To all those folks asking why the "AI safety" and "AI ethics" crowd can't find common ground --- it's simple: The "AI safety" angle, which takes "AI" as something that is to be "raised" to be "aligned" with actual people is anathema to ethical development of the technology.
>>
#AIhype isn't the only problem, for sure, but it is definitely a problem and one that exacerbates others. If LLMs are maybe showing the "first sparks of AGI" (they are NOT) then it's easier to sell them as reasonable information access systems (they are NOT).

>>
If (even) the people arguing for a moratorium on AI development do so bc they ostensibly fear the "AIs" becoming too powerful, they are lending credibility to every politician who wants to gut social services by having them allocated by "AIs" that are surely "smart" and "fair".>>
If the call for "AI safety" is couched in terms of protecting humanity from rogue AIs, it very conveniently displaces accountability away from the corporations scaling harm in the name of profits.

>>
It's frankly infuriating to read a signatory to the "AI pause" letter complaining that the statement we released from the listed authors of the Stochastic Parrots paper somehow squandered the "opportunity" created by they "AI pause" letter in the first place.

>>
Yes, we need regulation. But as we said: "We should focus on the very real and very present exploitative practices of the companies claiming to build them, who are rapidly centralizing power and increasing social inequities."

dair-institute.org/blog/letter-st…
A bunch of AI researchers high on their own supply wrote a ridiculous letter and got famous people including a certain billionaire man-child to sign, and in the process misappropriated our work. So we speak up and somehow we're at fault? I think NOT.

• • •

Missing some Tweet in this thread? You can try to force a refresh
 

Keep Current with @emilymbender@dair-community.social on Mastodon

@emilymbender@dair-community.social on Mastodon Profile picture

Stay in touch and get notified when new unrolls are available from this author!

Read all threads

This Thread may be Removed Anytime!

PDF

Twitter may remove this content at anytime! Save it as PDF for later use!

Try unrolling a thread yourself!

how to unroll video
  1. Follow @ThreadReaderApp to mention us!

  2. From a Twitter thread mention us with a keyword "unroll"
@threadreaderapp unroll

Practice here first or read more on our help page!

More from @emilymbender

Mar 29
Okay, so that AI letter signed by lots of AI researchers calling for a "Pause [on] Giant AI Experiments"? It's just dripping with #Aihype. Here's a quick rundown.

>>
First, for context, note that URL? The Future of Life Institute is a longtermist operation. You know, the people who are focused on maximizing the happiness of billions of future beings who live in computer simulations.

futureoflife.org/open-letter/pa…

>>
For some context, see:

aeon.co/essays/why-lon…

So that already tells you something about where this is coming from. This is gonna be a hot mess.

>>
Read 28 tweets
Mar 27
Ugh -- I'm seeing a lot of commentary along the lines of "'stochastic parrot' might have been an okay characterization of previous models, but GPT-4 actually is intelligent."

Spoiler alert: It's not. Also, stop being so credulous.

>>
(Some of this I see because it's tweeted at me, but more of it comes to me by way of the standing search I have on the phrase "stochastic parrots" and its variants. The tweets in that column have been getting progressively more toxic over the past couple of months.)

>>
What's particularly galling about this is that people are making these claims about a system that they don't have anywhere near full information about. Reminder that OpenAI said "for safety" they won't disclose training data, model architecture, etc.



>>
Read 4 tweets
Mar 23
Remember when you went to Microsoft for stodgy but basically functional software and the bookstore for speculative fiction?

arXiv may have been useful in physics and math (and other parts of CS) but it's a cesspool in "AI"—a reservoir for hype infections

arxiv.org/abs/2303.12712
From the abstract of this 154 page novella: "We contend that (this early version of) GPT-4 is part of a new cohort of LLMs [...] that exhibit more general intelligence than previous AI models. We discuss the rising capabilities and implications of these models."

>>
And "We demonstrate that, beyond its mastery of language, GPT-4 can solve novel and difficult tasks that span mathematics, coding, vision, medicine, law, psychology and more, without needing any special prompting."

>>
Read 6 tweets
Mar 21
More 🔥🔥🔥 from the FTC!

ftc.gov/business-guida…

A few choice quotes (but really, read the whole thing, it's great!):

>>
"The FTC Act’s prohibition on deceptive or unfair conduct can apply if you make, sell, or use a tool that is effectively designed to deceive – even if that’s not its intended or sole purpose."

ftc.gov/business-guida…

>>
"Should you even be making or selling it?"
"Are you effectively mitigating the risks?"
"Are you over-relying on post-release detection?"
"Are you misleading people about what they’re seeing, hearing, or reading?"

ftc.gov/business-guida…

>>
Read 5 tweets
Mar 20
Several things that can all be true at once:

1. Open access publishing is important
2. Peer review is not perfect
3. Community-based vetting of research is key
4. A system for by-passing such vetting muddies the scientific information ecosystem
Yes, this is both a subtweet of arXiv and of every time anyone cites an actually reviewed & published paper by just pointing to its arXiv version, just further lending credibility to all the nonsense that people "publish" on arXiv and then race to read & promote.
Shout out to the amazing @aclanthology which provides open access publishing for most #compling / #NLProc venues and to all the hardworking folks within ACL reviewing & looking to improve the reviewing process.
Read 5 tweets
Mar 15
Okay, taking a few moments to reat (some of) the #gpt4 paper. It's laughable the extent to which the authors are writing from deep down inside their xrisk/longtermist/"AI safety" rabbit hole.

>>
Things they aren't telling us:
1) What data it's trained on
2) What the carbon footprint was
3) Architecture
4) Training method

>>
But they do make sure to spend a page and half talking about how they vewwy carefuwwy tested to make sure that it doesn't have "emergent properties" that would let is "create and act on long-term plans" (sec 2.9).

>>
Read 9 tweets

Did Thread Reader help you today?

Support us! We are indie developers!


This site is made by just two indie developers on a laptop doing marketing, support and development! Read more about the story.

Become a Premium Member ($3/month or $30/year) and get exclusive features!

Become Premium

Don't want to be a Premium member but still want to support us?

Make a small donation by buying us coffee ($5) or help with server cost ($10)

Donate via Paypal

Or Donate anonymously using crypto!

Ethereum

0xfe58350B80634f60Fa6Dc149a72b4DFbc17D341E copy

Bitcoin

3ATGMxNzCUFzxpMCHL5sWSt4DVtS8UqXpi copy

Thank you for your support!

Follow Us on Twitter!

:(