[VieEnCode]

I found this guy's take on the AI safety scene to be quite insightful.

In summary, he feels the focus on sci-fi type existential risk to be a deliberate distraction from the AI industry's current and real legal and ethical harms: e.g. scraping copyrighted content for training without paying or attributing creators, not protecting those affected by the misuse of tools to create deepfake porn, the crashes and deaths attributed to Tesla's self-driving mode, AI resume screening bots messing up etc.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YsLf4lAG0xQ

[DennisP]

It's possible for current harms and future risks to both be real. It's also possible for human civilization to address more than one problem at a time. "You care about X but that's just a distraction from the thing I care about which is Y" is not really a good argument. I could just as well say that copyright concerns are just a distraction from the risk that AI could kill us all.

And it seems to me that if the AI industry wanted to distract us from harms, they would give us optimistic scenarios. "Sure these are problems but it will be worth it because AI will give us utopia." That would be an argument for pushing forward with AI.

Instead we're getting "oh, you may think we have problems now but that's nothing, a few years from now it's going to kill us all." Um, ok, I guess full steam ahead then? If this is a marketing campaign, it's the worst one in history.

[jalman]

The industry does not distract from harm to shake the followers off the tail. Whoever comes next will have to bear huge costs getting over the insane regulatory requirements. The more politicians are involved in the process, the more secure are initial investments.

[exe34]

> And it seems to me that if the AI industry wanted to distract us from harms, they would give us optimistic scenarios.

Nah it has to appear plausible.

[ben_w]

People are very good at promising a better future in a non-specific way and without much evidence. That's kinda how Brexit happened.

It's when you get the specific details of a utopia that you upset people — for example, every time I see anti-aging discussed here, there's a bunch of people for whom that is a horror story. I can't imagine being them, and they can't imagine being me.

[hoseja]

Only the last one is in any way actually bad and even then it should be in the interest of the company using it to fix it promptly.

[hifromwork]

Deaths in car crashes and copyright laundering by big corporations are not bad in any way at all?

[ben_w]

I would say that car crashes are bad, even though they already happen and the motivation behind AI is to reduce them by being less bad than a human.

I think it is a mistake to trust 1st party statistics on the quality of the AI, the lack of licence for level 5 suggests the US government is unsatisfied with the quality as well, but in principle this should be a benefit. When it actually works.

Copyright is an appalling mess, has been my whole life. But no, the economic threat to small copyright holders, individual artists and musicians, is already present by virtue of a globalised economy massively increasing competition combined with the fact the resulting artefacts can be trivially reproduced. What AI does here needs consideration, but I have yet to be convinced by an argument that what it does in this case is bad.

All these things will likely see a return to/increase in patronage, at least for those arts where the point is to show off your wealth/taste; the alternative being where people just want nice stuff, for which mass production has led to the same argument since Jaquard was finding his looms smashed by artisans who feared for their income.