I’ve been mulling over this quote from Naomi Klein over the last couple of days. I think its a strong summary of one of the best ethical arguments against the top AI labs.
My argument against this might be that the actual purpose of commercial application is to improve human wellbeing and prosperity overall, not to eliminate jobs. Jobs may or may not be eliminated, but either option could be fine if the prosperity is shared (at least somewhat) throughout humanity.
Then there are orgs like Mechanize, which are explicitly trying to eliminate jobs...
Besides that on the “theft” of creativity front, I think this is broadly true but I’m not sure what can be done at this point. To generalise (even with coding) AI feeds of the best that humanity has to offer then produces worse-than-the-best output much faster, at a fraction of the cost. Without the best of human IP, AI wouldn’t be very good. Newer models may be starting to be better than the best humans in niche areas, but this isn’t the norm.
I talk a lot about how AI helps us provide healthcare to some of the poorest people, but I still don’t have the greatest response to these kind of criticisms from many of my friends. I wonder how others respond to people when they bring arguments like this?
A lot of modern training data isn’t stolen, though. There are organisations which recruit people to do their jobs normally and screen share, or provide worked-through examples of their work, and this is increasingly making up the bulk of the data that’s used to pull frontier models ahead of others on work benchmarks. People are being paid for this and do it willingly, usually with knowledge of where their labour outputs are going!
So really, the problem is a subset of workers in each field are ‘defecting’ (to use a rat term I kinda loathe). How do you create solidarity among groups of workers to prevent a small number of them from putting the others out of work? Or, if technological progress is to be necessary, how do those groups of workers politically agitate for a welfare state and good ongoing education?
The left solved this problem two hundred years ago, but I suspect EA won’t like the solution…
In general it’s okay for a person to look at a dozen different paintings and then make a new painting that’s kind of like those paintings. This seems pretty analogous to what AI is doing and I’m not sure why it becomes not OK if it’s done by a corporation training an AI model. Perhaps there are specific violations of IP laws, and those can be discussed (and some of them are being adjudicated in court as we speak), and of course there is a separate question of whether those IP laws are just. However, what AI models doing to me seems mostly like it’s the sort of behavior we would be OK with individual people doing: i.e closer to the remixing/synthesizing end of the spectrum than the copying/”stealing” end.
Individual people don’t tend to brag about how as they’ve read everything that everyone else wrote, they’ve learned better than everybody else and can replace everybody else with better outputs at lower cost.
If they did this, I suspect they would not be popular
(Also, if we’re humouring AI companies’ claims that their products should be treated just like humans when it comes to “learning”, we should probably question the double standard where both corporations and computer programs evade any accountability for AI generated outputs which would be considered unethical, malicious or negligent if they were the work by human employees...)
I’ve been mulling over this quote from Naomi Klein over the last couple of days. I think its a strong summary of one of the best ethical arguments against the top AI labs.
My argument against this might be that the actual purpose of commercial application is to improve human wellbeing and prosperity overall, not to eliminate jobs. Jobs may or may not be eliminated, but either option could be fine if the prosperity is shared (at least somewhat) throughout humanity.
Then there are orgs like Mechanize, which are explicitly trying to eliminate jobs...
Besides that on the “theft” of creativity front, I think this is broadly true but I’m not sure what can be done at this point. To generalise (even with coding) AI feeds of the best that humanity has to offer then produces worse-than-the-best output much faster, at a fraction of the cost. Without the best of human IP, AI wouldn’t be very good. Newer models may be starting to be better than the best humans in niche areas, but this isn’t the norm.
I talk a lot about how AI helps us provide healthcare to some of the poorest people, but I still don’t have the greatest response to these kind of criticisms from many of my friends. I wonder how others respond to people when they bring arguments like this?
A lot of modern training data isn’t stolen, though. There are organisations which recruit people to do their jobs normally and screen share, or provide worked-through examples of their work, and this is increasingly making up the bulk of the data that’s used to pull frontier models ahead of others on work benchmarks. People are being paid for this and do it willingly, usually with knowledge of where their labour outputs are going!
So really, the problem is a subset of workers in each field are ‘defecting’ (to use a rat term I kinda loathe). How do you create solidarity among groups of workers to prevent a small number of them from putting the others out of work? Or, if technological progress is to be necessary, how do those groups of workers politically agitate for a welfare state and good ongoing education?
The left solved this problem two hundred years ago, but I suspect EA won’t like the solution…
In general it’s okay for a person to look at a dozen different paintings and then make a new painting that’s kind of like those paintings. This seems pretty analogous to what AI is doing and I’m not sure why it becomes not OK if it’s done by a corporation training an AI model. Perhaps there are specific violations of IP laws, and those can be discussed (and some of them are being adjudicated in court as we speak), and of course there is a separate question of whether those IP laws are just. However, what AI models doing to me seems mostly like it’s the sort of behavior we would be OK with individual people doing: i.e closer to the remixing/synthesizing end of the spectrum than the copying/”stealing” end.
Individual people don’t tend to brag about how as they’ve read everything that everyone else wrote, they’ve learned better than everybody else and can replace everybody else with better outputs at lower cost.
If they did this, I suspect they would not be popular
(Also, if we’re humouring AI companies’ claims that their products should be treated just like humans when it comes to “learning”, we should probably question the double standard where both corporations and computer programs evade any accountability for AI generated outputs which would be considered unethical, malicious or negligent if they were the work by human employees...)