Fizzlers saying capable AGI is far or won’t happen
How-Skeptics saying AGI won’t be able to effectively take over or kill us.
Why-Skeptics saying AGI won’t want to.
Solvabilists saying we can and definitely will solve alignment in time.
Anthropociders who say ‘but that’s good, actually.’
Pithy response: You don’t need to not believe in global warming to think that ‘use executive order to retroactively revoke permits for a pipeline that has already begun construction’ is poor climate policy!
Detailed response: One that I think is notably missing here is ‘thinking that AI is a risk but that currently proposed methods for mitigating AI risk do large amounts of damage for no or minimal reduction in that risk’.
What exactly is the mechanism by which “mandatory labeling of AI content” leads to a reduction in existential risk? The mechanism by which “protect actors’ employment from AI by banning contracts that license studios to use AI-generated footage” reduces the risk of world destruction? The mechanism by which “ban AI images from various places” makes human flourishing more likely?
The only mechanism I have ever seen proposed is “tying developers’ hands with all this rubbish will slow down AI development, and slowing it down is good because it will give us more time to...uh...to do...something?” Hopefully slowing down AI development research doesn’t also slow down to an equal-or-greater extent whatever areas of research are needed for safety! Hopefully the large corporations that can best navigate the regulatory mazes we are building are also the most responsible and safety-conscious developers who devote the largest portion of their research to safety rather than recklessly pursuing profit!
I guess if your P(doom) is sufficiently high, you could think that moving T(doom) back from 2040 to 2050 is the best you can do?
I guess if your P(doom) is sufficiently high, you could think that moving T(doom) back from 2040 to 2050 is the best you can do?
Of course the costs have to be balanced, but well, I wouldn’t mind living ten more years. I think that is a perfectly valid thing to want for any non-negligible P(doom).
Weird confluence here? I don’t know what the categories listed have to do with the question of whether a particular intervention makes sense. And we agree of course that any given intervention might not be a good intervention.
For this particular intervention, in addition to slowing development, it allows us to potentially avoid AI being relied upon or trusted in places it shouldn’t be, to allow people to push back and protect themselves. And it helps build a foundation of getting such things done to build upon.
Also I would say it is good in a mundane utility sense.
Agreed that it is no defense against an actual ASI, and not a permanent solution. But no one (and I do mean no one, that I can recall anyway) is presenting this as a full or permanent solution, only as an incremental thing one can do.
So, in an earlier draft I actually had a broader “Doom is likely, but we shouldn’t fight it because...” as category 5, with subcategories including the “Doom would be good” (the current category 5), “Other priorities are more important anyway; costs of intervention outweigh benefits”, and “We have no workable plan. Trying to stop it would either be completely futile, or would make it even more likely” (overhang, alignment, attention, etc), but I removed it because the whole thing was getting very unfocused. The questions of “Do we need to do something about this?” and “Which things would actually help?” are distinguishable questions, and both important.
My own opinion on the proposals mentioned: Fooling people into thinking they’re talking to a human when they’re actually talking to an AI should be banned for its own sake, independent of X-risk concerns. The other proposals would still have small (but not negligible) impact on profits and therefore progress, and providing a little bit more time isn’t nothing. However, it cannot a replacement for a real intervention like a treaty globally enforcing compute caps on large training runs (and maybe somehow slowing hardware progress).
Fooling people into thinking they’re talking to a human when they’re actually talking to an AI should be banned for its own sake, independent of X-risk concerns.
I feel like your argument here is a little bit disingenuous about what is actually being proposed.
Consider the differences between the following positions:
1A: If you advertise food as GMO-free, it must contain no GMOs.
1B: If your food contains GMOs, you must actively mark it as ‘Contains GMOs’.
2A: If you advertise your product as being ‘Made in America’, it must be made in America.
2B: If your product is made in China, you must actively mark it as ‘Made in China’.
3A: If you advertise your art as AI-free, it must not be AI art.
3B: If you have AI art, you must actively mark it as ‘AI Art’.
(Coincidentally, I support 1A, 2A and 3A, but oppose 1B, 2B and 3B).
For example, if an RPG rulebook contains AI art, should the writer/publisher have to actively disclose it? Does ‘putting AI-generated art in the rulebook’ count as ‘fooling people into thinking this was drawn by a human’? Or is this only a problem if the publisher has advertised a policy of not using AI art, which they are now breaking?
It sounds to me like what’s actually being proposed in the OP is 3B. The post says:
As in, if an AI wrote these words, you need it to be clear to a human reading the words that an AI wrote those words, or created that image.
Your phrasing makes it sound to me very much like you are trying to defend the position 3A.
If you support 3A and not 3B, I agree with you entirely, but think that it sounds like we both disagree with Zvi on this.
If you support 3B as well as 3A, I think phrasing the disagreement as being about ‘fooling people into thinking they’re talking to a human’ is somewhat misleading.
I think the synthesis here is that most people don’t know that much about AI capabilities, and so if you are interacting with an AI in a situation that might lead you to reasonably believe you were interacting with a human, then that counts. For example, many live chat functions on company websites open with “You are now connected with Alice” or some such. On phone calls, hearing a voice that doesn’t clearly sounds like a bot voice also counts. It wouldn’t have to be elaborate—they could just change “You are now connected with Alice” to “You are now connected with HelpBot.”
It’s a closer question if they just take away “you are now connected with Alice”, but there exist at least some situations where the overall experience would lead a reasonable consumer to assume they were interacting with a human.
And moving doom back by a few years is entitely valid as a strategy, I think it should be realized, and is even pivitol. If someone is trying to punch you and you can delay it by a few seconds, that can determine the winner of the fight.
In this case, we also have other technologies which are concurrently advancing such as genetic therapy or brain computer interfaces.
Having them advance ahead of AI may very well change the trajectory of human survival.
Pithy response: You don’t need to not believe in global warming to think that ‘use executive order to retroactively revoke permits for a pipeline that has already begun construction’ is poor climate policy!
Detailed response: One that I think is notably missing here is ‘thinking that AI is a risk but that currently proposed methods for mitigating AI risk do large amounts of damage for no or minimal reduction in that risk’.
What exactly is the mechanism by which “mandatory labeling of AI content” leads to a reduction in existential risk? The mechanism by which “protect actors’ employment from AI by banning contracts that license studios to use AI-generated footage” reduces the risk of world destruction? The mechanism by which “ban AI images from various places” makes human flourishing more likely?
The only mechanism I have ever seen proposed is “tying developers’ hands with all this rubbish will slow down AI development, and slowing it down is good because it will give us more time to...uh...to do...something?” Hopefully slowing down AI development research doesn’t also slow down to an equal-or-greater extent whatever areas of research are needed for safety! Hopefully the large corporations that can best navigate the regulatory mazes we are building are also the most responsible and safety-conscious developers who devote the largest portion of their research to safety rather than recklessly pursuing profit!
I guess if your P(doom) is sufficiently high, you could think that moving T(doom) back from 2040 to 2050 is the best you can do?
Of course the costs have to be balanced, but well, I wouldn’t mind living ten more years. I think that is a perfectly valid thing to want for any non-negligible P(doom).
Weird confluence here? I don’t know what the categories listed have to do with the question of whether a particular intervention makes sense. And we agree of course that any given intervention might not be a good intervention.
For this particular intervention, in addition to slowing development, it allows us to potentially avoid AI being relied upon or trusted in places it shouldn’t be, to allow people to push back and protect themselves. And it helps build a foundation of getting such things done to build upon.
Also I would say it is good in a mundane utility sense.
Agreed that it is no defense against an actual ASI, and not a permanent solution. But no one (and I do mean no one, that I can recall anyway) is presenting this as a full or permanent solution, only as an incremental thing one can do.
(Author of the taxonomy here.)
So, in an earlier draft I actually had a broader “Doom is likely, but we shouldn’t fight it because...” as category 5, with subcategories including the “Doom would be good” (the current category 5), “Other priorities are more important anyway; costs of intervention outweigh benefits”, and “We have no workable plan. Trying to stop it would either be completely futile, or would make it even more likely” (overhang, alignment, attention, etc), but I removed it because the whole thing was getting very unfocused. The questions of “Do we need to do something about this?” and “Which things would actually help?” are distinguishable questions, and both important.
My own opinion on the proposals mentioned: Fooling people into thinking they’re talking to a human when they’re actually talking to an AI should be banned for its own sake, independent of X-risk concerns. The other proposals would still have small (but not negligible) impact on profits and therefore progress, and providing a little bit more time isn’t nothing. However, it cannot a replacement for a real intervention like a treaty globally enforcing compute caps on large training runs (and maybe somehow slowing hardware progress).
I feel like your argument here is a little bit disingenuous about what is actually being proposed.
Consider the differences between the following positions:
1A: If you advertise food as GMO-free, it must contain no GMOs.
1B: If your food contains GMOs, you must actively mark it as ‘Contains GMOs’.
2A: If you advertise your product as being ‘Made in America’, it must be made in America.
2B: If your product is made in China, you must actively mark it as ‘Made in China’.
3A: If you advertise your art as AI-free, it must not be AI art.
3B: If you have AI art, you must actively mark it as ‘AI Art’.
(Coincidentally, I support 1A, 2A and 3A, but oppose 1B, 2B and 3B).
For example, if an RPG rulebook contains AI art, should the writer/publisher have to actively disclose it? Does ‘putting AI-generated art in the rulebook’ count as ‘fooling people into thinking this was drawn by a human’? Or is this only a problem if the publisher has advertised a policy of not using AI art, which they are now breaking?
It sounds to me like what’s actually being proposed in the OP is 3B. The post says:
Your phrasing makes it sound to me very much like you are trying to defend the position 3A.
If you support 3A and not 3B, I agree with you entirely, but think that it sounds like we both disagree with Zvi on this.
If you support 3B as well as 3A, I think phrasing the disagreement as being about ‘fooling people into thinking they’re talking to a human’ is somewhat misleading.
I think the synthesis here is that most people don’t know that much about AI capabilities, and so if you are interacting with an AI in a situation that might lead you to reasonably believe you were interacting with a human, then that counts. For example, many live chat functions on company websites open with “You are now connected with Alice” or some such. On phone calls, hearing a voice that doesn’t clearly sounds like a bot voice also counts. It wouldn’t have to be elaborate—they could just change “You are now connected with Alice” to “You are now connected with HelpBot.”
It’s a closer question if they just take away “you are now connected with Alice”, but there exist at least some situations where the overall experience would lead a reasonable consumer to assume they were interacting with a human.
And moving doom back by a few years is entitely valid as a strategy, I think it should be realized, and is even pivitol. If someone is trying to punch you and you can delay it by a few seconds, that can determine the winner of the fight.
In this case, we also have other technologies which are concurrently advancing such as genetic therapy or brain computer interfaces.
Having them advance ahead of AI may very well change the trajectory of human survival.