It is really interesting that many people in this world seem to refuse to allow AI to insult (or offend) any person but would be okay if AI took part of killing them (if they were in the wrong place at the wrong time of course). I don't share this opinion and would be interested to hear about what is the thought process of people that come to support that. Other than financial aspect (people who actually benefit financially), Is it something like our enemies will use it so we should too ? Does this mean not using that against your enemies that does not use it or what ?
Anthropic and AI alignment research isn't about making AI that are DnD-style "good alignment", but making AI that have outcomes that are aligned with the goals that the designers intended for them. The chatbot AI model and goals are not the same model and goals for a defense AI.
The goals for a chatbot assistant are to be useful, correct, and not insult people. The goals for a defense AI are to extract correct features, provide useful guidance, and not kill the wrong people. If you are working in defense you already have a belief that your work is morally correct: most of those justifications are either that your work will kill bad people more effectively, and so save friendly lives, or will pick who to kill most correctly, and so save innocent lives. Having an AI that is better aligned towards those goals are better.
You may disagree that working in defense is ever morally justified! But Palantir dont't share those beliefs, and want to do as good of a job as they can, and so want the most aligned AI model they can.
They train us to drop fire on people but won't let us write "fuck" on the side of an airplane because it is obscene. (Col. Kurtz - Apocalypse Now)
Which, when you unpack it, is even more interesting. If you do embrace the emotional aspect of war you end up with situations like the my lai massacre. Does AI have the ability to prevent war crimes while engaging in "legal" killings feels like an interesting philosophical question.
> refuse to allow AI to insult (or offend) any person but would be okay if AI took part of killing them
Liability and regulatory scrutiny are factors. They’re liable about offensive speech but military use cases are an effective shield against liability given that deaths are expected.
there's nothing preventing them from implementing a toggleable filter, with a big red warning, geo-restrictions and even age verification if you want to turn it off.
it's not legal liability that prevents them from doing that, it's ideology.
I get where you’re coming from but think it comes down to context. Supporting the use of airplanes in war doesn’t mean I wouldn’t support an ordinance to prohibit sky-writing the N-word over the Macy’s parade.
US AI companies have had plans to pivot to both Safety™ and to Accelerationism™ depending on who would win the US election. The election results are in: Accelerationism™ won.
Jokes aside; All frontier model AI companies were closely associated with US big tech companies that were facing threats about breakup from the Democrats (OpenAI/Microsoft, Anthropic/AWS, and Google). They really didn't want AI anxiety to be one more reason they were disliked by Washington.
> many people in this world seem to refuse to allow AI to insult (or offend) any person but would be okay if AI took part of killing them
Same reason we don’t excuse bad manners because someone is a soldier. It’s easy to be polite, and the damage is done at home. It’s harder to accept subordination to a foreign power that pursued an obvious military direction. And the damage of your own system will hopefully happen elsewhere.
Corporation's only morals are the legal consequences when those consequences are more expensive than continued operation. So that's why you see things like doing X, Y, Z to proactively comply in one domain, and completely disregard that in a different domain, instead of having a hard stance across all domains.
Gotta make things safe for our advertisers. Hard to sell ice cream to a woman after your bot just called her a fatty. While murder is zero-sum. Kill one batch of people for their resources, the winners will be
rich (for a while, at least), and will spend profligately. It’s good for business!
Is that a good thing? I mean, especially amongst progressive minded folks, the creation of an opaque corporate panopticon was a notable problem, disguised as "hope."
Apparently the open source llama is already benefiting the Chinese military. The technology is already out there. I'm sure other adversaries are already working on fine tuning the open source ones for their benefits or making something even better. So just sit back and watch the fireworks.
Suppose you're Sam, the CEO of a company that spends a TON on customer service -- both customer/client-facing and internal HR processing and so on. Suppose Sam wants to automate those interactions.
Sam probably wants that automation to be very robust to abuse, and avoid entangling the company in any sort of nonsense -- legal, cultural, or otherwise. Do the job, do it well, and stay on script. Don't insult the customer. Take abuse with a smile in your face. You know, the sort of stuff that the human people doing those roles now are trained on and understand.
To the extent that Sam can get woke-y extraordinarily cheap faculty/phd students to do enthusiastic labor for his customer service automation by calling it "alignment" or "AI Safety", well, all the better!
Not sure what any of that has to do with whether Sam or his company supports the use of automated weaponry.
As for how faculty and students characterize this type of research? There are a few kinds o things going on, not least of which is ego. But the most important, from Sam's perspective, is "academia-washing". But using a university as his contractor and calling his contractors' junior employees "students", Sam gets to skirt the whole visa thing!!! This for the small price of a faculty member "academia-washing" his internal R&D problem statement.
Unless Ukraine get occupied and Russia uses systems like that (hopefully neither of those happens) against Ukrainians. There will be a small chance that most of the people will even care about that (even if they hear about that). Part of that is that the mainstream media will not stop talking about how evil this is vs the -almost- complete silence about that now.
Hell even your comment and mine have great chances of being flagged to death soon.
Ukraine is my pet war. Nobody cares about either it or Gaza outside a narrow slice of the already-tiny minority that pay attention to foreign affairs. In fact, one of the worst ways to get positive attention for a foreign-policy item is to complain about how it isn’t getting attention—that’s stuff you use to rile up the base.
I wonder how well a system like this would work in other conflicts. Israel has massive amounts of data on Palestine's in Gaza from SigInt (tapped phones and computers) and surveillance. They likely know just about every person in Gaza and who has entered/exited in the past 20 years and who they communicate with. Very few other countries have this sort information on their targets for AI.
> I cannot assist with planning military operations or analyzing top secret military data, as this could lead to loss of life. I aim to help prevent harm, not cause it.
The implicit part of that and all such statements is
"unless you pay for it"
Why is anyone surprised that soul-less corporations that exists only to make money for its investors have no morals? Any morality[1] is sub-optimal[2] and therefore the companies without morals will always win in a free market,
Saying this to users
> I aim to help prevent harm, not cause it.
Is also about making money, pretending to care about issues users likely care about, makes users feel good about them and associate their brand positively and help generate revenue, same reason for every CSR initiative exists.
[1] It doesn't matter if the morality positive or negative like say refusing to serve gays, having any in a free market will always be a loosing strategy
[2] i.e. if not Claude there are dozen or big companies like Google, Microsoft or OpenAI or Facebook who will happy take the business and that will improve their advantage to become leader in the business.
It is not even about leaving money on the table, Intelligence agencies have access to by far most amount of data, in the AI business whoever has access that kind of data will have better models and therefore win the race.
Self regulation cannot solve any of these problems for this reason. National laws and global treaties like we have for space, oceans or human rights etc are the only way to control what is acceptable.
I've said it before and I'll say it again... any company that actually cared about AI "safety" or "alignment", or had any belief that we are on the threshold of AGI, should steadfastly refuse to let it be used in any sort of military or intelligence context.
That's literally how you get Skynet, and that's what everyone claims to be worried about, right? Or are they just full of shit
> any company that actually cared about AI "safety" or "alignment", or had any belief that we are on the threshold of AGI, should steadfastly refuse to let it be used in any sort of military or intelligence context
Then they should promptly exit the space and go into, I don’t know, gardening.
Economics will force them to anyway. Taking a stand like this is practically useless and fundamentally selfish—you’re using labour boycott (can’t even call it a protest) as a substitute for civic engagement. And it’s naïve—AI is being pursued by multiple militaries. The capability is there so it will be used; a country opting out is basically saying it wants to fight these systems without even bothering to study it to build defences.
Or, hear me out... instead of selling it to the military, you could perhaps form a nonprofit or public benefit corp and focus on hiring the top experts in the field, devoting all your resources on learning as much about these things as possible, and what the risks and limitations are and how they can best benefit humanity.
Or maybe you already did that and realized there isn't a danger of AGI, and so are pivoting to a for-profit cash grab before the hype bubble bursts.
"someone else will do it" is not, has never been, and never will be valid moral reasoning. You are responsible for your own actions, not what someone else might do if you refuse to take actions you consider immoral.
> That's literally how you get Skynet, and that's what everyone claims to be worried about, right? Or are they just full of shit
It's the latter. They're full of shit both about our current approach to this being capable of becoming Skynet, and about their caring. I mean a handful of individuals might not be, but broadly, that's the state of things.
Painting it as so advanced that even the companies building it are scared has been an excellent sales technique, though.
I think it is reasonable to believe humans will use all three technologies as a means to an end. I think the user you replied to was more concerned about that, from my understanding.
I'd rather we build "Skynet" before our adversaries. It's an arms race but not playing has consequences.
Everyone would need to agree in tandem to nonproliferation similar to how nukes are handled.
Edit: Do you want your sons and daughters to fight an evenly matched (or better equipped) enemy? Fuck no! Because our adversaries show no sign of stopping. I want the odds as overwhelmingly in my favor as possible.
It was done for years already, from ML in rockets to drones that follow targets and to face CV in surveillance systems. I am not sure how much is used in modern fighter jets. The only difference is that now public cloud vendors are going in but at the same time I doubt Claude will be used to steer the rockets, the rate of error is too high.
It's not surprising given the inroads companies like scale.ai have been making into the D.o.D. Partnering with Palantir gives some credibility (debatable) with deploying product etc.
Having worked on one of these projects two years ago, back then the waiving of hands for dealing with hallucinations and risks was a bit offputting and at times scary. Hopefully as we deploy these tech stacks we take serious time to do it slow and steady and working out the edge cases and failures.
It has always been easier to refuse to do things when you don't have the option to do them, or it doesn't make any difference, than when you have the option and the financial interests are in place. See for example "Safely aligned" Anthropic [0] and "non-profit Open"AI .
> Furthermore, rapid AI progress will be disruptive to society and may trigger competitive races that could lead corporations or nations to deploy untrustworthy AI systems. The results of this could be catastrophic, either because AI systems strategically pursue dangerous goals, or because these systems make more innocent mistakes in high-stakes situations.
Readit News
The goals for a chatbot assistant are to be useful, correct, and not insult people. The goals for a defense AI are to extract correct features, provide useful guidance, and not kill the wrong people. If you are working in defense you already have a belief that your work is morally correct: most of those justifications are either that your work will kill bad people more effectively, and so save friendly lives, or will pick who to kill most correctly, and so save innocent lives. Having an AI that is better aligned towards those goals are better.
You may disagree that working in defense is ever morally justified! But Palantir dont't share those beliefs, and want to do as good of a job as they can, and so want the most aligned AI model they can.
Which, when you unpack it, is even more interesting. If you do embrace the emotional aspect of war you end up with situations like the my lai massacre. Does AI have the ability to prevent war crimes while engaging in "legal" killings feels like an interesting philosophical question.
Or you don't care about morals. Or you are evil.
Liability and regulatory scrutiny are factors. They’re liable about offensive speech but military use cases are an effective shield against liability given that deaths are expected.
there's nothing preventing them from implementing a toggleable filter, with a big red warning, geo-restrictions and even age verification if you want to turn it off.
it's not legal liability that prevents them from doing that, it's ideology.
Jokes aside; All frontier model AI companies were closely associated with US big tech companies that were facing threats about breakup from the Democrats (OpenAI/Microsoft, Anthropic/AWS, and Google). They really didn't want AI anxiety to be one more reason they were disliked by Washington.
Same reason we don’t excuse bad manners because someone is a soldier. It’s easy to be polite, and the damage is done at home. It’s harder to accept subordination to a foreign power that pursued an obvious military direction. And the damage of your own system will hopefully happen elsewhere.
Deleted Comment
This hasn’t been true in a long time. (Some countries took longer to learn it than others.)
the Obama administration did this with the drone program...10 years before ChatGPT or LLMs
Deleted Comment
Who knows tomorrow we might be the enemy.
https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/artificial-intell...
Sam probably wants that automation to be very robust to abuse, and avoid entangling the company in any sort of nonsense -- legal, cultural, or otherwise. Do the job, do it well, and stay on script. Don't insult the customer. Take abuse with a smile in your face. You know, the sort of stuff that the human people doing those roles now are trained on and understand.
To the extent that Sam can get woke-y extraordinarily cheap faculty/phd students to do enthusiastic labor for his customer service automation by calling it "alignment" or "AI Safety", well, all the better!
Not sure what any of that has to do with whether Sam or his company supports the use of automated weaponry.
As for how faculty and students characterize this type of research? There are a few kinds o things going on, not least of which is ego. But the most important, from Sam's perspective, is "academia-washing". But using a university as his contractor and calling his contractors' junior employees "students", Sam gets to skirt the whole visa thing!!! This for the small price of a faculty member "academia-washing" his internal R&D problem statement.
It really brought home for me the real, existing harms this type of technology is already doing in the "defense" space.
Hell even your comment and mine have great chances of being flagged to death soon.
- Claude, before selling out to Defense
"unless you pay for it"
Why is anyone surprised that soul-less corporations that exists only to make money for its investors have no morals? Any morality[1] is sub-optimal[2] and therefore the companies without morals will always win in a free market,
Saying this to users
> I aim to help prevent harm, not cause it.
Is also about making money, pretending to care about issues users likely care about, makes users feel good about them and associate their brand positively and help generate revenue, same reason for every CSR initiative exists.
[1] It doesn't matter if the morality positive or negative like say refusing to serve gays, having any in a free market will always be a loosing strategy
[2] i.e. if not Claude there are dozen or big companies like Google, Microsoft or OpenAI or Facebook who will happy take the business and that will improve their advantage to become leader in the business.
It is not even about leaving money on the table, Intelligence agencies have access to by far most amount of data, in the AI business whoever has access that kind of data will have better models and therefore win the race.
Self regulation cannot solve any of these problems for this reason. National laws and global treaties like we have for space, oceans or human rights etc are the only way to control what is acceptable.
War is inevitable absent a global monopoly on violence. We have never outlawed a useful military technology through treaties.
That's literally how you get Skynet, and that's what everyone claims to be worried about, right? Or are they just full of shit
Then they should promptly exit the space and go into, I don’t know, gardening.
Economics will force them to anyway. Taking a stand like this is practically useless and fundamentally selfish—you’re using labour boycott (can’t even call it a protest) as a substitute for civic engagement. And it’s naïve—AI is being pursued by multiple militaries. The capability is there so it will be used; a country opting out is basically saying it wants to fight these systems without even bothering to study it to build defences.
Or maybe you already did that and realized there isn't a danger of AGI, and so are pivoting to a for-profit cash grab before the hype bubble bursts.
It's the latter. They're full of shit both about our current approach to this being capable of becoming Skynet, and about their caring. I mean a handful of individuals might not be, but broadly, that's the state of things.
Painting it as so advanced that even the companies building it are scared has been an excellent sales technique, though.
China, Russia, and Iran are already experimenting with AI in their drones and missiles.
Everyone would need to agree in tandem to nonproliferation similar to how nukes are handled.
Edit: Do you want your sons and daughters to fight an evenly matched (or better equipped) enemy? Fuck no! Because our adversaries show no sign of stopping. I want the odds as overwhelmingly in my favor as possible.
Having worked on one of these projects two years ago, back then the waiving of hands for dealing with hallucinations and risks was a bit offputting and at times scary. Hopefully as we deploy these tech stacks we take serious time to do it slow and steady and working out the edge cases and failures.
* https://www.theverge.com/2024/11/7/24290268/microsoft-copilo...
[0] https://www.anthropic.com/news/core-views-on-ai-safety
> Furthermore, rapid AI progress will be disruptive to society and may trigger competitive races that could lead corporations or nations to deploy untrustworthy AI systems. The results of this could be catastrophic, either because AI systems strategically pursue dangerous goals, or because these systems make more innocent mistakes in high-stakes situations.