Much ado about censored

Posted May 7, 2023 12:11 UTC (Sun) by ekj (guest, #1524)
In reply to: Much ado about *censored* by roc
Parent article: Google "We Have No Moat, And Neither Does OpenAI" (SemiAnalysis)

There's very different ways of "holding back" AIs though. There's trying to reduce the risk of a runaway process of self-improvement that'd potentially very quickly lead to AI being the new master of earth. And then there's ChatGPT giving me boilerplate-nonsens and refusing to produce text on a given topic if a major American corporation judges the topic controversial and therefore potentially harmful to shareholders.

Good Open Source alternatives is a good way of putting limits on the latter, since if Google or other big companies shackled their AIs in ways users dislike, and the best Open Source alternatives are reasonably close in quality; the users would just defect.

Much ado about censored

Posted May 7, 2023 21:03 UTC (Sun) by roc (subscriber, #30627) [Link]

There's a lot of stuff in between like "help me hack all the world's computers", "help me make poison" [1], or "help me convince lots of people to give away their money and commit suicide" [2]. Major American corporations judge those topics controversial and want to avoid giving advice on those topics or facilitating them via an AutoGPT-style agentic loop, and these are also potential building blocks for a world-dominating AI. Believe me, it's awkward to be in the position of having to decide where to put guardrails, but "there should be no guardrails" does not sound good to me. Government regulation might be better than corporate self-governance, but a lot of people who fear corporate guardrails aren't much happier about governments.

[1] https://www.theverge.com/2022/3/17/22983197/ai-new-possib...
[2] https://www.vice.com/en/article/pkadgm/man-dies-by-suicid...