[submeta]

Scary actually. Because how can we asses the risks when we don’t know what the system is capabale of doing.

[ein0p]

We know exactly what the system is capable of doing. It’s capable of outputting tokens which can then be converted into text.

[reducesuffering]

And social media manipulation is just registers and bytes, wait no, sand and electrons.

[isaacremuant]

Just because you can do something with technology doesn't mean the problem is technology itself. It's like newspapers. Printing them I technology and allows all kind of things. If you're of the authoritarian mindset, you'll want to control it all out of some stated fear, but you can do that for everything.

[friendzis]

If you can do something with technology, that something is part of risk assessment. Authoritarianism is irrelevant, that's engineering.

[ben_w]

Which is so broad as to be unhelpful.

We also know that petroleum mixed with air may be combusted to release energy; we needed to characterise this much better in order for the motor car to be distinguishable from a fuel-air bomb.

[ein0p]

And that's exactly my point. Regulating the underlying tech is utterly pointless in this case - it's utterly harmless by itself.

[ben_w]

That's exactly wrong, we know some things that can be expressed as "a sequence of tokens" are harmful and indeed have already made them crimes.

What we need is to characterise what is possible so we can skip the AI equivalent of Union Carbide in Bohopal.

[ein0p]

Yes, but we also know that a knife can be used to slice vegetables or stab people, and we still allow knives. I can go to Google right now and easily find out how to make Sarin or ricin at home. Are you suggesting that we should ban Google Search because of that?

[ben_w]

> Yes, but we also know that a knife can be used to slice vegetables or stab people, and we still allow knives.

I'm from the UK originally, and guess what.

Also missing the point, given stabbing is a crime; what's the AI equivalent of a stabbing? Does anyone on the planet know?

> I can go to Google right now and easily find out how to make Sarin or ricin at home. Are you suggesting that we should ban Google Search because of that?

Google search has restrictions on what you can search for, and on what results it can return. The question is where to set those thresholds, those limits — and politicians do regularly argue about this for all kinds of reasons much weaker than actual toxins. The current fight in the US over Section 230 looks like it's about what can and can't be done and by whom and who is considered liable for unlawful content, despite the USA being (IMO) the global outlier in favour of free speech due to its maximalist attitude and constitution.

People joke about getting on watchlists due to their searches, and at least one YouTuber I follow has had agents show up to investigate their purchases.

Facebook got flack from the UN because they failed to have appropriate limits on their systems, leading to their platform being used to orchestrate the (still ongoing) genocide in Myanmar.

What's being asked for here is not the equivalent of "ban google search", it's "figure out the extent to which we need an equivalent of Section 230, an equivalent of law enforcement cooperation, an equivalent of spam filtering, an equivalent of the right to be forgotten, of etc." — we don't even have the questions yet, we have the analogies, that's all, and analogies aren't good enough regardless of if the system that you fear might do wrong is an AI or a regulatory body.