The problem with AI ethics, safety and to a smaller extent, privacy groups is that the priority of the work/message is not placed on the practicality of solving the problem, or i.e. calculating improving affordability of food/housing, but is placed,as evident on this article too, on the lack of "governance structures".
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.
tempodox · 30m ago
Par for the course. This whole “AI” wave is one massive hype fest chock full of “creative marketing”, where you're hard pressed to find any reliable facts, how would “AI Ethics” even be a thing other than a massively hallucinatory artifact? If there were any ethics to be seen around “AI”, the first order of business would be to stop wasting those ridiculous amounts of energy for some cute parlor tricks.
pjc50 · 1h ago
> to list every current violation and abuse of humans in every single country without exception
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.
nisten · 46m ago
Sure yes that too, all of it. Why not. Labs process datasets with trillions of tokens.
The whole point was that these people just complain and make smartass excuses instead of getting any actual work done.
empiko · 49m ago
There are tons of highly technical papers being published about this topic. Yeah, there are some people without tech knowledge working on this as well, but I would expect them to be a minority, although they are probably very visible.
Isamu · 2h ago
This has been happening for a long time. I first noticed this with the hand waving dismissals of older concepts like Asimov’s laws.
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.
myrmidon · 2h ago
I think a big factor in Asimov's laws specifically being sidelined is that the whole process of building AI looks very different from what we pictured back then.
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.
sensanaty · 54m ago
Isn't this worse, though? You said it yourself, it's an even blacker black box that nobody truly understands. And we even have an attempt at setting rules for these things akin to Asimov's laws, those "system prompts" that people are fascinated by are testament to that and they tend to be THOUSANDS of statements long (and they're not very good at following them).
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...
myrmidon · 25m ago
My point is that past expectations about AI where that it would be possible/most viable to set hard, explicit constraints on behavior, like how a stream of instructions constrains the behavior of a CPU.
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.
stephencanon · 1h ago
Raising children involves a whole lot of simple constraints that you gradually relax.
“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.
diggan · 1h ago
> 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.
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.
myrmidon · 21m ago
Yes, but those hand-crafted rules are just input data, they don't actually constrain the behavior, they are just an attempt.
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.
tsumnia · 1h ago
All I know is when I asked Grok, Claude, ChatGPT, and Gemini if it believed in the Hogfather, only ChatGPT and Claude said yes.
We gotta work on getting the other models to agree.
> the whole process of building AI looks very different from what we pictured back then.
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.
salawat · 1h ago
>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.
scotty79 · 2h ago
It might make a comeback when we finally get good at teachning AI what's real and what's imagined and also logical reasoining. I think it does moral evaluation of actions mostly well already (bacause humans are not great at it anyways). Then a rule like "don't harm humans" might suffice.
pjc50 · 1h ago
The AI has a huge problem with knowledge of the real because, unlike humans struggling with the question of whether the universe might be a simulation or we might be a brain in a jar dreaming that we're human, the AI is a simulation and it is a brain in a jar. It cannot prod the real universe to determine what's real.
DSingularity · 1h ago
I’m not sure we will ever get good at teaching them to distinguish reality from imagination. Feels like there are too many generative models pushing everything from fake songs to fake video clips.
halfmatthalfcat · 1h ago
We can’t even do it ourselves. People live in their own “truth”.
JackFr · 2h ago
Not hand waving, Asimov’s three laws are not a good framework. My claim is that the whole point was so that Asimov could write entertaining stories about the ambiguities and edge cases of the three laws.
qualeed · 2h ago
This is a pretty good example of what parent comment was referencing, I think.
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)
morsecodist · 1h ago
I think it's fair to point out that they were never intended to be a good framework for aligning robots and humans. Even in his own stories they lead to problems. They were created precisely to make the point that encoding these things in rules is hard.
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?
diggan · 1h ago
> I think it's fair to point out that they were never intended to be a good framework for aligning robots and humans. Even in his own stories they lead to problems. They were created precisely to make the point that encoding these things in rules is hard.
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.
adastra22 · 26m ago
This seems very much a “did you even read the book??” moment. That Asimov’s laws didn’t work, and indeed failed spectacularly, was kinda the whole point.
Isamu · 2h ago
Right, in particular Asimov is not presenting a detailed framework of any kind.
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.
Sharlin · 1h ago
The burden of proof is obviously on anyone who wants to argue that the three laws are, in fact, a good solid framework for robot ethics. It's pretty astonishing that the three laws are taken by anyone as being some sort of canonical default framework.
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.
qualeed · 1h ago
>The burden of proof is [...]
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.
Sharlin · 1h ago
Given the total vagueness of the three laws idea and how Asimov came up with the idea because he wanted something easily broken to be used as a plot device, the perfectly reasonable stance is to not take them seriously a priori. Anyone is totally within their rights to think about them more and present for discussion some more solid ethical framework based on them. But I'd rather AI ethicists focused on frameworks that had some finite probability of actually working.
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.
krapp · 1h ago
The most obvious evidence that Asimov's three laws are not a good framework is the fact that they are not a framework, they are a plot device. Isaac Asimov was a professor of biochemistry, he had no clue about how robots or AI might actually work. The robots in his stories have "positronic brains" because positrons at the time were newly discovered and sounded cool.
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.
qualeed · 1h ago
This would probably be better suited under the original comment so that the original commenter has a better chance of seeing/reading it.
blibble · 2h ago
> I would love to see a good reasoned argument there.
"we want money from selling weapons"
nancyminusone · 1h ago
It's a different kind of harm. A civil engineer knows that if number A is bigger than B, the building will fall over and crush someone. That type of physical harm is obvious.
Most harm that AI causes has nothing to do with calculating the tensile strength of your skin, and is a lot harder to quantify. Ask any engineer and they will tell you that if it can't be measured, you probably have no business making incorrect conclusions about it.
Most engineers also think the sociologists and psychologists trying to measure these things would be more useful to society in the kitchen of a fast food establishment.
johnecheck · 53m ago
Don't speak for us all. Just because something is difficult to quantify doesn't mean that it's not worth talking about and studying.
While I agree that the fields of sociology and psychology have real flaws, implying that we'd be better off if everyone in those fields were flipping burgers is absurd.
nancyminusone · 24m ago
It's nothing more than a stereotype, of course, but I know very few who got into engineering "for the philosophy", especially outside of software.
That's why everything engineer course has an ethics section, although the business majors probably need one the most.
alnwlsn · 12m ago
"Hey look buddy, I'm an engineer. That means I solve problems, not problems like "What is beauty?" Because that would fall within the purview of your conundrums of philosophy."
danaris · 2h ago
Asimov's Three Laws of Robotics were explicitly designed to be a good basis for fiction that shows how Asimov's Three Laws of Robotics break down.
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.
jordanb · 1h ago
It's kinda hilarious that people are explicitly trying to build a future based on (mostly dystopian) scifi, which was the point of the torment nexus thing. But then when scifi argues for constraints on technology the argument is "those are just stories."
Sharlin · 1h ago
If you think Asimov proposed the three laws as anything like a workable constraint framework of some sort, you're hilariously mistaken and probably haven't read a single Robot book in your life. Asimov came up with them BECAUSE they were a) simple, b) vague, and c) broken. BECAUSE he wanted to write stories about all the specific ways they were broken.
krapp · 1h ago
The argument isn't "those are just stories" it's that "those stories demonstrate why those constraints won't work."
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.
i_dont_know_ · 3h ago
I keep seeing "AI ethics" being redefined to focus on fictional problems instead of real-world ones, so I wrote a little post on it.
bayindirh · 2h ago
Great little post. Congrats.
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.
dale_glass · 2h ago
Worrying about that stuff is just a waste of time. Not because of what you said, but because it's all ultimately pointless.
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.
bayindirh · 2h ago
The thing is, if you can make sure that some of that your images/music/code aren't used for AI training, then you can be sure that you can continue doing what you do, because your personal style enables the specialty you can create.
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 $ARTIST$".
dale_glass · 2h ago
> The thing is, if you can make sure that some of that your images/music/code aren't used for AI training, then you can be sure that you can continue doing what you do, because your personal style enables the specialty you can create.
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.
bayindirh · 1h ago
> Personal styles are dime a dozen and of far lesser importance than you think.
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.
dale_glass · 1h ago
> Try imitating Mickey Mouse, Dilbert, Star Wars, Hello Kitty, XKCD, you name it.
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.
bayindirh · 1h ago
> Those are not styles, they're characters for the most part. (Emphasis mine)
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].
> 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.
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.
jeppester · 2h ago
Sometimes AI is "just like a human", other times AI is "just a machine".
It all depends on what is most convenient for avoiding any accountability.
JackFr · 2h ago
IP is a pragmatic legal fiction, created to reward developers of creative and innovative thought, so we get more of it. It’s not a natural law.
As such fair use is whatever the courts say it is.
bayindirh · 2h ago
Then let's abolish all of them. Patents, copyrights, anything. Let's mail Getty, Elsevier, car manufacturers, chemical plants, software development giants and small startups that everything they have has no protection whatsoever...
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.
i_dont_know_ · 2h ago
Thanks! Yeah, there's a lot of "well, it's 'standard practice' now so it can't be wrong" going on in so many different ways here too...
grues-dinner · 2h ago
Yes, all this highly public hand-wringing about "alignment" framed in terms of "but if our AI becomes God, will it be nice to us" is annoying. It feels like it's mostly a combination of things. Firstly, by play-acting that your model could become God, you install FOMO in investors who see themselves not being on the hyper-lucrative "we literally own God as ascend to become its archangels" boat. You look like you're taking ethics seriously and that deflects regulatory and media interest. And, it's a bit of fun sci-fi self-pleasure for the true believers.
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.
Levitz · 1h ago
It's interesting how I think our experience differs completely, for example, regarding people's concerns for AI ethics you write:
>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.
Thanks for the perspective. For me I think it's a matter of degree (I guess I was a bit "one or the other" when I wrote it).
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.
lr4444lr · 2h ago
AI ethics are like nuclear ethics: the incentive to break them is too powerful without every major player becoming a signatory to some agreement with consequences that have teeth.
ragnot · 2h ago
If you have the time, check out the show "Pantheon" (it should be on Netflix). It goes into this and how effectively AI ethics goes out the window when the reward for breaking them means nation-dominating power.
mystraline · 34m ago
Whose ethics? Do we get to know what the axioms of this ethics are? How about questions to ethical dilemmas?
Or are "ethics" being used to shroud bias, and used as a distraction and a way to be unquestionable?
mitthrowaway2 · 2h ago
It seems to me that this article is the one prevaricating between "ethics" and "safety". The latter is of course a narrow subset of the former, as there are many ethics issues that are not safety issues.
bo1024 · 2h ago
You might not be aware of the context (actually the author of the article might not either). There has in fact been a big push by major AI companies to focus on quote safety unquote while marginalizing (not citing, giving attention to, etc) people focusing on what those companies call quote ethics unquote.
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.
True... I was trying to define them the way (I think) companies are defining them (like what their alignment teams are looking at) and the way it's reported. I think in these specific contexts they're used with overlap but yeah I do bounce back and forth a bit here.
JackFr · 2h ago
Safety is about unintentional harm to yourself or others. Ethics largely concern themselves with intentional behavior.
Workaccount2 · 38m ago
I have wondered for a while now if it happens to be that the less safe guards and thought policing you do, the more capable and generalizable the model becomes. Like "bad" parameters are actually critical for forming the whole picture necessary for ingenuity and advancement.
Effectively making it so that whoever has the lowest safeguards has the most capable model.
kyoob · 49m ago
Starts so strong with "governance structures, accountability, how their data is used, jobs being lost, etc," refutes that what we mean is some sci-fi scenario when we ask about ethics, and then ends with a sci-fi scenario: "...how do we know it will do what we want it to, and not try to subvert us and… take over the world? How do we know it will stay on humanity’s side?"
Wait, go back to the jobs! What was that about accountability?
akakajzbzbbx · 1h ago
Humans can’t agree on what is ethical / safe, so I don’t get people trying to apply it to AI. Am I missing something big here?
Anytime I see discussion framed as “ethics” my brain swaps ethics with “rules I think are good”.
mathiaspoint · 1h ago
Yeah a lot of people who are either malicious or just bad at philosophy got involved and now everyone thinks AI ethics/AI safety is a joke at best. These kinds of people are surprisingly bad at learning from mistakes like this and will probably double down, turning both the public and industry against them.
pjc50 · 1h ago
The "human alignment problem" has not been solved and is probably unsolveable.
blibble · 2h ago
> If we give companies unending hype, near unlimited government and scientific resources, all of our personal data including thoughts and behavior patterns, how do we know their leaders will do what we want them to, and not try to subvert us and… take over the world? How do we know they stay on humanity’s side?
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
positron26 · 2h ago
Distribute power or go home. Something missed by many in these conversations is the role of open source in raising the floor so that we have a gazillion companies that have more interest in there being a fair, predictable market than a winner-take-all market.
i_dont_know_ · 1h ago
Really good point on open source and the nudges it provides, and definitely a point that isn't made often enough!
p3rls · 29m ago
It's hilarious listening to people talk about AI ethics while their bots like perplexity knock my server offline trying to download 50000 files at once. Thank god for cloudflare.
micromacrofoot · 1h ago
Unfortunately I think it is too late. The time to make any sort of rules around AI ethics has already passed, the US has AI so embedded into its economy now that any legislation with teeth is practically impossible. Companies and people running them are not on our side, or even humanity's side, they're on their own.
It's staggering how quickly this has happened.
nathias · 2h ago
I don't know why people allow others to proclaim they're 'ethicists' if they have no relevant philosophical education. There are whole fields of 'ethics' that are just PR departments trying to escape the now bad connotations of 'PR departments'.
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.
tucnak · 1h ago
It could be the case that Wittgensteinians have won completely, and if that is, indeed, the case—a great chunk of academic ethics should be considered hubris...
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.
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.
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.
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.
“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.
We gotta work on getting the other models to agree.
https://youtube.com/watch?v=trXjZ70ab1Q&pp=0gcJCfwAo7VqN5tD
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.
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.
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)
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.
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.
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.
"we want money from selling weapons"
Most harm that AI causes has nothing to do with calculating the tensile strength of your skin, and is a lot harder to quantify. Ask any engineer and they will tell you that if it can't be measured, you probably have no business making incorrect conclusions about it.
Most engineers also think the sociologists and psychologists trying to measure these things would be more useful to society in the kitchen of a fast food establishment.
While I agree that the fields of sociology and psychology have real flaws, implying that we'd be better off if everyone in those fields were flipping burgers is absurd.
That's why everything engineer course has an ethics section, although the business majors probably need one the most.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Or are "ethics" being used to shroud bias, and used as a distraction and a way to be unquestionable?
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...
Effectively making it so that whoever has the lowest safeguards has the most capable model.
Wait, go back to the jobs! What was that about accountability?
Anytime I see discussion framed as “ethics” my brain swaps ethics with “rules I think are good”.
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
It's staggering how quickly this has happened.
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.