[geertj]

> Ensure that Frontier AI Protects Free Speech and American Values

I am in the early phases of collecting my thoughts on this topic so bear with me, but it this a bad thing?

AI models will have a world view. I think I prefer them having a western world view, as that has built our modern society and has proven to be most successful in making the lives of people better.

At the very minimum I would want a model to document its world view, and be aligned to it so that it does not try to socially engineer me to surreptitiously change mine.

[exe34]

> I think I prefer them having a western world view,

What worries me is that the current "western world view" of America is not the same as the western world view we've shared with them since the cold war. The trend is towards the same kind of values and behaviour we see in the Islamic Republic and the Russian Federation. If that sort of "western world view" gets baked into the intelligent infrastructure, it may be very hard to change course in the future. For example dissidence and wrongthink is going to get harder and harder.

[petesergeant]

> but it this a bad thing?

I think the worry is that there’s no fixed definitions here, so the executive can use this to exert partisan or ideological pressure on model providers.

Every four years the models get RLHF’d to switch between thinking guns are amazing vs thinking guns are terrible.

[geertj]

> Every four years the models get RLHF’d to switch between thinking guns are amazing vs thinking guns are terrible.

I may be naive, but on this specific case, I am hoping that an AI could lead us to a somewhat objective truth. There seems to be enough data points to make some conclusion here. For example, most/all counties in Europe have less gun violence than the US, but there are at least two EU counties with high gun ownership (Finland and Austria) that also have low gun violence. The gun ownership issue is so polarized these days, I don’t think we can trust most people to make reason based arguments about it. Maybe an AI could help us synthesize and interpret the data dispassionately.

[eric-burel]

Yeah I mean you'd want to take a look at the plan to get a bigger picture, it reflects a specific set of values which are not universally shared. This should led to the development of European models, but it feels inefficient to duplicate the work in each country/region just because open source models are planned to be used as trojan horses for values.

[AesopAerial]

> I think I prefer them having a western world view, as that has built our modern society and has proven to be most successful in making the lives of people better.

Highly debatable, and most people anywhere would probably say the same thing about whatever world view they hold.

[ben_w]

"Western" != "American": I grew up in a country where even the police are not, and do not wish to be, routinely armed.

Even then, there is an important difference between de-facto and de-jure rules. Fun fact: even North Korea has a constitutional guarantee of freedom of speech and the right vote*. They don't do these things as we would understand any of those words, but they have those things right there in the constitution.

So: does the USA, as it exists today, represent the values you want? Can you honestly say, hand on heart, that Alligator Alcatraz should be a thing your AI has been trained to support? Or that it's fine for Qatar to donate a 747 that becomes part of the library of the current president, not the office of the president, when his term in office comes to an end?

I won't list everything, this isn't the place for that, but even if we wind the clock back a few years, do you (/we) want an AI aligned with a political circus of kayfabe that distracts us from the real political machinations?

Of course, this is still USA-focused.

I'd say that what really made a difference to our quality of life wasn't even the American political system: there were massive improvements to human existence starting with the first industrial revolution in the UK in the 1760s, but the social and political nature of the world back then was so bleak that communism got invented a century later and introduced what was at the time controversial ideas like "women are not property" and "universal free education is good", and the USA's systems changed substantially several times since then (at a minimum Civil War, New Deal, and the Civil Rights movement).

The "meta system" that allows change can be considered good, but not uniquely so if you compare this to the Russian Revolution getting rid of the Tzars and a 40 years later they were in orbit (and this despite the Holodomor and WW2) and then threw off these shackles with Glasnost and the fall of the USSR (and note there that in Russia specifically, not all the former soviet countries but specifically Russia, the freedom gained failed to bring material improvements and the lives of those living through it were, in aggregate, made worse despite that freedom), and similar stories with the Chinese starting with dangerous incompetence (Four Pests campaign) and now in a position where "which is more powerful, them or the USA?" is a matter of which measure you use rather than it being obvious.

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constitution_of_North_Korea#Ch...