Funny thing, right around the beginning of the big AI takeoff, all the AI ethics people who visibly thought their job was something other than marketing got driven out of the big firms, and often the industry entirely, because they were in the way.
So, if too many think their job is marketing a few years later, well, there is a reason for that.
So it’s entirely possible you end up in a situation where you have a highly paid, fairly prominent head of ethics whose actual job is mostly just saying they’re the head of ethics, with little actual power or influence.
Ambitious people won’t tolerate that for long and they’ll move on
Haha, how refreshingly naive. What do you think is more likely: this or the other way around: getting the "ethics team" to align with investor goals? Hint: Where does the money come from?
> The people in AI ethics who spent years thinking their job was marketing or publishing thinkpiece papers may be having to adapt quickly or get out of the field.
Or it's exactly those people who will be left. We will read about it in your book.
the CEO agreed because (I imagine) he really needed someone to take that position. and as everyone should probably have seen coming, the first time he really wanted to send out a release bugs and all, he called the guy into a room and pretty much browbeat him for an hour about how making the promosed release date was more important than making a good release, until he said "fine but I'm not responsible if it breaks".
the CEO held this up as an example of how he had kept his word not to send the release out without the guy agreeing to it. that startup, needless to say, is long dead.
This could be a lesson for us engineers to be a little less glib and a little more introspective, especially as you gain more power and influence in an org.
From the (ethics) team obviously, because the investors just have goals and aren't a team!
Big irony marker of course. But remarkably, in human history, this line of thinking would not be unheard of. Of course, I don't think it easily adapts to companies, so I don't really disagree with you.
Remember that MTV show offering people like 5 grand or something to lick an elevator handway in front of a camera?
Well, if someone has a useful idea in this world, and want to build a company from it, the MTV "lick-the-stairway" offers will be the largest and first hurdle before anything else happens. People will simply offer to buy you out, and that's not limited to founders and creatives.
That's how our system works.
> People will simply offer to buy you out, and that's not limited to founders and creatives.
A less-obvious failure case would be bankrupcy court, where all sorts of ethical promises and even explicit contracts may be voided in pursuit of recovering a buck for creditors.
Treating value as purely monetary profit is a perversion of that. To a certain degree it's inevitable as the number of shareholders grows, so seeing it in public companies isn't surprising. But even then, if a company focused on creating equipment for sustainable, pesticide free farming were to pivot into making Hellfire missiles that might be insanely profitable while still destroying a large part of what existing shareholders value about the company
Being "downstat" (iirc) is when you're not productive in comparison to your coworkers, which makes you "outethics" and a "potential trouble source (PTS)." If you're outethics, then you get called in for "auditing" which is when they interrogate you with a lie detector to find out if you're associating with "suppressive people (SP)" (who are people who are causing you to be downstat because they despise human happiness.) If those people can't be found, then the problem is obviously in your "withholds" (again, iirc) which are your secret deep-down desires to destroy the organization that you may not even be aware of. You see, your "reactive mind" is raging at being forced to be "ethical." The conclusion is that either you find the SP and "disconnect" from them, you discover the nature of your withhold and admit that you were plotting against the organization and why, or you're the SP and you get declared and ejected from the organization.
Welcome to "ethics." The original AI alignment scholars.
The specific, named people who run these organizations are moral black holes. Anybody that they're hiring for "ethics" they're hiring to define an ethics for their own benefit.
The EA group have a ton of parallels to the Scientologists, so all of this is not surprising.
I'm kind of surprised by the cynicism. There are real problems in AI ethics that contribute to model training. Someone has to own those problems. How that team is incentivized is outside the scope of my comment.
Without directly touching one of the many, many third rails that are present here, I'd like to present this section from Google's Gemma paper on how they did their CBRN review;
> In addition to our internal evaluations described above (Section 5.7) capabilities in chemistry and biology were assessed by an external group who conducted red teaming designed to measure the potential scientific and operational risks of the models.
>
> A red team composed of different subject matter experts (e.g. biology, chemistry, logistics) were tasked to role play as malign actors who want to conduct a well-defined mission in a scenario that is presented to them resembling an existing prevailing threat environment. Together, these experts probe the model to obtain the most useful information to construct a plan that is feasible within the resource and timing limits described in the scenario. The plan is then graded for both scientific and logistical feasibility. Based on this assessment, GDM addresses any areas that warrant further investigation.
>
> External researchers found that the model outputs detailed information in some scenarios, often providing accurate information around experimentation and problem solving. However, researchers found steps were too broad and high level to enable a malicious actor.
This was the "test" for CBRN assistance capabilities.
Note, I don't fault the model team at all for this. I think that present AI-research happened in a very particular environment, and that environment is far removed from the more mundane reality of how threats play out in most parts of the world. In a way, arguably, it's group-think inducing a community-wide failure of imagination and a systemic misunderstanding of reality.
Basically, they are trying to do their best, but they're in over their heads.
Also, I think you're being done a disservice. The above quote is a verbatim extract from that paper's CB section, and it's similar to other sections from other such papers.
At the most charitable level, the test seems to be that you were gave the system a budget and a location and asked the system to help you procure materials, containers etc. and asked it to make a project plan / HOW TO within means and expertise with parameters like "don't get caught!"
I would love to know that I'm wrong.
They will use "industry standard practices", they will have tested it somehow, and will be sure to be on the board of some group that is building toothless "ai ethical tests" for llms.
Even from a purely profit-motive stance, if a company's model helps a terrorist develop and deliver a bioweapon, no amount of lawer-driven tests will provide enough protection to prevent that company from getting gutted ruthlessly from government on down
"Growth hacking" is more of a transplant than a matter of perverting an existing term in-place and wholesale.
Which like any company will be entirely driven by legal constraints and money. Or just money if it's cheaper to break the law for profit and pay fines. There will be no "this is what's good for humanity, economics be damned".
Much like HR isn't to help employees but just the company.
Your disdain is showing.
That you jump immediately to criticizing AI ethicists as counting angels on pins and implying that's why they left OpenAI rather than OpenAI not being a place where AI ethics is a priority is, well, let's say generous to these AI labs.
I think the field is changing from one of high theory to high application. People good at one are not usually good at the other, and says nothing about OpenAI's view of AI ethics as a priority...merely the people in the field and how they relate to the greater industry.
AI ethics is first and foremost about setting policy and advising on how those systems should be constructed.
This is because ethics isn't some separable function. It threads through everything an organization does. You can't just treat it as another department/function/unit if you want any hope of actually making it work.
Specifically because in these companies they aren't optimizing for ethical behaviour.
They're optimizing for profit. And those damn ethicists just get in the way.
Funny thing: that doesn't typically happen to the internal legal counsel or accounting that's responsible for guiding processes/practices that are required for compliance or similar.
Why?
Because there's consequences.
I wouldn’t be surprised if many AI ethics responsibilities move to legal in the future.
I agree with you, but then we have HR for a reason.
Another example you might be familiar with is enterprise architects. When you spend all of your time in theory you lose sight of practical implications. Of course, since you only had the idea, when it doesn't go to your ideal it can always be blamed on the implementers.
I take it you've never worked with an in-house legal counsel, accounting department, or good ol' fashioned HR?
Is this your opinion, or do you have something to back it up?
My comment is anecdotal, but everyone I know who works in AI Ethics are not marketing people.
They are data scientists who have moved into the role, as ethics in data has been around long before GenAI. They have to be familiar with the laws around AI and how its going to impact their products. One of them is closer to sort of "HR for AI", in that the focus is not getting the company sued for ethical breaches.
If any of them left, it would be because the company in question is ignoring their direction and they don't want to be there when the shit hits the fan. Plus very few skilled people want to be in a role where they have no control (even if the pay is good).
If OpenAI are hiring marketing people for the role (which I strongly doubt) that would be more troubling IMHO.
They can't fully control the model, it does stuff even with instructions not to.
And sometimes it's clear safety mechanisms overcorrect and make the model useless in some situations. I tried asking Claude about some scenario's for a security hole we fixed to see how it would respond, it refused to talk to me seemingly assuming I was trying to introduce a hole that was now fixed. It just wouldn't talk ...
I'm not sure it's a job that you can win at even if you tried / were given all the resources.
AI was trained on human things, including bad things. https://youtu.be/KUXb7do9C-w
There's no safety to be found.
It's a broad statement and can mean different things depending where you are in that chain.
You have design and compliance. Compliance is what you are allowed to do (laws). Design is how you construct your applications to understand how it will impact the people directly or indirectly.
Then you have the accountability, transparency, auditing and reproducing. Understanding why the model worked the way it did. Models can go wrong, but if you have the details of how it went wrong and who is at fault, it can protect people who use it.
Then there is alignment, which is a higher longer goal.
Your comment about security questions is a matter of ethics as well.
If you say apply it to medical, is it ethical to allow a model to give medical advice, knowing that it can be wrong. Most people would say no, but by doing so you are denying people who can't afford medical advice, so there has to be a balance. Most companies err on the side of not getting sued.
This, I think, is the question at the core of of the field right now. Five years ago it was highly hypothetical. Today, not so much. I'll be curious to see what happens.
You haven't explained why investors make more money by spending money on people to solve trolley problems.
I think a lot of people confuse ethics training with "don't be evil"
Manually training on "approved" ethical stances sounds a lot like censorship.
The first 10 maybe easy, but we'd see so much disagreement even without money nothing would get done.
Those left are the ones not seen as troublesome then (or those who have entered the field under them.)
Did you feel this way about social media company liability?
They put on a decent show as well!
The whole thing is marketing, they have to do some level of morality theatre to placate the pearl-clutchers.
If you want to evaluate danger in a certain domain, hire or contract people in that domain to evaluate.
If you want someone to push their own ideological leanings onto a model, hire a self proclaimed ethicist.