My writeup of the open letter debacle, with so many links and references(!)
Why that open letter urging an AI development pause is problematic
Among other things:
- The host organisation
- Essentially no mention of all the current harm
- Boosting the idea of sentience
- Misleading citations
- The choice of "6 months"
- We vs. they
https://axbom.com/ai-open-letter-problematic/
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The main reason the technocrat billionaires are conjuring AI at the same time as they explain how afraid they are the of thing they are conjuring: it’s because they believe they have a better chance of not suffering the abuse everyone else is suffering if they can claim to be its master.
This is what they mean with the word “loyal” in that open letter.
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My list of real and potential harms by generative models already in motion, that the open letter fails to acknowledge:
» Security issues such as data privacy and breaches, that have already happened
» The fact that these tools are trained on vast amounts of biased data and serve to perpetuate that bias
» The fact that workers in Kenya and elsewhere are being exploited to train these tools, having to suffer harm to remove harmful content. A practice long employed by social media companies.
» An increase in the capture of biometrically inferred data that will severely impact human free will as it enables widespread personal manipulation (deepfakes) and gives authoritarian regimes more power to suppress dissent. Or encourages democracies to move towards authoritarianism, when putting the disenfranchised in harms way .
» Risks to climate due to significant energy use in large neural network training. It’s valid to note that the ones who benefit the most from AI are the rich, and the ones who suffer most from the climate crisis are the poor. The latter group don’t appear to get a lot of say in what these suggested 6 months of pause mean for them.
» Bad actors with nefarious intent becoming hugely empowered to do damage with malware and scams , but also to invent chemical weapons .
» How the tools are already disrupting art, literature and education (including ownership of all training data) without opportunity to address these issues in a reasoned manner
» Exclusion of a large part of the global population simply due to the limited number of languages that these tools are trained on.
» Unsubstantiated claims of sentience that lead to unfounded fears (a harm that the letter itself contributes to)
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I also urge you to read this just-published message: Statement from the listed authors of Stochastic Parrots on the “AI pause” letter.
Saying it like it is are @timnitGebru, @meg, @emilymbender and Angelina McMillan-Major. Anyone interested in the topic of generative models should of course be following them all and reading their work.
Quote: «While we are not surprised to see this type of letter from a longtermist organization like the Future of Life Institute, which is generally aligned with a vision of the future in which we become radically enhanced posthumans, colonize space, and create trillions of digital people, we are dismayed to see the number of computing professionals who have signed this letter, and the positive media coverage it has received. It is dangerous to distract ourselves with a fantasized AI-enabled utopia or apocalypse which promises either a "flourishing" or "potentially catastrophic" future. Such language that inflates the capabilities of automated systems and anthropomorphizes them, as we note in Stochastic Parrots, deceives people into thinking that there is a sentient being behind the synthetic media. This not only lures people into uncritically trusting the outputs of systems like ChatGPT, but also misattributes agency. Accountability properly lies not with the artifacts but with their builders.»
FULL TEXT here:
https://www.dair-institute.org/blog/letter-statement-March2023
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