There are biometric-restricted guns that attempt to ensure only authorized users can fire them.
This doesn’t prevent an authorized user from committing murder. It would prevent someone from looting it off of your corpse and returning fire to an attacker.
This is not a great analogy for AI, but it’s still effectively amoral anyway.
The argument for limiting magazine capacity is that it prevents using the gun to kill as many people as you otherwise could with a larger magazine, which is certainly worse, in moral terms.
This is closer. Still not a great analogy for AI, but we can agree that outside of military and police action mass more is more likely than an alternative. That being said, ask a Ukrainian how moral it would be to go up against Russian soldiers with a 5 round mag.
I feel like you’re focused too narrowly on the gun itself and not the gun as an analogy for AI.
you could have a camera on the barrel of a hunting rifle that is running an object recognition algorithm that would only allow the gun to fire if a deer or other legally authorized animal was visible
This isn’t bad. We can currently use AI to examine the output of an AI to infer things about the nature of what is being asked and the output. It’s definitely effective in my experience. The trick is knowing what questions to ask about in the first place. But for example OAI has a tool for identifying violence, hate, sexuality, child sexuality, and I think a couple of others. This is promising, however it is an external tool. I don’t have to run that filter if I don’t want to. The API is currently free to use, and a project I’m working on does use it because it allows the use case we want to allow (describing and adjudicating violent actions in a chat-based RPG) while still allowing us to filter out more intimate replaying actions.
An object doesn’t have to have cognition that it is trying to do something moral, in order to be performing a moral function.
The object needs it to differentiate between allowing moral use and denying immoral use. Otherwise you need an external tool for that. Or perhaps a law. But none of that interferes with the use of the tool itself.
t3rmit3@beehaw.org 4 months ago
But is literally does. If my goal is to use someone else’s gun to kill someone, and the gun has a biometric lock, that absolutely interferes with the use (for unlawful shooting) of the gun.
Wrt AI, if someone’s goal is to use a model that e.g. OpenAI operates, to build a bomb, an external control that prevents it is just as good as the AI model itself having some kind of baked in control.
MagicShel@programming.dev 4 months ago
Again a biometric lock neither prevents immoral use nor allows moral use outside of its very narrow conditions. It’s effectively an amoral tool. It presumes anything you do with your gun will be moral and other uses are either immoral or unlikely enough to not bother worrying about.
AI has a lot of uses compared to a gun and just because someone has an idea for using it that is outside of the preconceived parameters doesn’t mean it should be presumed to be immoral and blocked.
Further the biometric lock analogy falls apart when you consider LLM is a broad-scoped tool for use by everyone, while your personal weapon can be very narrowly scoped for you.
Consider a gun model that can only be fired by left-handed people because most guns crimes are committed by right-handed people. Yeah, you’re ostensibly preventing 90% of immoral use of the weapon but at the cost of it no longer being a useful tool for most people.
t3rmit3@beehaw.org 4 months ago
Not every safety control needs to solve every safety issue. Almost all safety controls are narrowly-tailored to one threat model. You’re essentially just arguing that of a safety control doesn’t solve everything, it’s not worth it.
LLMs being a tool that is so widely available is precisely why they need more built-in safety. The more dangerous a tool is, the more likely it is to be restricted to only professional or otherwise licensed users or businesses. Arguing against safety controls being built into LLMs is just going to accelerate their regulation.
Whether you agree with that mentality or not, we live in a Statist world, and protection of its constituent people from themselves and others is the primary function of a State.
MagicShel@programming.dev 4 months ago
Not exactly. My argument is that the more safety controls you build into the model, the less useful the model is at anything. The more you bend the responders away from true (whatever that is) the less of the tool you have.
Yeah I agree with that, but I’m saying protect people from the misuse of the tool. Don’t break the tool to the point where it’s worthless.