How do you prevent a person from pirating software? I don’t think you could have a super advanced server farm, for someone with money could probably daisey chain enough computers and run a simple AI instance without needing an entire datacenter. Certainly enough to create something like an AI Twitter bot spreading disinformation to rubes who don’t bother to fact check. Maybe that can convince people that Haitians eat cats on Bastille Day. Maybe it convinced them that Biden is dead and replaced by an actor. Depending on how clever the bot is and how credulous the target audience is, you can probably incept someone to be a lone wolf terrorist. But what exact thing do you prevent here? Limit the number of GPUs (which are also used for bitcoin mining) computers themselves? Hard drives? Given how easy it is to download software, I can’t imagine that you could honestly expect to stop people from downloading software — we’ve been failing at that since Napster in 1990.
Looking forward to the update where you break through a cellar wall and discover a tunnel that leads... somewhere.
Who's got two thumbs and a fully-vested pension
"that training data being selected and refined by the employees of the company making the model" is pretty unambiguous. So I take my open model and I run it on my own iron and I chunk it down and I get this skinny little thing. Maybe I train it on the most heinous shit imaginable. That's not Meta's fault and it's not Meta's problem and if I wanna take an open model and code it for evil, nobody is going to stop me. But this is an open model running on someone else's cloud with payments processed by someone else's payment processor with Oauth handled by Google and Facebook and Github and whoever. And they are every bit as morally, ethically, legally and practically culpable as Goldman Sachs was for laundering cartel money. If they're all profiting off of evil they get to pay the penalties for profiting off of evil. This is not a gray area.
Just had a call with a recruiter. Job would be awesome if (1) it wasn't 2 hours away and (2) it was permanent but it's only a 2 month contract "with possiblity for extension" so I'm going to do the interview for the experience of it, but am not taking the risk of a 2 month contract when I've got a job that I hate but should be around for another year or so. Ugh I hate this job market.
Been a part of 2 unions now. First one was phenomenal. Worked there for a summer semester and that was it, and because I took a class during that summer, I got a $5,000 tuition reimbursement check at the end which was more than I made all summer. Current union leaves a bit to be desired. They treat limited term and part time employees significantly worse than permanent ones. But it's also likely the reason why in 18 months my salary has gone up 10% so I can't complain too much.
Pretty great song.
Good luck on the change in direction. Joining the union has changed my life for the better. 3 more months until im off probation.
AI is a product that gives people ideas.
It's not the training data that does that. What you are seeing is mostly the result of hidden prompt engineering and post-processing of outputs. You can kind of skew the training data, but when you are talking about open models, you can't code morality into the dataset, and you can just as easily ask a model to be evil with a dataset that isn't optimized for it. GPT won't generate Mario because OpenAI literally tells it not to if you ask it to.
registration in for the emt program. doing future planning feels very strange. if all goes well i think i can become a paramedic by 2027 if that's the way i wanna go - which feels crazy that the turnaround can be that fast for a full pivot. apparently the city of chicago is absolutely jonesing for paramedics so maybe i can get in on the ground floor and end up in a union job by the time I'm 30. that would be fucking sick still need money to bridge the gap though. still no job lined up for the meantime. i just gotta make it until january and then i can get an emt job (assuming i as a new program grad can get hired quick) gwaa gwaa
That's a flag, not a bathrobe. Treat it with respect. I had a subscription to Delta Press, albeit through a pseudonym because I wasn't stupid, albeit still delivered to my home address because actually, I kinda was. Delta Press was awash in ideas. I had a book called "improvised PETN & Mercury Fulminate." I had another on assembling legally air-tight alternate identities. Those weren't regulated and still aren't. Tim McVeigh blew up the Federal Building in OKC because of the Turner Diaries, which is very much still available in many languages and formats. Generations of teenagers have read The Anarchist Cookbook and thought they learned something. "For informational purposes only." AI isn't an idea, it's a product. In this case, it's a product encouraging harm. Michelle Carter went to jail for encouraging harm and the CSPC pulls harmful products off the market. I'm willing to bet you or I can sit in a room with a lawn dart without hurting anyone. I'm not so sure about my neighbors. The cornet gets cued up whenever someone knows that what they want individually is bad socially. If your porn harms women your porn needs to be regulated. If your kids toys harm kids your toys need to be regulated. If your chatbot tells incels they'll never be loved unless they get $80k in surgery it needs to be regulated. Especially if you're making money at it.
What an absurd statement! You can absolutely program morality into the models. They rely on training data, that training data being selected and refined by employees of the company making the model. Every LLM out there is a swiss-cheese lookup table of "things we won't get sued over." That's why you can no longer get ChatGPT to generate Mario but you can absolutely get it to Miyazakify everything. This isn't something that happened through serendipity, this is something that happened through training. "Don't tell teenagers to dickmax" is the same programming statement as "don't tell journalists the Jews should be gassed."Yeah, you can't program morality into the models.
We have paint samples up. The kitchen is nearly ready for cabinets. My eye was expensive, but I'm a rich asshole so I can afford it. Turns out "your eye jelly has popped loose and dragged your retina with it" happened to my father and my grandmother, at least according to my sister. And because it happened in New Mexico my grandmother's was diagnosed as macular degeneration and left untreated for too long to do anything. I also got to see some photos of what Gus the Dementor actually looked like and the impression that I was looking through miso soup is borne out by the evidence. Was. That's an important milestone, too. I still have a tattered veil of unfocused crud floating around but it's much more manageable. I'm doing three interviews this week, one for the second time. I've actually been recognized for my voice on the street a couple times which is kind of crazy because we get like 40 downloads. But according to Nielsen we're also getting between 4k and 6k listeners on the radio, which my receptionist assures me "oh, honey, radio is dead." My daughter wrote three heartbreaking poems about how much she hates her teachers. She wanted to turn them in for an assignment. I gave her the inaugural dose of The Angry Kid's School Survival School and pointed out that allegory has deniability, written documents require a response and forcing change is only possible if the people being forced are actually capable of it. I suggested the teachers become forest creatures and she jumped on it. The poems are still heartbreaking but they're about squirrels. My mother's late-life gift has been to be every bit the bitch she was to me to my sister. This has opened my sister's eyes about how yeah, she had it rough but also yeah, it sure as shit could have been rougher. It's also kind of amazing that no matter the flecks and spatters of our familial shitshow, everyone else who touches it is somehow worse off. Apparently my aunt is coming out. She has a dementia diagnosis. She will be accompanied by my cousin, whom my sister called a "polyamorous narcissist" which sounds like a pejorative but is part point of pride, part crutch. "According to my therapist, unlike most people I have a hard time when my needs aren't in focus so it's really important that you focus on my needs." She has a daughter who was told, at age six, "mommy goes down into the basement every morning because she likes to have sex with Aunt Artemis." Now, age twelve, the daughter steals for attention. My sister is reluctant to allow either in her house for obvious reasons. The less obvious reason is her own daughter told her, age six at the time, "please can we never visit these people again." I'm really thankful that there's a second cousin in the mix here who I don't even know what she looks like, despite the fact that she's three months older than my daughter. I have one contractor who's great at finish work. I have another contractor who's great at overbuilt structural work. The first contractor told me how much he hates it when framers put nail boards everywhere because they make drywall a pain in the ass. The second contractor implored me to let him put nail boards everywhere because he didn't want to put any nails through electrical while putting up trim. I had to remind him that he wasn't putting up trim. "I need to make this cumbersome for everyone because if I don't I'll destroy it" is a great way to tell someone you shouldn't be doing the work. We failed inspection last friday as we expected to. Inspector is a lovely lady who walked in and said "wow, what a beautiful room this is" followed by "so what did you end up doing because your drawings are impossible." So we've got a game plan and she got a 2 hour house tour. She especially enjoyed the secret staircase. "I think everyone should have something in their house that's baldly illegal," she said, and grinned. We have paint samples up. This is as close as I can get to guarded optimism.
Yeah, you can't program morality into the models. Once again, we have a new technology that rolls over our norms, expectations, and economic and legal systems. This is a trend that is growing in pace. Human nature is the culprit. We can't help ourselves. We are a medium for the protagonist, we aren't the protagonist.
But the downside to regulating pollution is more palatable than that of regulating ideas. Free speech isn't neoliberal bullshit. It's the foundation of democracy. But we are a long way from when free speech meant pamphlets of Farmer Refuted. And thus, we are forced further into this quandary where we give permission to the government to regulate the ideas economy because of nasty ideas on the market, and what we get is more than we asked for.
It is hard! Because any kid can just code up any fuckin' thing he wants and then what do we do? Thing is, I had friends who would go to the hardware store and buy pipe, then hit the sporting goods store and buy smokeless, and lo and behold they'd spend the afternoon making pipe bombs. I had another friend who used his time in the machine shop to make 9mm pistols. My sister's boyfriend called in bomb threats every day at 1pm for about six weeks to avoid having to take a chemistry midterm. Easy! You just head over to the pay phone and dial! So simple a kid could do it. In all three cases. First pipe bomb I ever saw? I was in fourth fucking grade. So how do you stop the kids from buying pipe? Obviously you don't because that's stupid. Maybe the kid has a sink to fix, or maybe he's picking up supplies for his dad. You can almost see the Leave it to Beaver episode. One thing you can do, though, is you can make it illegal to manufacture pipe bombs. Then the kids that make pipe bombs? You can actually intervene in their lives before someone gets killed. Ohhh, but how that will curtail innovation! Ohhh, but how that will stifle free speech! Ohhh, but how that will somehow bring us closer to Communist Russia, which apparently we're fans of, except when Trump is mad at them, but even then... Fucking look. Tim McVeigh cooked that up out of nitromethane and fertilizer. Nitromethane was tough to buy even back then - you'd best be a top fuel dragster team. It took McVeigh three tries because the first two people were at "dude where's your dragster" and "what are you trying to do, build a bomb lol?" The fertilizer? Enough for 12 acres of corn, 12 acres being at the time roughly one fifteenth of a typical farming operation. And we've been trying to regulate it ever since. We sure as shit track the nitromethane. There are legitimate purposes for AI, much like there are legitimate purposes for ammonium nitrate. Nearly everyone fucking around with it will do no harm. There's absolutely no point in regulating things that can be dangerous but are mostly used for innocuous purposes; everything that can be easily used for malfeasance we regulate the shit out of. I can buy castor beans online right now. I can find online articles telling me what a beautiful plant it is. And everyone agrees you're A-OK to do that - even though the beans should be handled with gloves, apparently - until you try to cook up ricin, which has been illegal since - wait for it - 2019 because a whole bunch of simps take their murder cues from Breaking Bad. Fuckin' Agatha Christie used ricin in one of her books. We didn't need to regulate ricin, much like we didn't need to regulate nitromethane. Is it Vince Gilligan's fault that now you can't cook up deadly toxins at home for relaxation? I mean, yeah, but that's incidental. Vince Gilligan doesn't profit off of people buying castor beans off Amazon. Facebook? OpenAI? Anthropic? If my malfeasance requires your giant server farm, you have an obligation to the public.
They are now being forced to not delete any chats anymore due to a lawsuit. So at least you can't looksmaxx anymore in private...
I do think it's hard to fundamentally change open models to prevent this? My understanding is that with open weights models, you could in theory just put the model back in the oven to train the safety features out of them again. (Although I might be wrong about that.) Facebook is entirely to blame for opening this particular Pandora's box though.
The idea that the line is at "legal/illegal" rather than "ethical/unethical" or "moral/immoral" is neoliberal bullshit. The great companies of America were created and operated on the idea that they were community members with an obligation to the community. The great companies of America were destroyed by the libertarian idea that companies were obligated to do anything and everything for the benefit of the shareholder regardless of anything else. That's a post about the content that OpenAI will reproduce and the content it won't. It's entirely related to financial impact and utterly divorced from legal peral, much as how Pornhub was bereft of Paris Hilton's naughty bits but awash in Traci Lords'. They're doing what they can get away with and since there's no one to sue them for generic manosphere bullshit, they're all in. The issue is not "is this bad" it's "what is the downside for us."
Johnny Got His Gun
The oil slick is illegal. I’m not sure this is. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not a fan of LLMs as a service, in part, because of this. We already have too many for-profit machines deciding what the public thinks, and regulating their unsavory uses requires the regulation of ideas, which just moves the levers of influence from one power to another and we end up fucked either way. We’re in a bad spot. Btw once I finish updating my rpg book, my next project is locking this place down into a humans-only sanctuary.
if only someone could do something
So... you unleash an oil slick onto Santa Barbara and go "oh well?" How are the people PROFITING from this shit not responsible for it? "there's plenty of open-source LLMs" but this shit is on OpenAI iron being advertised by OpenAI for the profit of OpenAI.
No one. There's no good solution for it. People can make LLMs do nasty things. There's plenty of open source LLMs.
BUT WAIT IT GETS WORSE One developer, who only goes by the name Lore in their communications with the media, described the open-source release of the large language model (LLM) Llama as creating a “gold rush-type of scenario”. He used Llama to build Chub AI, a website where users can chat with AI bots and roleplay violent and illegal acts. For as little as $5 a month, users can access a “brothel” staffed by girls below the age of 15, described on the site as a “world without feminism”. Or they can “chat” with a range of characters, including Olivia, a 13-year-old girl with pigtails wearing a hospital gown, or Reiko, “your clumsy older sister” who is described as “constantly having sexual accidents with her younger brother”.
Who WOULD you want to create the solution? Cathy O'Niel described an algorithm as "bias codified as math" in Weapons of Math Destruction. "Bias" as a neutral but honest term - "A preference or an inclination, especially one that inhibits impartial judgment." Training data IS bias. It favors one answer over another, that's the point. The problem is in the codification. As a reminder: Pornhub was utterly bereft of Paris Hilton (civil tort, good lawyers) and utterly awash in Traci Lords (literal child pornography, no enforcement). Everyone got freeze peaches about how they couldn't fap it to revenge porn anymore and nobody gave much of a shit what that did to people. It was a real problem but it wasn't until someone threatened the money that Pornhub lifted a finger. Cathy O'Niel's solution to the bias in algorithms is to make them OPEN which is something that simply can't be done with LLMs. So we're cool with OpenAI telling the incels to dickmax? Are we cool with OpenAI telling the White Nationalists to kikepurge? What about ISIS? what's OpenAI's obligation to anyone targeted by ISIS?
You can make ChatGPT have all sorts of nasty personalities. Open LLMs can be completely unhinged. I don't see this as an OpenAI problem that I'd want them to create a solution to. They shouldn't feature it, of course, no matter how popular.
This was a terrifying read. There’s and entire world I know nothing about