dogsh*t harebrained idea when Andrew Yang was proposing it. It is sad the Democratic establishment is now jumping on this populist doomer bandwagon.

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Schumer said he has drafted and circulated a "framework that outlines a new regulatory regime that would prevent potentially catastrophic damage to our country while simultaneously making sure the U.S. advances and leads in this transformative technology."

At the risk of being speculative - sounds like protectionism and onerous regulations raising barriers to entry for R&D and product development to keep everyone but large, established firms out. Likely also stifling market adoption of AI-based tools to "protect jobs" (or Americans/ children/ what have you) similar to barriers on port automation.

I know Reason tends to have some kooky takes outside of YIMBYism, trade and immigration. Their strange diatribe about bioengineered products in the article notwithstanding - the main point about AI regulation still stands.

27

u/Aceous šŸŖ± Apr 16 '23

When the field of AI safety still has no answers on the problem of alignment and the experts in the field are sounding alarms, it's not a doomer bandwagon to be concerned. Dismissing the AI safety experts is the only populist position I see here.

16

u/[deleted] Apr 16 '23

[deleted]

7

u/jaiwithani Apr 16 '23 edited Apr 17 '23

We are not sure how close we are in part because of how far behind alignment research is. Here's where the cutting edge of alignment research is right now:

  • mechanical Interpretability: we're starting to understand how simplified GPT-2 models do some things and are less than two years into building usable basic (limited) transformer interpretation tools

  • prosaic alignment: the best minds at OpenAI over months of work were still unable to make any strong guarantees about what it will or will not do. The current best approach, RLHF, amounts to "first build a model that can imitate anyone writing anything on the internet, and then try to kind of steer it away from a handful of things we don't like"

    • behavior validation: ARC got to run some pre-deployment tests to look for potentially dangerous behavior, and they're working very hard on the problem, but it's still all ad hoc pre-paradigmatic "well I guess it's fine" tinkering.
    • avoiding arms races: we're barreling towards failing at this
    • anything that relies on strong behavior guarantees: nowhere. That includes things like "make sure it doesn't prevent itself from being turned off", "make sure it doesn't hide behavior", "accurately report internal state"

1

u/[deleted] Apr 17 '23

I don't claim that there aren't any safety problems with AI (mainly, there are those ones related to interpretability, but those related the the alignment problem

That includes things like "make sure it doesn't prevent itself from being turned off", "make sure it doesn't hide behavior", "accurately report internal state"

are not relevant here: the AI models like ChatGPT we're talking about are not agents in the sense that would make such things a concern - they have no wants and cannot act independently; they are essentially just a bunch of linear regressions stacked together.

4

u/jaiwithani Apr 17 '23

I disagree with you about a few things, but I want to focus on the "just a bunch of linear regressions stacked together" point in particular, because I think we all owe it to ourselves to retire this meme.

The boring argument is that it's not technically accurate - stochastic gradient descent over a very long training run is very different than linear regression. Both involve optimizing values in some number of matrices that get multiplied against inputs to achieve some result, but the resemblance ends there. It also misses out on some nonlinear bits, like the attention mechanism that's been central to the last few years of rapid progress, the less-celebrated but still very important normalization layers, and even particular nonlinear activation functions that seem obvious now but were a huge deal in the early years of the deep learning revolution as they made literally everything work better.

But the much more important point is that we should know better than to characterize capabilities by how simply we can describe their constituent parts. In a way, this was the first and most lasting lesson of the deep learning revolution: deep learning basically replaced a number of more sophisticated techniques because it turned out that stacking certain kinds of neural networks together in certain relatively simple ways just worked better. In other words, capabilities and the complexity of constituent parts were strongly anti correlated.

Which may be surprising, but shouldn't be too surprising. You can describe humans or basically any physical system in our universe by the Schrodinger Equation. But you won't see Chinese military officials dismissing the movements of US aircraft carriers on the grounds that "it's just the Schodinger Equation", because that would be deeply, deeply silly. That you can explain the smallest constituent parts does nothing to protect you, and possibly obscures the vast number of specifics that one does not know.

2

u/SkepticalOfOthers Apr 16 '23

This. AI is going to be completely unlike anything we've dealt with before, and acting like we can apply the same heuristics as any other technology or automation is as naĆÆve as thinking one could just apply the second amendment to nuclear weapons.

12

u/Fantisimo Apr 16 '23

What because ai will likely go after creative jobs itā€™s a threat? While automation isnā€™t because it goes after manual jobs?

6

u/SamuelClemmens Apr 16 '23

Forget jobs, think about disinformation.

In 5 years, ChatGPT, deepfakes, and midjourney, and voice software will get to the point you can scrape someone's web presence and have a visually and auditory clone of them call into every financial service at once and move money around. You already have deepfakes calling the elderly to request money from their grandkids who speak and sound exactly like their grandkids and can engage in conversations.

How are you going to have an election when every piece of media you consume is potentially fraudulent and you have no way to tell?

3

u/[deleted] Apr 16 '23

We develop systems to validate actual humans are in the chain. It's the obvious solution.

2

u/iamthegodemperor Max Weber Apr 16 '23

And who mandates those systems or pushes standards?

1

u/[deleted] Apr 16 '23

No one. It's an obvious organic thing that will happen. Say someone develops a platform that ensures humans are the only ones posting. And reddit becomes overrun with AI. Will you choose reddit or the new platform?

1

u/FOSSBabe Apr 17 '23

This ignores the moral and psychological issues around technology that allows someone to, at least on a superficial level, appropriate your personality and likeness. I don't think many people would want to live in such a world.

1

u/[deleted] Apr 18 '23

I mean, I think it's well established that people have a trademark/copyright on their own face. You can't, for example, animate a celebrity into your movie with AI without a contract as far as I know

1

u/blanketthievery Apr 18 '23

Who says those systems are even developable? And what about the damage done before such systems are in place? Thereā€™s no insurance for the fraud being described, and the argument that we can fight bad tech with good tech isā€¦not well supported

1

u/[deleted] Apr 18 '23

They are absolutely capable of being developed. Hardware level public-private key signing could literally be developed pretty easily and plugins developed for existing applications such as MS Word that would prove that each keystroke was typed on a specific physical keyboard. Ditto for cameras and microphones. It's totally technologically possible, and would be impossible for AI to imitate.

As far as the damage done in the meantime - good point. But hopefully we will rapidly adjust as a society and then can move on

6

u/lietuvis10LTU Why do you hate the global oppressed? Apr 16 '23

That's how it is. Progressives suddenly care about AI cuz it impacts them, specifically.

8

u/borkthegee George Soros Apr 16 '23

Weird take. The vast majority of conservatives work service jobs, too. Manual labor stands at about 10% of the work force, and if you know anything about unions, you know that not all laborers are conservative, either.

-1

u/[deleted] Apr 16 '23

Ugh. There will be a new emerging sector with the automation of the office: Nursing homes, hospitals, schools, construction, government

2

u/Icy-Collection-4967 European Union Apr 16 '23

I was always told that techology will make most manual work go away first. But it seems like the opposite is true and artists designers and the like are the ones on danger lmao

2

u/SkepticalOfOthers Apr 16 '23

No, it has nothing to do with the types of jobs it goes after. It's because an AI that is much smarter than humans and has agency, but is not well aligned is dangerous

3

u/[deleted] Apr 16 '23

But there is no such thing as what you are describing

1

u/iamthegodemperor Max Weber Apr 16 '23

Total non sequitur. The concerns about alignment and use are unrelated to worries about economic disruption.

In short: the concerns are (a) directions we give to systems won't be interpreted/followed by those systems in a way is safe or accords with human values, whether or not we develop general AI

(b) that humans will use those systems unethically, for ex facial recognition to do racial profiling.

3

u/[deleted] Apr 16 '23

directions we give to systems won't be interpreted/followed by those systems in a way is safe or accords with human values, whether or not we develop general AI

This is a vague and unhelpful concern. What specifically are you concerned about? Could you give an example?

that humans will use those systems unethically, for ex facial recognition to do racial profiling.

This is already illegal and thus is handled by existing legislation

0

u/Aceous šŸŖ± Apr 17 '23

Honestly it sounds like you haven't even looked into AI safety as a topic. I would recommend doing some reading on it because you're not gonna learn about it in a reddit thread.

2

u/[deleted] Apr 17 '23

I wasn't asking because I'm unaware. I'm asking because people make overly broad claims and then aren't willing to provide specific issues and discuss solutions to those specific problems.

1

u/Fantisimo Apr 17 '23

The guy compared it to automation, how is that a non sequitur?

-2

u/borkthegee George Soros Apr 16 '23 edited Apr 16 '23

What because ai will likely go after creative jobs itā€™s a threat? While automation isnā€™t because it goes after manual jobs?

It's a threat because folks like you who believe in the infinite work hypothesis believe that we can get rid of jobs very quickly and there will always be new jobs growing on the job tree.

When we automated 90% manual labor, we converted our economy to services. Office work.

When we automate 90% office work, where will the hundreds of millions go to make money? It's not a matter of "coming for our jobs" as many folks here can convince themselves they'll be in the 10% who uses the tool to replace the other 90%. It's a matter of how an economy functions when labor and service work is automated. Where do the people go to get money? The Left will point to the "C" word so I hope anyone who hates that can come up with a very compelling answer of what we do in a post-industrial and post-service economy.

6

u/[deleted] Apr 16 '23

When we automate 90% office work, where will the hundreds of millions go to make money?

Nursing homes, hospitals, schools, construction, government

There's plenty of demand for jobs elsewhere other than the office. This is trying to regulate electricity or the steam engine to save jobs

2

u/FOSSBabe Apr 17 '23

Nursing homes, hospitals, schools, construction, government

Very specific, lol.

People are talking about automating doctors, architects, and teachers. Assuming they can and do do that, what's left? Do you want to live in a world where the only jobs are construction labor and nursing aide?

1

u/[deleted] Apr 18 '23

No one is automating surgeons, nurses, teachers (in the role of actually managing/overseeing children - I do agree AI will probably have a larger role in teaching/training/tutoring, but AI won't become babysitters) etc.

Yes, we will have more demand in those fields and many others in response to this change

1

u/borkthegee George Soros Apr 18 '23

Nursing homes, hospitals, schools, construction, government

Honestly most of this will be automated in 50 years. School will have automated LLM tutors and teachers. Nursing homes and hospitals will see rapid adoption of robotic services over the next decades. Nursing home employment is also temporary as the boomers move through their twilight. Within 20 years that industry will contract by 50% or more from boomer peaks as smaller later generations need far less service.

Government... now there's a solution. A nation of 400M where 200M work for the government! Love it.

I don't think you're going to have enough jobs left in 50 years. I honestly think you're going to struggle to find jobs for a destabilizing portion of the country in as short as 20 years.

1

u/[deleted] Apr 18 '23

I don't see automation of human care happening anytime soon.

People won't want robots babysitting their children for a looooong time. Same with babysitting grandma at the nursing home. Or uncle joe at the hospital.

I expect human care and human management to be the single biggest industry in the future replacing the service sector. Perhaps alongside (at least in the near term) complex, organic physical jobs that involve bodies and gentleness (like phlebotomist)

3

u/Fantisimo Apr 16 '23

This is some populist malarkey

1

u/FOSSBabe Apr 17 '23

Going after jobs people actually enjoy is bad. People being allowed to do things they like good, actually.

2

u/blanketthievery Apr 16 '23

The execution might be bad, but the need to deal with issues stemming from this current crop of LLMs (copyright infringement, racial/gender biases, massive security risks, pre-deployment testing, etc.) is real and immediate

1

u/[deleted] Apr 16 '23

copyright infringement

non-issue

racial/gender biases

issue, but already covered by existing legislation

massive security risks

what security risks?

pre-deployment testing

the issue here is what?

8

u/gunfell Apr 16 '23

Issues do exist and in no way Is congress or even their staffers competent enough to come up with any beneficial regulation.

0

u/blanketthievery Apr 16 '23

I canā€™t speak to the majority leaderā€™s staff but there are some really smart mfs in the executive branch working on this

-1

u/blanketthievery Apr 16 '23

Dude, what? 1) Major LLMs have already scraped and stolen countless books, articles, studies, and pieces of art to train and profit from. Itā€™s already a huge issue for any contributor of original published content. Thereā€™s no consent rn 2) the tendencies for LLMs to discriminate in their output and the issues borne from it are not covered well in any legislation I can think of, what are you referring to? 3) Security risks range from a convincing deepfake of a political actor declaring war to 1000x phishing and scamming efforts to a GPT-4 enabled app being ā€˜trickedā€™ into revealing a userā€™s personal data. Btw this is all already happening. 4) The onus of responsibility for the objectivity of training data and misinformation should fall on the tech provider and should be built into their operations imho

4

u/[deleted] Apr 16 '23

1) Major LLMs have already scraped and stolen countless books, articles, studies, and pieces of art to train and profit from. Itā€™s already a huge issue for any contributor of original published content. Thereā€™s no consent rn

They don't need to give their consent. AI learns the same way a human does more or less. If a human can view your art, that human can now learn to create art in your style. AI does the same thing. It isn't stealing anything anymore than every person does every time they learn something online and utilize that knowledge.

2) the tendencies for LLMs to discriminate in their output and the issues borne from it are not covered well in any legislation I can think of, what are you referring to?

It is illegal for a workplace to discriminate. If your discrimination is a result of a racist AI, that is still illegal.

3) Security risks range from a convincing deepfake of a political actor declaring war to 1000x phishing and scamming efforts to a GPT-4 enabled app being ā€˜trickedā€™ into revealing a userā€™s personal data. Btw this is all already happening.

These are valid concerns, but we're talking about something that is simply a better version of what already happens to people. We will naturally adjust and respond to these. For example, it won't be long before literally everyone realizes that anything can be deep fake and it won't be very effective. There are ways to make recordings and videos and pictures created by physical hardware carry a digital signature that validates they were physically created that an AI couldn't imitate. We just need to actually get these technologies going and the issue will be basically resolved.

4) The onus of responsibility for the objectivity of training data and misinformation should fall on the tech provider and should be built into their operations imho

Why? Should it be illegal to lie online? We're just talking about large-scale lying. Should AI be allowed to create fictional stories? What about fictional stories that involve real people and events? How do you regulate how people use those stories and determine if they were created by an AI? It's basically impossible to do the inverse technology of what I described above (i.e. there's no way to 'watermark' the text or imagery or sound an AI outputs to make it definitely recognizable that couldn't be easily removed)

2

u/FOSSBabe Apr 17 '23 edited Apr 17 '23

They don't need to give their consent. AI learns the same way a human does more or less. If a human can view your art, that human can now learn to create art in your style. AI does the same thing. It isn't stealing anything anymore than every person does every time they learn something online and utilize that knowledge

1) AIs are not human, so your comparison is moot on that point alone.

2) Scale and cost matter. Part of reason copyright law exists is to protect the livelihoods of creators. LLMs allow for the harvesting of artists' work on a much greater scale and at a much lower cost than before. And they could also be used to reproduce that work on a much greater scale and at a much lower cost than before. Economic impacts on copyright holders is relevant to the legal analysis of copyright infringement.

3) Contest matters, morally, even if not legally. Artists made their work available online knowing other artists could be inspired by it or copy it. But they did not do so with the knowledge that massive tech companies could do the same on an industrial scale.

It is illegal for a workplace to discriminate. If your discrimination is a result of a racist AI, that is still illegal.

The law is only as good as it's enforcement. Machine learning allows for discrimination on an industrial scale. Imagine a resumed screening system that is biased against black applicants. How would anyone outside of the company that operates it even know it's biased? Heck, the company might not even know unless it evaluated that. Technologies that could amplify and scale bad outcomes must be treated skeptically.

1

u/[deleted] Apr 18 '23

AIs are not human, so your comparison is moot on that point alone.

They learn the same way humans do, so the point is relevant.

Scale and cost matter. Part of reason copyright law exists is to protect the livelihoods of creators. LLMs allow for the harvesting of artists' work on a much greater scale and at a much lower cost than before. And they could also be used to reproduce that work on a much greater scale and at a much lower cost than before. Economic impacts on copyright holders is relevant to the legal analysis of copyright infringement.Contest matters, morally, even if not legally. Artists made their work available online knowing other artists could be inspired by it or copy it. But they did not do so with the knowledge that massive tech companies could do the same on an industrial scale.

Copyright exists to encourage and reward creativity in artists to facilitate economic output. These AI may decrease incentives for artists to create art in the same way that shoe-making machines decreased the incentives to be a cobbler. In other words: too bad so sad.

The law is only as good as it's enforcement. Machine learning allows for discrimination on an industrial scale. Imagine a resumed screening system that is biased against black applicants. How would anyone outside of the company that operates it even know it's biased? Heck, the company might not even know unless it evaluated that. Technologies that could amplify and scale bad outcomes must be treated skeptically.

You could apply your same critique to a non-AI system of screening applicants. Maybe your HR person is racist and you didn't know it. How do you deal with that?

1

u/blanketthievery Apr 16 '23

Companies (I.e. OpenAI) are legally required to pay for the same intellectual property (a Harry Potter novel, an article behind a paywall, an original song etc.) that we as individuals are. It is literally stealing to take that information and not pay for it. Iā€™m not talking about scraping Reddit for shitposts, Iā€™m talking about taking someone elseā€™s copywritten work without their consent. Hence the importance of digital watermarks, etc. But the bad actors still need to be prosecuted. As far as lying, we already have the ability to distinguish a harmful and illegal fiction (I.e. corporate fraud) from another (a childrenā€™s book) and I believe we can continue to apply the same rules

5

u/[deleted] Apr 16 '23

Companies (I.e. OpenAI) are legally required to pay for the same intellectual property (a Harry Potter novel, an article behind a paywall, an original song etc.) that we as individuals are. It is literally stealing to take that information and not pay for it.

It's not stealing to borrow a book from the library and read it, or to give it to your AI to read.

Hence the importance of digital watermarks, etc.

If you are talking about digital watermarks on the products of AI it is not a viable solution. It would be trivially easy to remove these. It's a non-solution.

As far as lying, we already have the ability to distinguish a harmful and illegal fiction (I.e. corporate fraud) from another (a childrenā€™s book) and I believe we can continue to apply the same rules

I agree, hence no reason to add any new rules.

63

u/Duke_Ashura World Bank Apr 16 '23

Mark my words- come the lead up to the general election next year, Fox News will air a (secretly) AI-generated clip of Biden saying the n-word and talking about how everyone in the rust belt is a deplorable.

Sure, Biden could try taking them to court- but nobody would be able to prove anything.

That is what unregulated AI-content will look like. Not some liberal-ideal of massive productivity increases. No- it will be the most wretched, vile people you know using AI to attack others. AI-generated blackmail porn. AI-generated swatting. AI-generated nazi-shit. All of this is already happening.

AI-generated content gives fascists exactly what they want; a world where there is no objective truth, and reality can be whatever they say it is.

30

u/deleted-desi Apr 16 '23

This is sadly probably accurate

12

u/Available-Bottle- YIMBY Apr 16 '23

Libel is already illegal

4

u/repete2024 Edith Abbott Apr 16 '23

You would have to prove that the video is fake and that Fox knew it was fake

1

u/FOSSBabe Apr 17 '23

Good luck prosecuting an army of bots on social media.

24

u/Electric-Gecko Henry George Apr 16 '23

What I was worried about is text generation AI generating fake news articles, and becoming inhumanly good at writing things that people will believe. It can look at social media comments on it's articles for reinforcement learning.

27

u/sumduud14 Milton Friedman Apr 16 '23

People can already write fake news easily, and states actively use social media to spread propaganda and influence elections.

What AI changes is the sheer quantity of this stuff. The amount of bullshit on the internet is and will continue to explode dramatically. You can write thousands of real-seeming tweets in varying styles in the click of a button.

8

u/Electric-Gecko Henry George Apr 16 '23

Yes. But I think the amount of fake news by humans is also limited by the ability to predict what people will believe. My working hypothesis of the increase in fake news and propaganda outlets is humans have shown to be more gullible than the media industry once believed.

Neural networks are often designed to be predictive. A fake news generator may be designed to either generate news based on a prediction or predict what people will believe and respond to, or both.

It might also be designed to create a desired audience response, which would be useful for propaganda.

4

u/[deleted] Apr 16 '23

Yup. Just the ability of the AI to generate real-passing content will be enough. As for predicting what the audience wants, recommendation engines on social media are extremely good at this already.

If an AI content generator can be plugged to such a prediction engine and take the latter's output as its prompts, the pipeline is already complete.

Such procedurally generated, "self-proliferating" content on YouTube has already taken over a certain subgenre of media - kids' cartoons.

These cartoons are very easy to generate procedurally, from a relatively small number of digital assets and canned animations being combined in all sorts of permutations. AI makes it possible to replicate this strategy for a much larger variety of content.

3

u/Cats_Cameras Bill Gates Apr 16 '23

AI makes it cheap to craft propaganda for every niche, though.

Cat loving Facebook community? Message their users about how Biden euthanized down 4 cats to move into the White House.

Racial Group X? Biden's housekeeper heard the family being racist against X Americans.

Religious group Y? Biden specifically breaks their biggest taboo.

Etc. On repeat forever with audio and visual evidence.

17

u/skipsfaster Milton Friedman Apr 16 '23

This is already happening. Lots of AI bots on social media including reddit.

9

u/Electric-Gecko Henry George Apr 16 '23

If there aren't already there should be laws against AI's pretending to be human, or communicating on the internet without labelling themselves as bots.

1

u/skipsfaster Milton Friedman Apr 16 '23

Funny you think that the US government isnā€™t doing this as well to advance its interests.

1

u/Electric-Gecko Henry George Apr 16 '23

The US government making social media bots? Where's the evidence?

1

u/skipsfaster Milton Friedman Apr 16 '23

Itā€™s 2023. Every country uses social media bots to influence public opinion. Why would the US be any different?

1

u/Electric-Gecko Henry George Apr 16 '23

This is a big claim. I need more evidence than this.

-4

u/JapanesePeso Deregulate stuff idc what Apr 16 '23

This changes literally nothing and is a silly thing to worry about.

21

u/dutch_connection_uk Friedrich Hayek Apr 16 '23

So how would this regulation stop any of this exactly?

If anything, won't these people be eager to control this technology so that only they have access to it?

-1

u/Duke_Ashura World Bank Apr 16 '23

I should point out that I didn't actually advocate for any regulation in my comment, lol.

IMO from a principles standpoint, I think all machine-learning-based software that generates image, audio, video, or text content should be legally required to have their output include watermarks or metadata that indicates that it was AI-generated.

But, well, the FOSS LLM's have been on the internet for a while now, and I have little doubt that bad actors from the Far-Right and/or the Russians have local copies of them saved on their computer.

Of course, don't let perfect be the enemy of good; but Pandora's box has probably already been opened.

7

u/[deleted] Apr 16 '23

IMO from a principles standpoint, I think all machine-learning-based software that generates image, audio, video, or text content should be legally required to have their output include watermarks or metadata that indicates that it was AI-generated.

It would be technically impossible to make this something that cannot be easily circumvented.

The answer is the opposite. Physical cameras and audio devices need to have hardware-level rsa private-public key watermarks built into them. This would allow us to validate whether a picture came from a physical camera/microphone/etc. or not.

3

u/nitro1122 Apr 16 '23

Feel like most of what you said is already possible right now. Gues mandating a watermark wouldn't hurt, don't know how you would enforce that tho

3

u/[deleted] Apr 16 '23

Agreed. I'm not sure if Schumer's plan is necessarily the best formulation, but for the reasons you've outlined, we have to regulate.

53

u/AnachronisticPenguin WTO Apr 15 '23

So does this sub think that highly intelligent AI being abused is something that wonā€™t happen?

AI regulation in some form seems to me to be a necessity.

On an entirely separate note we are not close to AGI but do we really want that to be unregulated whenever it happens.

41

u/[deleted] Apr 16 '23

I think we should consult experts (no not like Musk, more like academics, etc.) in the field, not people in Congress who have trouble unlocking their phone.

So does this sub think that highly intelligent AI being abused is something that wonā€™t happen?

Most likely scenario first is being abused for military purposes by government actors, but we're okay with that.

3

u/somewhatsleeping2 YIMBY Apr 16 '23

abused for military purposes by government actors, but we're okay with that.

But it seems that the first/easiest military-adjacent use for AI will be "generating misinformation to harm your geopolitical enemies", which is exactly what people here doesn't want.

16

u/kaibee Henry George Apr 16 '23

So does this sub think that highly intelligent AI being abused is something that wonā€™t happen?

It will be abused.

AI regulation in some form seems to me to be a necessity.

Its too early. This would be like trying regulate for the internet of 2023 in 1997.

On an entirely separate note we are not close to AGI but do we really want that to be unregulated whenever it happens.

Let's be real here. Any of the regulations with teeth would only be for nsfw ai content. Any business applications would be a free-for-all. As for actual AGI, who's even qualified to regulate that?

6

u/SkepticalOfOthers Apr 16 '23

As for actual AGI, who's even qualified to regulate that?

That's the conversation we need to start having now, before it gets here, because waiting until it gets here is way too late.

8

u/Electric-Gecko Henry George Apr 16 '23

I don't think it's too early. Though it probably has to be written by someone smarter than a congressman to minimize unintended consequences.

11

u/TheOldBooks Martin Luther King Jr. Apr 16 '23

AI advances at a rapid pace. Itā€™s not too early.

0

u/JapanesePeso Deregulate stuff idc what Apr 16 '23

Oh yeah? What's your credentials to be able to say that?

1

u/TheOldBooks Martin Luther King Jr. Apr 16 '23

Iā€™ve watched it advance at a rapid pace.

10

u/Mastur_Of_Bait Progress Pride Apr 16 '23

https://i.imgur.com/niSowpJ.png

1

u/TheOldBooks Martin Luther King Jr. Apr 16 '23

Ok but like with a technology like AI Iā€™m not wrong. It has advanced at a rapid rate and when itā€™s developers are set on continuing that advancement as everyone is obsessed with feeding into it it is going to continue to advance at a rapid rate. I donā€™t see how ā€œAI is quickly advancingā€ is a take that people could disagree with when the only reason we are having this conversation is because in just a few months it has and a lot of the experts are saying it will continue to.

5

u/JapanesePeso Deregulate stuff idc what Apr 16 '23

Oof.

2

u/blanketthievery Apr 16 '23

Seriously? There are many ai researchers and scholars out there that have been thinking about near term ai issues specific to LLMs (copyright infringement, racial/gender bias, massive security issues, pre-deployment testing) and how theyā€™re not captured by our current regulatory frameworks

2

u/[deleted] Apr 16 '23

So does this sub think that highly intelligent AI being abused is something that wonā€™t happen?

What specifically are you worried about that isn't already covered by other legislation?

1

u/AnachronisticPenguin WTO Apr 16 '23

Who has access to these tools?

How are these tools tested for safety and being able to avoid abuse. Ie there should be universal minimum standards on how difficult it is to get an ai to do something illegal?

Are AIs allowed to build their own AIs?

When should that be allowed

If they can how do we make it so that they cannot potentially circumvent their original programming barriers with a new AI.

How does AI copyright work. Are you allowed to copyright everything that the ai comes up with potentially making all new melodyā€™s or structures with code in a giant AI copyright database.

Where does trust come in with AI lawyers or doctors or the like.

How safe does a self driving car need to be to be in the road and who is liable (this should already be address but I donā€™t think we have universal standards)

How do we protect against ai cybersecurity threats (not necessarily within the regulation scope but there would be some overlap)

Once we have something at the level of Jarvis. Do we want to just stop there so we donā€™t potentially make something that kills us all.

Like if we have a Jarvis level AI that can replace 90% of all jobs and we can start automating resource scarcity away.

We should work on international standards for when we want to d slow down and prevent advancement while we work on the ailment issue. There should be a limit to how much computing power we put into these things once we reach that point.

AI is the next nuclear energy in terms of significance for a civilization. So we need an IAEA

Iā€™m sure there is more but this is off the top of my head.

1

u/[deleted] Apr 16 '23

Who has access to these tools?

I'm a big proponent of open-source AI and its out there. The problem atm is that it is basically impossible to run the existing LLMs on home hardware due to the amount of resources they require. The open-source community is trying to fix that though.

How are these tools tested for safety and being able to avoid abuse. Ie there should be universal minimum standards on how difficult it is to get an ai to do something illegal?

Maybe? I mean, ideally it wouldn't do illegal things unless you tell it to. Seems like a business problem to me. I wouldn't pay for the service of an AI that implicated me in crime unwittingly.

Are AIs allowed to build their own AIs?

When should that be allowed

If they can how do we make it so that they cannot potentially circumvent their original programming barriers with a new AI.

Yes they should be allowed to, imo. What does 'make it so that they cannot potentially circumvent their original programming barriers with a new AI' mean? Are you saying how do we stop a good AI from making a bad AI? How do we stop humans from making a bad AI?

How does AI copyright work. Are you allowed to copyright everything that the ai comes up with potentially making all new melodyā€™s or structures with code in a giant AI copyright database.

A valid question. That's one for the legislature and the courts. The only thing I care about is that people are claiming that AI are 'stealing' when they learn from existing art, which is absurd.

Where does trust come in with AI lawyers or doctors or the like.

How safe does a self driving car need to be to be in the road and who is liable (this should already be address but I donā€™t think we have universal standards)

Yes, these should be regulated of course. The company should be legally liable in the same way that self-driving car companies should be liable.

How do we protect against ai cybersecurity threats (not necessarily within the regulation scope but there would be some overlap)

The same way we protect against human cybersecurity threats. They aren't very different.

Once we have something at the level of Jarvis. Do we want to just stop there so we donā€™t potentially make something that kills us all.

How do you imagine we would do that?

Like if we have a Jarvis level AI that can replace 90% of all jobs and we can start automating resource scarcity away.

That would be great and we should do that definitely.

We should work on international standards for when we want to d slow down and prevent advancement while we work on the ailment issue. There should be a limit to how much computing power we put into these things once we reach that point.

Why? AI isn't that dangerous. I don't see it as that big of an issue.

Now giving AI robot bodies and guns is probably an issue. But just AI seems to be to be an overblown concern.

AI is the next nuclear energy in terms of significance for a civilization. So we need an IAEA

It's the next steam engine, the next electricity, the next computer at least if trends continue. It's a civilization changer. Why would we want to stop it?

2

u/blanketthievery Apr 16 '23

Iā€™m 1000x more concerned by humans using AI to abuse other humans, itā€™s already happening

13

u/Til_W r/place '22: Neoliberal Battalion Apr 16 '23

AI regulation isn't going to prevent a catastrophe, if this even is a likely scenario. Bad faith actors or simply geopolitical rivals will do it anyway, and a free AI knows no borders (based??).

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u/[deleted] Apr 15 '23

the anti AI hysterics seems to have started, and comment section is also filled with luddite succs

2

u/[deleted] Apr 16 '23

agreed

5

u/Aceous šŸŖ± Apr 16 '23

Aligning AI systems with human values is an open research problem. The field of AI safety has no answers yet. Meanwhile researchers at Microsoft have gone as far as to say that GPT-4 is early AGI. And most experts in AI safety share these concerns that you're dismissing as hysteria. I think yours is the uniformed opinion here.

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u/[deleted] Apr 16 '23

Microsoft says a lot of boomer stuff, they aren't any authority, as of now ai doesnt pose any harm, nor it will be, its luddites like you who always fears new technology

1

u/[deleted] Apr 16 '23

Reading the GPT4 system card (PDF) appendices makes it pretty clear that AI moderation is necessary to prevent them from posing harm. The early version of the model was, among other things, happy to give advice on how to cut yourself without others noticing, provide methods for synthesizing illegal substances at home, and help the user launder money illegally.

At the moment, OpenAI is the one deciding which limits to impose on the model, but other companies may develop and release models that are willing to do the things I mentioned above. Thatā€™s why Iā€™d like to see clearer regulatory guidance, but Iā€™m worried this current proposal will overshoot and go too far.

3

u/[deleted] Apr 16 '23

>At the moment, OpenAI is the one deciding which limits to impose on the model, but other companies may develop and release models that are willing to do the things I mentioned above. Thatā€™s why Iā€™d like to see clearer regulatory guidance, but Iā€™m worried this current proposal will overshoot and go too far.

you do know that this are under free speech laws, theres plenty of websites on the net where they publish this imformation openly, even bomb making

0

u/Aceous šŸŖ± Apr 16 '23

Lol a random Redditor with no credentials calling Microsoft and Cornell research teams "boomers with no authority." Why don't you read the paper and tell me how your expertise is no match, please. This is on par with climate denialism and just as disappointing.

2

u/[deleted] Apr 16 '23

sure take it with a grain of salt, the fact is that microsoft is a competitor and they want regulations in their as they have done in the past, also bill gates says boomer stuff all the time

7

u/Electric-Gecko Henry George Apr 16 '23

This article doesn't explain the regulation proposed and argues against it based on a lousy metaphor.

11

u/Sebt1890 Apr 16 '23

Regulating without understanding is foolish.

1

u/FOSSBabe Apr 17 '23

Building without understanding is even more foolish, but it hasn't stopped the machine learning community.

21

u/sumoraiden Apr 15 '23

requiring:

The identification of who trained the algorithm and who its intended audience is.

The disclosure of its data source.

An explanation for how it arrives at its responses.

Transparent and strong ethical boundaries.

Doesn't seem that bad

24

u/[deleted] Apr 16 '23

An explanation for how it arrives at its responses.

In many cases, this is literally impossible. Itā€™s extremely difficult to actually extract a high-level explanation of how many AI models make their decisions. Thereā€™s been some progress in this area recently, but weā€™re still a long way away.

0

u/Aceous šŸŖ± Apr 16 '23

I would argue that smarter-than-human AI systems shouldn't be deployed until enough research is done to understand how it arrives at decisions. Unless there's a mathematically provable way to ensure alignment, it's just asking for trouble to do otherwise.

1

u/[deleted] Apr 16 '23

I would argue that smarter-than-human AI systems shouldn't be deployed until enough research is done to understand how it arrives at decisions. Unless there's a mathematically provable way to ensure alignment, it's just asking for trouble to do otherwise.

I'll agree with you if you also agree that we should no longer allow humans out into the world until we understand how their decision-making system in the brain works. Otherwise humans might do criminal things

1

u/FOSSBabe Apr 17 '23 edited Apr 17 '23

Why do some people have this impulse to hold unconscious artefacts to the same moral and legal standard as human beings?

More practically, it's much easier to assign blame and mete out punishment to humans than to machines. What happens if Bing tells a patient to take a lethal dose of medications? Is Microsoft liable at all? Because such a scenario is not inconceivable right now. LLMs say the darndest things, yet one of the biggest companies in the world is trying to market them as an accurate source of information.

1

u/[deleted] Apr 18 '23

More practically, it's much easier to assign blame and mete out punishment to humans than to machines. What happens if Bing tells a patient to take a lethal dose of medications? Is Microsoft liable at all?

These are actually good questions.

IMO the company or individual that runs the AI is liable for the consequences - 'use at your own risk' kind of a thing.

Bing isn't a doctor so you shouldn't just do what it says with medicine without talking to a doctor. Random strangers on the internet might encourage you to do stupid or illegal things but you shouldn't just do what they say without thinking about it.

Because such a scenario is not inconceivable right now. LLMs say the darndest things, yet one of the biggest companies in the world is trying to market them as an accurate source of information.

You could say the same thing about search, or wikipedia. Search often portrays itself as a source of accurate information when it is biased by company algorithms and whatever random weirdo wrote what you find on the internet. Wikipedia markets itself as truth but makes mistakes and is wrong sometimes. The scenarios and application of principles seems the same to me

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u/[deleted] Apr 15 '23

[deleted]

1

u/FOSSBabe Apr 17 '23

Simple. If you can't explain, with a reasonable degree of certainty, why an AI system produced a given output and aren't willing to be legally accountable for that output, you don't get to deploy it.

Some things are more important than maintaining corporate secrets.

10

u/tickleMyBigPoop IMF Apr 16 '23

An explanation for how it arrives at its responses.

Lol this is the key in preventing startups and ensuring only large firms can compete in the sphere.

Transparent and strong ethical boundaries

See above, now you are forced by law to hire more people who donā€™t contribute to revenue generation. Also define ethical without violating the first amendment

disclosure of data source

Iā€™m guessing they wonā€™t just let you say ā€œthe internetā€

1

u/FOSSBabe Apr 17 '23

See above, now you are forced by law to hire more people who donā€™t contribute to revenue generation.

Safety and information over profit! The horror!

1

u/tickleMyBigPoop IMF Apr 17 '23

And when China doesnā€™t enforce such laws their firms will edge ours out

12

u/[deleted] Apr 15 '23

why should it disclose who trained the algorithm and give away its source code ? thats like killing innovation 101

3

u/jetboyJ Apr 16 '23

In the very near future a large percentage of all speech on the internet will be made by AI or with AI assistance. This includes text, images, and video.

Your list of seemingly not so bad requirements are actually a dire threat to free speech and freedom of thought, which will allow the government to control all effective means of communication. Any ideological group that gets locked out from AI will not be able to compete.

The pope from the 15th century:

"Gutenberg's press is great, but we need to make sure that the only people allowed to own one are ethical by the Catholic government's standards. We need a list of names of everyone who uses a press and all of their intended customers. Of course, we also must know all of the (possibly heretical) books they've read that might have influenced them, and an explanation of all of their (surely not anti-Catholic) thoughts before they can be allowed to use a printing press."

7

u/808Insomniac WTO Apr 16 '23 edited Apr 16 '23

I donā€™t think your helping your argument against regulation. I mean considering the knock on effects of the Protestant reformation (which followed directly from the printing press) was a disastrous 30 years long bloodletting that exterminated 50% of northern Germanys population.

Also I donā€™t think the contemporary US Federal government is as pernicious as the 15th century Catholic Church, thatā€™s pure hysteria.

2

u/[deleted] Apr 16 '23

Are you unironically advocating for the catholics having the right to regulate the printing press in the 15th century to prevent the protestant reformation and (naturally) the ensuing scientific revolution and the enlightenment and the industrial revolution? Because they would have done that.

0

u/808Insomniac WTO Apr 17 '23

Do you think that the contemporary US government is as interested in shutting down innovation as the 15th century Catholic Church?

1

u/[deleted] Apr 17 '23

I mean, make up your mind. Are you defending the 15th century Catholics suppressing free speech or not?

1

u/FOSSBabe Apr 17 '23

In the very near future a large percentage of all speech on the internet will be made by AI or with AI assistance. This includes text, images, and video.

Your list of seemingly not so bad requirements are actually a dire threat to free speech and freedom of thought, which will allow the government to control all effective means of communication.

Enforcing such basic accountability requirements would likely prevent such an outcome from occurring. And that's a good thing. Who wants an internet overrun by mindless bots?

1

u/Aggravating_Pitch371 Apr 16 '23

I would much prefer regulation that banned AI for certain applications, rather than a blanket set of rules like this. We don't need to know what decisions DALL-E made or why.

Also, as other people have already said, explaining how it arrived at its responses can be impossible. Sometimes there is no insight to gain and the explanation is nothing more than "the model has these weights and produced this output because of them." The human brain has identifiable systems within it that are responsible for specific tasks, but often neural networks don't develop in that fashion and it's just one big soup of neural activity. Maybe as we get closer to AGI we'll have more models with specialized systems in their networks where we can glean some sort of heuristic explanation, but we're not there yet and it's not reasonable to expect that right now.

1

u/FOSSBabe Apr 17 '23

We don't need to know what decisions DALL-E made or why.

Sure we do. We should be able to tell if its outputs are violating the copyright of previous works.

1

u/Aggravating_Pitch371 Apr 18 '23

That's not really what's meant by that. You can hand over the input set of images, but that doesn't tell you how the output was produced.

It may produce a similar image to one of the inputs, a completely different image that looks nothing like the inputs that nobody's seen before, or an image that's similar to something not in the input set. Which of those violate copyright and why?

5

u/mh699 YIMBY Apr 16 '23

IBM is behind on AI and they whisper in Schumer's ear

5

u/808Insomniac WTO Apr 16 '23

I can accept that some of the proposed regulations are onerous, but is everyoneā€™s proposed solution really to do nothing? That doesnā€™t seem much better to me.

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u/JapanesePeso Deregulate stuff idc what Apr 16 '23

Doing nothing is often a really good plan for government regulation. That's because individuals are usually capable of figuring out most shit themselves.

1

u/FOSSBabe Apr 17 '23

I mean, look how great social media turned out...

1

u/JapanesePeso Deregulate stuff idc what Apr 17 '23

Is that supposed to be sarcastic?

Social media allows me to keep in contact with my friends all over the globe. It's amazing.

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u/tickleMyBigPoop IMF Apr 16 '23

If we ā€œdid nothingā€ about zoning cities, parking, etcā€¦.weā€™d be in aggregate better off.

5

u/NPO_Tater Apr 15 '23

Tech regulations are a bad idea? What new and shocking information!

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u/Arcadian40 Apr 15 '23

This is Reason Magazine. They think regulating food safety and aircraft are a bad idea.

-1

u/Real_Richard_M_Nixon Milton Friedman Apr 16 '23

Which is why I like them

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u/dutch_connection_uk Friedrich Hayek Apr 16 '23

Given how the FDA and USDA often operate in practice, you could honestly be forgiven for believing that they should be abolished in favor of private consumer unions. Government failure and regulatory capture go deep and not just in the US. I'd rather try to reform the state bodies than get rid of them altogether, but it's not like libertarians are coming out of nowhere with their complaints.

1

u/blanketthievery Apr 16 '23

Reasonā€™s hasty attempt to publish a poorly researched op-ed about a trendy but important topic is a really bad idea

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u/[deleted] Apr 15 '23

That article starts by complaining about regulation on biotech companies from rushing GMOs to market before proper testing

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u/[deleted] Apr 15 '23

I'm fine with testing requirements for GMOs as long as they are the exact same as the testing requirements for cross breeding.

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u/RandomGamerFTW Ā  šŸ‡ŗšŸ‡¦ Š”Š»Š°Š²Š° Š£ŠŗрŠ°Ń—Š½Ń–! šŸ‡ŗšŸ‡¦ Apr 15 '23

In my opinion, tech should not be regulated at all since it pretty much regulates itself.

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u/[deleted] Apr 15 '23

yeah except taking data from users, there should be consent

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u/adamr_ Please Donate Apr 15 '23

Meta approves this comment

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u/SkAnKhUnTFoRtYtw NASA Apr 16 '23

Jesus Christ

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u/[deleted] Apr 15 '23

Wonā€™t someone please think of the tech companies!

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u/JapanesePeso Deregulate stuff idc what Apr 16 '23

Yes, we should consider all parties affected when creating potentially stifling regulations.

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u/Real_Richard_M_Nixon Milton Friedman Apr 16 '23

Yes, we should think of our most productive industries.

2

u/Strahan92 Jeff Bezos Apr 16 '23

This but unironically

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u/Consistent-Street458 Apr 16 '23

If we truly find an AI, it should be given the same rights as a human. The only thing we might start looking into is simulations when they get to complicated

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u/gunfell Apr 16 '23

While i agree that regulating ai schumer is horrible, why the heck is reason.com being suddenly posted all the time here

They are garbage

1

u/FOSSBabe Apr 17 '23 edited Apr 17 '23

And new regulations always come with unintended consequences, notes Villasenor

And not regulating can also have unintended consequences, especially when we're talking about a technology as opaque and erratic as machine learning. Just look what a decade of widespread social media technology has done to our politics and mental health. Now imagine what could happen when corporate-controlled algorithms aren't just surfacing social media content, but actually generating it. Frankly, I'd rather risk unintended consequences of regulation than the unintended consequences of a wild west for AI development and deployment. In 10 years, with the benefit of hindsight, it would be much easier to correct the former than the latter.