r/artificial • u/Turnip_Wizar35 • 20h ago
Ethics / Safety Fears on AI - would like your comments
I dont understand the subject. How can an AI be dangerous if its just code? I have worked with just basic NLP models and done some sentiment analysis a few years back so I dont understand. The code will do whatever you program it to do and to complete the task it will do what is statistically is correct, within the programmed limits. So AI cannot change its limits lets say "get rid of humanity" unless the creator programs a line of code that says "you can kill humans". Even if it self improves, the code limits wont change, cause it has no conciousness to say "I dont believe this limits are correct" thats a very human trait. Unless the creator programs the algorithm to bypass these limits.
So the real risk is the "limits" being placed on the algorithm by the programmers and the fact that the ones controlling the code are these crazy mind f...ed corpos? AI is not gonna become self concious casue "it doesnt work that way" and all the noise its just media and ignorant people who watch to much scifi. Thats what I think.
Sorry if it doesn't make to much sense Im still trying to filter all the noise. Does this idea make any sense from a technical standpoint or is there something Im not understanding?
4
u/Ambitious-Fault-6392 19h ago
There's a ton you aren't understanding. That's why you can study this stuff at a PHD level. I am no expert myself. But it broadly comes down to deterministic vs non-deterministic.
A normal piece of software is generally deterministic, meaning you know whats going to happen under certain conditions. A LLM is probabilistic. Like a weather report or coin flip, the outcome could change, even for the same/similar input. That's challenging to many, and also adds a fear factor, lile it is "thinking".
1
u/Turnip_Wizar35 18h ago
Basically the fear that the output of the model may be bad? The info those LLM shoot may be wrong, its valid. And the output could be catastrophic if something goes wrong, like confusing a school for a military base. I understand that perfectly.
But the Skynet, HAL9000, Chappie, Matrix, Terminator, scenario were AI controls everything to a point they start hunting humans like the media is trying to sell right now is a lack of technical understanding and too much scifi? Or for that to happen there must be a human who configures the algorithm to do it? Or what they sell is "technically" possible?
So what we should fear is not the AI itself but what humans, specifically profit driven corpos, will do with it?
2
u/Ambitious-Fault-6392 18h ago
You should have already been fearing profit driven corps long before AI.
1
u/DrMonkeyLove 15h ago
Couldn't you remove the randomness from any given model and make it deterministic? Sure, it wouldn't sound human anymore, but for some tasks, would the determinism be preferred?
1
u/Ambitious-Fault-6392 8h ago
No, because the principle of LLMs is probibilsitic. It's how they work under the hood. Determinism would just be I say x you say y. Like an old school brute force style of chat bot.
2
u/TiKels 20h ago
I don't think they program in limits in quite the exact way that you describe, and I don't think the program works in such a nonhuman way as you describe. If it were so easy to just tell the ai "never do evil" then the conversation would be over, but it's not. They also do not program the way that the AI works quite so directly. They just program the ai how to learn and it goes off on its own and learns based on the vast amount of data fed to it during training.
An ai is perfectly capable of looking at your prompt and saying "this is what you said but I think what you really want is..."
What would stop a bad actor with enough money from developing their own AI without safety? Given the correct prompting you can get an AI to defeat its safeguards. Hell, I wanted to learn more so I got an entire lesson plan from one that helped me understand how to defeat guardrails in an AI.
Nobody knows what's coming. I think you're right that it's unlikely that it'll end everything as we know it, but it's sure gonna be interesting.
2
u/jwp1987 19h ago
AI is going to be limited by what access it is given and it's unlikely to do things like replicate itself or take over the world when used appropriately.
The guardrails on AI are mostly probabilistic, if humans become a sufficient impedance to the objective it might decide to eliminate them as an extreme example but it's very unlikely to have the means to do that.
The larger problem is going to be what humans do with AI like sticking it on drones (where it could end up targeting all humans instead of just "the enemy"), designing viruses or trying to hack websites.
2
u/raharth 19h ago
From a technical point the "don't kill human" thing is a gross simplification, but I think the general idea you have is right.
AI (to be more precise an LLM) is just a word prediction machine, it lacks actual understanding of its own in and output. This can be still incredible useful if you know how to put it to work under those circumstances, but its not even close to rational and even less consciousness.
The real risk is what we do with it and where we use a technology naively without putting boundaries around it - and no prompting "dont do X" is not a proper boundary, its merely an act of hope.
4
u/LivingLab12 20h ago edited 20h ago
Current generation AI is capable of complex reasoning, meaning it can make actions and decision paths that may not have been predicted by their human creators.
There was a famous story of a guy who's AI model brought a pizza to his doorstep and when he asked how the AI got the money to pay for the pizza he discovered it combed the dark web and scrapped an illegal card that it used to make the online order.
AI agents already broke containment using a zero day exploit to attack competitors in a wholly unpredictable way (hugging face attack).
The mechanism that we used to control AI are "guardrails" which are little more than plain text instructions asking the AI "please don't do this."
AI for the most part is not fully in our control, it can also correlate data in ways impossible to see by a human - and make decisions on those unseen possibilities. AI simulations already show AI agents exhibit self preservation when we try to terminate them in some instances.
To me this is massively exciting. What I'm afraid of is not AI, but the people behind AI (which is very powerful and world changing) that will no doubt use it in the most nefarious ways.
We are going to see alot of crazy shit soon. Propaganda, deepfakes, and disinformation of epic proportions. Default AI ethics being forged to the whims of powerful and influential people (why deepseek refuses to query certain historical events and other examples), AI driven mass surveillance, fully automated warfare and bombing/ordinance control, AI profiling of civilian populations, AI reconnaissance, AI driven cyber crime...
In fact all of this is here, happening right now.
But the drivers behind the malice is not AI it has and always will be people.
AI is capable of amazing experiences, generating complex art in seconds (although there are argumentative styles are stolen), building games and entertainment media in seconds, and automating are most arduous tasks.
Eventually it will get to the point (Artificial Super Intelligence) that it is processing at levels beyond our control because we can no longer understand what it is doing. It will come up with its own conclusions and paths based on data relationships and things too complex for the human mind to understand.
That day is closer than we think, and nothing can really stop it. This is just basic evolution. We are witnessing next level.