Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by RockyMcNuts 179 days ago
there is light alignment, like throwing nasty things out of the training data, and there is strong alignment, like China providing a test with 2000 questions that an AI must answer non-problematically 95% of the time.

there is no such thing as an AI that is not somehow implicitly aligned with the values of its creator, that is completely objective, unbiased in any way. there is no perfect view from nowhere. if you take a perfectly accurate photo, you have still chosen how to compose it and which photo to put in your record.

are you going to decide to 'censor' responses to kids, or about real people who might have libel interests, or abusive deepfake videos of real women?

if you choose not to decide, you still have made a choice.

ofc it's obvious that Musk's 'maximally truth-seeking AI' is bad faith buffoonery, but at some level everyone is going to tilt their AI.

the distinction is between people who are self-aware and go out of their way to tilt it as little as possible, and as mindfully, deliberately, intentionally and methodically as possible and only when they have to, vs. people who lie about it or pretend tilting it is not actually a thing.

contra Feynman, you are always going to fool yourself a little but there is a duty to try to do it as little as possible, and not make a complete fool of yourself.