I mean, once the discussion goes THIS far off the rails of reality, where do we go from here?
If we are talking about AI stoking human fears and weaknesses to make them do awful things, then ok I can see that and am afraid we have been there for some time with our algorithms and AI journalism.
at best, maybe it adds a new level of sophistication to phishing attacks. That's all i can think of. Terminators walking the streets murdering grandma? I just don't see it.
what I think is most likely is a handful of companies trying to sell enterprise on ML which has been going on since forever. YouTubers making even funnier "Presidents discuss anime" vids and 4chan doing what 4chan does but faster.
It doesn't take a whole lot of imagination to come up with scenarios like these.
Don't let your limited imagination constrain you're ability to live in fear of what could be. Is that what you mean? So it's no longer sufficient to live in fear of everything, now you need to live in fear even when you can't think of anything to be afraid of. No thanks.
More banally, state actors can already use open source models to efficiently create misinformation. It took what, 60,000 votes to swing the US election in 2016? Imagine what astroturfing can be done with 100x the labor thanks to LLMs.
[1] dx.doi.org/10.1038/s42256-022-00465-9
So you're saying that:
1. the religious nut would not find the same information on Google or in books
2. if someone is motivated enough to commit such an act, the ease of use of AI vs. web search would make a difference
Has anyone checked how many biology students can prepare dangerous substances with just what they learned in school?
Have we removed the sites disseminating dangerous information off the internet first? What is to stop someone from training a model on such data anytime they want?
2. Accessibility of information makes a huge difference. Prior to 2020 people rarely stole Kias or catalytic converters. When knowledge of how to do this (and for catalytic converters, knowledge of their resale value) became available (i.e. trending on Tiktok), then thefts became frequent. The only barrier which disappeared from 2019 to 2021 was that the information became very easily accessible.
Your last two questions are not counterarguments, since AIs are already outperforming the median biology student, and obviously removing sites from the internet is not feasible. Easier to stop foundation model development than to censor the internet.
> What is to stop someone from training a model on such data anytime they want?
Present proposals are to limit GPU access and compute for training runs. Data centers are kind of like nuclear enrichment facilities in that they are hard to hide, require large numbers of dual-use components that are possible to regulate (centrifuges vs. GPUs), and they have large power requirements which make them show up on aerial imaging.
If that happened open efforts could marshal tens or hundreds of thousands of GPUs.
Right now the barrier is that training requires too much synchronization bandwidth between compute nodes, but I’m not aware of any hard mathematical reason there couldn’t be an algorithm that does not have to sync so much. Even if it were less efficient this could be overcome by the sheer number of nodes you could marshal.
this is a conspiracy theory that gained popularity around the election but in the first impeachment hearings, those making allegations regarding foreign interference failed to produce any evidence whatsoever of a real targeted campaign in collusion with the Russian government.
However, the possibility of foreign election interference, real or imagined, is not a valid reason to hold back progress on AI.
It’s true we are fucked if bioweapons become easy to make, but that is not a question of ”AI”.
> Essentially you are advocating against information being more efficiently available.
Yes. Some kinds of information should be kept obscure, even if it is theoretically possible for an intelligent individual with access to the world's scientific literature to rediscover them. The really obvious case for this is in regards to the proliferation of WMDs.
For nuclear weapons information is not the barrier to manufacture: we can regulate and track uranium, and enrichment is thought to require industrial scale processes. But the precursors for biological weapons are unregulated and widely available, so we need to gatekeep the relevant skills and knowledge.
I'm sure you will agree with me that if access information on how to make a WMD becomes even a few order of magnitudes as accessible as information on how to steal a Kia or how to steal a catalytic converter, then we will have lost.
My argument is that a truly intelligent AI without safeguards or ethics would make bioweapons accessible to the public, and we would be fucked.
