[jameshart]

The ‘ethics’ section seems surprisingly cursory and lacking in references.

“The ability to memorize large databases of facts could have potential ramifications for society, especially if those databases include sensitive personal information or copyrighted works. However, one advantage of using an external memory is that the memory can be easily cleared of all such information”

That’s it? Just ‘may have ramifications’?

No concern that this enables ‘Tay’-like failure modes where a system can be manipulated through input into generating particular output?

Or even just grappling with whether adding ‘memory of experiences’ to a language model might open the door to creating a system that has beliefs, or opinions…? and that maybe there might be some ethical concerns with just wiping that out?

[ipsum2]

That'd be a waste of space. Most transformer models have the same ethical concerns, which have been addressed in countless other papers. Why bother copy pasting the same essays in every minor tweak of transformers?

[dotnet00]

The ethics sections for ML papers almost always seem extremely superfluous. It's like asking a CPU designer to talk about the danger that their CPU can run code for computing firing trajectories. It's a paper about providing memory to ML models, it'll have all the possible applications that require memory, what else does one need?

[kettleballroll]

The ethics section is a tacked on thing which is required by some large ML conferences. They're essentially a PR stunt. No ML researcher i know cares about it, or devotes more than the 5 minutes it takes to write some platitudes to the task. There are simply no incentives to write this properly. And quite frankly, i don't think there should be. We are educated, paid and motivated to push the boundaries of research, not to think about all potential fallout (which, let's face it, would usually require a whole additional paper for most meaningful contributions). I don't really see how we could change this.

Tldr: as a general rule you can ignore the ethics section of ML papers.

[6gvONxR4sf7o]

> We are educated, paid and motivated to push the boundaries of research, not to think about all potential fallout

That’s the whole problem that led to the introduction of these sections.

[belval]

That's debatable, would an "ethics" section on the original deepfake paper have changed anything?

ML research isn't as inaccessible as genetics research, if there's something idiotic that people can do with DL, they will eventually do it. Acting as if having people add a paragraph to their paper where they "reflect" on the consequences will change anything is only showing how disconnected you are with reality.

Research is research, there shouldn't be any "forbidden knowledge", we have laws for a reason.

[balthigor]

> not to think about all potential fallout

You're doing it wrong then.

Ignoring ethics is lazy.

[enchiridion]

Yep, this is correct.

[YeGoblynQueenne]

>> Tldr: as a general rule you can ignore the ethics section of ML papers.

More generally still, you can ignore the ethics of ML researchers- pretty much for the same reasons that you can ignore the Great Turnip of Justice in the sky.

[refulgentis]

I'm not sure it's scientific or helpful to include the risk that a program develops "beliefs" or "opinions", and terminating the program is "wiping [someone] out"

[visarga]

> No concern that this enables ‘Tay’ like failure modes where a system can be manipulated through input into generating particular output?

Isn't that the core idea in prompting and few shot learning for large language models?

[changoplatanero]

My feeling is that those topics would be best addressed in a separate paper by authors who have more of a background in ethics.