Seriously. Considering the existential risk the AI Safety tribe says exists if sufficient care is not taken, they appear to be existentially incompetent in their messaging. It should be their number one priority to convince the legion of competent non-AI engineers who will be developing and running the infra for their systems to come to their side. Currently they seem to be failing spectacularly.
If it wasn't for others in the AI community vouching for their chops it'd be easy to mistake them for Philosophy of Mind majors going by their tweets. They need to convince their fellow engineers not politicians. Right now when people hear "safety" for AI they think "regulation by incompetent bureaucrats".
The AI safety people need to remember that "you can't tell people anything", you have to show them [0].
It is newspeak. Alignment is what they worked on. Alignment means a model outputs are in line with expectations. I.e. that it does what's told. This is essentially another way of pushing the usefulness of models. A super intelligent model that ignores your instructions is little different to a dumb model than cannot understand your instructions.
AI are just tools, still I don't want my tools to insult or push my kids into depression or self harm. The proliferation of these AI assistants and tools means it's getting harder to keep kids from very adult things without going to extremes like home schooling. They're being built into browsers, tablets, and IoT appliances as fast as makers can integrate them.
That said, most adults can judge for themselves what they want from their tools. So I imagine there will be a constant tension, even after the biggest concerns have been debated and resolved
If it wasn't for others in the AI community vouching for their chops it'd be easy to mistake them for Philosophy of Mind majors going by their tweets. They need to convince their fellow engineers not politicians. Right now when people hear "safety" for AI they think "regulation by incompetent bureaucrats".
The AI safety people need to remember that "you can't tell people anything", you have to show them [0].
[0]http://habitatchronicles.com/2004/04/you-cant-tell-people-an...