ai companies don’t seem to care about being safe.
Google DeepMind released a Frontier Safety Framework about how they will observe AI to make it safe. OpenAI has killed its’ long-term AI risks team in it’s cradle. We should not trust companies with our AI safety if they do not earn it. Most of them at this point have not *truly* earned it.
It is beyond great that Google is making public strides towards AI safety. I am critiquing it because care so much that I want it to be better.
Before I get started, I am also not stating the authors of the paper in question have done anything wrong. In fact, they deserve a lot of praise and support for the work they are currently doing. My primary issue is the people above the researchers: people within Google who are deciding what to do about AI safety.
Similar to the US government, instead of making moves towards AI safety, Google has announced a roadmap to accomplish AI safety. There is a difference in between achieving something, and saying that you are doing things to achieve something.
It is amazing we have tangible examples of frameworks. But it is also not enough.
Here’s the problem: frameworks and roadmaps are blueprints of implementation, and the key to execution of these frameworks happens within the implementation.
Whether or not something will truly save humanity from risks requires really hard to ask questions. Like, “what is a threat that would facilitate shutdown? Should we quantify it? Who will verify that quantification? Who will sign off on the shutdown?”
Transparency about safety means nothing without transparency of verification. A framework is great, but we need to know every level, every step, and to be able to know tangible criteria so that it can be measured and replicated by a 3rd party.
AI safety must happen in an open field, not in a closed box.
It should not only deal with the frameworks, but with edge cases, the quantification of data, the shareholders in charge and how they ensure diversity within them, and so on. That being said, there’s a lot companies don’t want us to know in the way of industry secrets.
Especially in the AI boom we are dealing with now, the pressure to scale and put stuff out without regards for ethical considerations is immense.
Many AI products were not shared out of safety concerns, and OpenAI had broken that seal by masquerading as a non-profit with a fun tinkering breakthrough before commercializing it and speed running r/technology hating them.
There is little incentive besides PR and political strife that pushes these companies to focus on safety right now. Anything can be drowned out with the flush of money that knocks down ethics in its’ wake.
One of the things I advocate for is a clear user map from harm experienced by user -> fix quantifying it.
Imagine I release an app that texts girls they are hot using the ChatGPT API. If that model within my app texts one woman that she’s an ugly bitch and she should kill herself, there should be a way for her to directly communicate that to all parties involved, and remeditation for that harm.
In simpler terms, there would be a clear layer by layer solution that tracks each step and allows the end result to be communicated across the stakeholders who created the product, and to direct opportunities for the person harmed to have it communicated in some way.
Building a proper AI safety infrastructure means a building framework. But it includes information to the public and public education (like the CDC does for health risks) about potential spam and scams. Safety means work, work, work, and more work that just makes people feel as though they are being restricted.
But, safety can also mean innovation and creativity.
It could include things like hashed image values for generative AI, which would allow law enforcement to track Child Sexual Abuse Material (CSAM) generated by AI and to link it back to the user. It includes clear paths and pipelines from someone who experiences harm by a 3rd party, all the way back to that model or item that caused harm.
I think the FAA does an absolutely amazing job at this. They face a multi-layered issue: manufacturers of products and the people who use those products on a large number of people. The underlying products themselves (airplanes) can be unsafe in manufacturing, or they can be operated in an unsafe way (airlines).
The FAA works on every level, from manufacturing, to working directly with airlines, to tracking all of the safety-critical maintenance that happens on those airplanes.
When the NTSB investigates major accidents, they work with the FAA to enforce safety through regulation. Even then, the FAA has continually had issues over the years with regulation. Nevertheless, they provide a starting point to think about true AI (and tech products in general) safety.
It is not just about a framework, but transparency about WHAT happens within that framework.
We hear all too often of “safety councils“ or research teams. But, as OpenAI and Twitch dissolve their own, we see too often that these are groups that work within the shadows. They do not have true autonomy and power to create change.
There is no safety without power. Safety needs power, money, advocates, storytellers, and resources. And we should be very critical of what a company says about safety, versus how they treat it internally.
Everything that comes out of a CEO’s mouth is a PR statement that is flavored with shareholder jack-off Gatorade. When CEOs say to us they “rweally rweally care about ai safety uwu 🥺” in the press, but they are laying off crucial safety teams and adding layers of abstraction away from harm instead of turning towards it to find solutions, you have your answer.
Just because a company has a safety team doesn’t mean they give a 1/5th of a fuck about your safety.
The reason I love technology so much is there has never in our time been such a visible mascot of change. Tech itself is synonymous in our cultural mind with change, invention, chaos, and ultimately: impact.
As we outsource models to companies and deliver the results through an API, there’s layers of abstraction from harm.
There’s many reasons for this. People don’t want to tell their boss they fucked up, CEOs don’t want to go to the board and say “we’re leaving millions of dollars on the table because this makes us feel bad”, and companies want to feel in-the-know, but not drowning in information.
This leads to abstractions and games of corporate telephone, which all makes co-ordinating safety and caring about it hard. It has to come from the top down. The people who are in charge and have power need to care.
When the people who program the tool and who make money from the tool are abstracted away from those consequences, we come face to face with harm again. That abstraction of AI model harm away from people in charge of safety is what I’m most concerned about.
I don’t know that we will ever truly get there, but it is worth fighting to make things that enable massive impact safe for everyone. This will require more than what we can advocate for. It requires political reform, public pressures on tech companies, and larger education around the harms of tech. But, the wheels of time turn.
We will come to see if these companies follow through with their frameworks (historically unlikely). But, the history of tech and safety has always been a give and pull. This time is no different.
There was a point in our history where texting and driving was not yet known to be dangerous. In fact, tech companies even FOUGHT politicians to stop them from enacting anti-texting and driving bills, stating they were hurting the freedom of the user and were “un-American”.
Over time, public opinions had shifted based on the harm caused, and tech companies had no choice but to encourage people to be responsible.
Demand transparency, and demand clarity. Demand multi-layer safety implementations, resources and power to those focusing on risks and ethics, and political money and support towards mitigating negative harm these models create.
Demand diverse voices, and action within the company that aligns with the PR sheen they spray over every word.
More importantly, demand that they treat the impact they have on your lives with care.
