Notices by Prof. Emily M. Bender(she/her) (emilymbender@dair-community.social), page 9

“On the same day, [Google] announced that it would be weaving generative AI into its health-care offerings.”

➡️ 🚨🚨🚨

“Employees say they’re concerned that the speed of development is not allowing enough time to study potential harms.”

➡️Employees are correct.

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Ever found the discourse around "intelligence" in "A(G)I" squicky or heard folks pointing out the connection w/eugenics & wondered what that was about?

History of it all can be found in this excellent talk by @timnitGebru (w/ co-author @xriskology )

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P7XT4TWLzJw

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To all those folks asking why the "AI safety" and "AI ethics" crowds can't find common ground --- it's simple: The "AI safety" angle, which takes "AI" as something that is to be "raised" to be "aligned" with actual people is anathema to ethical development of the technology.

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#AIhype isn't the only problem, for sure, but it is definitely a problem and one that exacerbates others. If LLMs are maybe showing the "first sparks of AGI" (they are NOT) then it's easier to sell them as reasonable information access systems (they are NOT).

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If (even) the people arguing for a moratorium on AI development do so bc they ostensibly fear the "AIs" becoming too powerful, they are lending credibility to every politician who wants to gut social services by having them allocated by "AIs" that are surely "smart" and "fair".

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If the call for "AI safety" is couched in terms of protecting humanity from rogue AIs, it very conveniently displaces accountability away from the corporations scaling harm in the name of profits.

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It's frankly infuriating to read a signatory to the "AI pause" letter complaining that the statement we released from the listed authors of the Stochastic Parrots paper somehow squandered the "opportunity" created by the "AI pause" letter in the first place.

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Yes, we need regulation. But as we said:

"It is indeed time to act: but the focus of our concern should not be imaginary "powerful digital minds." Instead, we should focus on the very real and very present exploitative practices of the companies claiming to build them, who are rapidly centralizing power and increasing social inequities."

https://www.dair-institute.org/blog/letter-statement-March2023

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A bunch of AI researchers high on their own supply wrote a ridiculous letter and got famous people including a certain billionaire man-child to sign, and in the process misappropriated our work. So we speak up and somehow we're at fault? I think NOT.

Who else is feeling just buried under #AIhype after the past few weeks? GPT-4’s “system card”? “Sparks of AGI”? OMG skynet is coming “AI pause” letter? If you’re ready for some cathartic BS shoveling, come join me and @alex as we dig out from under all of this on the next episode of Mystery AI Hype Theater 3000.

Friday April 7
9:30-10:30am Pacific Time
http://twitch.tv/dair_institute

#MAIHT3k #MathyMath #SALAMI

Some of these policy goals make sense:

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Yes, we should have regulation that requires provenance and watermarking systems. (And it should ALWAYS be obvious when you've encountered synthetic text, images, voices, etc.)

Yes, there should be liability --- but that liability should clearly rest with people & corporations. "AI-caused harm" already makes it sound like there aren't *people* deciding to deploy these things.

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Yes, there should be robust public funding but I'd priortize non-CS fields that look at the impacts of these things over "technical AI safety research".

Also "the dramatic economic and political disruptions that AI will cause". Uh, we don't have AI. We do have corporations and VCs looking to make the most $$ possible with little care for what it does to democracy (and the environment).

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Policymakers: Don't waste your time on the fantasies of the techbros saying "Oh noes, we're building something TOO powerful." Listen instead to those who are studying how corporations (and governments) are using technology (and the narratives of "AI") to concentrate and wield power.

Start with the work of brilliant scholars like Ruha Benjamin, Meredith Broussard, Safiya Noble, Timnit Gebru, Sasha Costanza-Chock and journalists like Karen Hao and Billy Perrigo.

They then say: "AI research and development should be refocused on making today's powerful, state-of-the-art systems more accurate, safe, interpretable, transparent, robust, aligned, trustworthy, and loyal."

Uh, accurate, transparent and interpretable make sense. "Safe", depending on what they imagine is "unsafe". "Aligned" is a codeword for weird AGI fantasies. And "loyal" conjures up autonomous, sentient entities. #AIhype

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Okay, calling for a pause, something like a truce amongst the AI labs. Maybe the folks who think they're really building AI will consider it framed like this?

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Just sayin': We wrote a whole paper in late 2020 (Stochastic Parrots, 2021) pointing out that this head-long rush to ever larger language models without considering risks was a bad thing. But the risks and harms have never been about "too powerful AI".

Instead: They're about concentration of power in the hands of people, about reproducing systems of oppression, about damage to the information ecosystem, and about damage to the natural ecosystem (through profligate use of energy resources).

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And could the creators "reliably control" #ChatGPT et al. Yes, they could --- by simply not setting them up as easily accessible sources of non-information poisoning our information ecosystem.

And could folks "understand" these systems? There are plenty of open questions about how deep neural nets map inputs to outputs, but we'd be much better positioned to study them if the AI labs provided transparency about training data, model architecture, and training regimes.

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Next paragraph. Human-competitive at general tasks, eh? What does footnote 3 reference? The speculative fiction novella known as the "Sparks paper" and OpenAI's non-technical ad copy for GPT4. ROFLMAO.

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On the "sparks" paper:
https://twitter.com/emilymbender/status/1638891855718002691?s=20

On the GPT-4 ad copy:
https://twitter.com/emilymbender/status/1635697381244272640?s=20

On "general" tasks:
https://datasets-benchmarks-proceedings.neurips.cc/paper/2021/hash/084b6fbb10729ed4da8c3d3f5a3ae7c9-Abstract-round2.html

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