Benjamin Hilton Profile picture
Head of Alignment & CAST (Cyber and Autonomous Systems Team) at the UK AI Security Institute (AISI). views my own
Aug 29, 2022 15 tweets 10 min read
There are too few clear overviews of x-risk from AI.

So I tried to write a new one.

(@80000Hours’ previous article was from 2017!)

This was difficult - lots of articles on this are (imo) confused.

I (hopefully!) did things differently: 80000hours.org/problem-profil…

🧵⤵️ 1. I address lots of (I think) common misconceptions about AI risk

Many people - including me a year ago - have all sorts of objections to working on AI risk that I am no longer confident about
Jul 7, 2022 9 tweets 2 min read
There's lots of talk about the UK's political and constitutional crisis.

But Boris Johnson's resignation after nearly 3 years in office is actually a huge win for the UK's weird, unwritten norms-based constitution - and will, I think, only serve to strengthen it.

Here's why: 1) Since 1900, here's why short-lived PMs resigned:

Douglas-Home (1 yr, 1 day): health concerns
Eden (1 yr, 279 days): Suez Crisis
Brown (2 yrs, 318 days): lost election
Chamberlain (2 yrs, 348 days): WW2
May (3 yrs, 11 days): Brexit
Callaghan (3 yrs, 29 days): lost election
May 31, 2022 17 tweets 8 min read
No, DALL-E doesn’t have a secret language.

(or at least, we haven't found one yet)

This viral DALL-E thread has some pretty astounding claims. But maybe the reason they’re so astounding is that, for the most part, they're not true.

Thread 👇🧵 (1/15)

Let’s start with some of the basic claims.

1) @giannis_daras says "Contarra ccetnxniams luryca tanniounons" means bugs or pests.

This just seems wrong.

Here's what I get if I put "Contarra ccetnxniams luryca tanniounons" into DALL-E - lots of different animals.

(2/15)
May 25, 2022 14 tweets 8 min read
There's a new competitor to DALL-E out there: Google's Imagen.

I don't have access to Imagen but I do have some of their example images. Let's do some side-by side comparisons.

(left is Imagen, right is DALL-E)

1. "A blue jay standing on a large basket of rainbow macarons." ImageImage 2. "A brain riding a rocketship heading towards the moon."

(again, left is Imagen, right is DALL-E) ImageImage
Apr 29, 2022 5 tweets 4 min read
@holmesjtg Let's try it!

1) A sign that says "stop". Image @holmesjtg 2) A sign that says "beware of the dog" ImageImageImage
Apr 29, 2022 15 tweets 9 min read
DALL-E is crazy impressive.

But I’m getting a feel for what it can and can’t do, and there are some quite noticeable limitations you won’t see on the curated publicised examples (including my own).

So, 8 limitations of DALL-E, a thread:

(also, have a #dalle koala doing magic) 1) It can take a lot of adjusting prompts to get something good.

e.g. This was actually generated with “A renaissance-style painting of a modern supermarket aisle. In the aisle is a crowd of shoppers with shopping trolleys trying to get reduced items.”