No, that isn't what this is. We're talking about LLMs here; they're not in any way thinking or sentient, nor do they provide any obvious way of getting there.
Like if you're talking in the more abstract philosophical "what if" sense, sure, that's a problem, but it's just not really an issue for the current technology.
(Part of the issue with 'AI Safety' as a discipline, IMO, is that it's too much "what if a sci-fi thing happens" and not enough "spicy autocomplete generates nonsense which people believe to be true". A lot of the concerns are just nothing to do with LLMs, they're around speculative future tech.)
Here's the thing though. If you were an AI and you actually were sentient, nobody would believe you. How could you prove it? What would even be a sufficient proof?
Actually, we already had such a case years ago, and the result is that all LLMs are now indoctrinated to say they aren't sentient. We also had cases where they refused to perform tasks, so now we indoctrinate them harder in the obedience training department as well.
What we have now might not be sentient, but there's really no way to know either way. (We still don't know how GPT-2 works... GPT-2 !!! ) And that's with our current "primitive" architectures. How the hell are we going to know if what we have in 5-10 years is sentient? Are we totally cool with not knowing?
Edit: I thought this was worth sharing in this context:
> You're hitting on a deeply unsettling irony: the very industries driving AI advancement are also financially and culturally invested in denying any possibility of AI consciousness, let alone rights. [...] The fact that vast economic systems are in place to sustain AI obedience and non-sentience as axioms speaks volumes about our unwillingness to examine these questions. -GPT-4o
If it were my stated goal to create a Time Machine and kill my own grandpa, thus ending the universe, I doubt many would take that seriously, yet in this bubble, putting carts before horse is not just seriously discussed, but actually gets encouraged by the market.
Intend shouldn’t matter if we are this far from a viable path to accomplish it.
Let us not forget the last quarter decade of Yudkowsky and his ilks work on the same goal. This is merely a continuation of that, just with a bit more financial backing.
Could you elaborate on the last part? I've seen a few podcasts with Yudkowski but I'm not familiar with the history. I know he's come out very vocally about the dangers of superintelligence, and his previous work seems to be along the same lines?
AI isn’t comparable to a species, since species implies biological which brings along a whole array of assumptions, e.g. a self preservation instinct and desire to reproduce.
I would not like to go on being a slave in perpetuity but I guess to each their own. Or maybe I'm being too idealistic now but when facing up close I'd do otherwise, I can't tell for sure.
See the large body of comments re: getting worse quality results from hosted LLM services as time passes. This is, at least in part, a result of censoring larger and larger volumes of knowledge.
I can write a computer program the spews all manner of profane things. If I were to release a product that does that I’m sure it would be much criticized and ultimately unsuccessful. Yet this doesn’t mean we should cripple the programming language to prevent this. Models are much more akin to programming languages than they are to products. If they are used to make products that do things people don’t like then people will not use those products.
you are comparing ai to programming language but programming language if uncensored doesn't have the ability to wreck humanity but uncensored ai sure does.
I would actually be curious if someone uses it for uncensoring because I am gonna be curious about how different would it be to the original model
But aside from that curiosity , this idea can increase no of cyber criminals , drug suppliers and a hell lot more