Commentary: AI companies are creating 'all-powerful psychopaths.' Maybe not a great idea?
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Set us as preferred Repeated law-breaking.Lying and deceit.
Reckless disregard for safety.Lack of remorse.
Those are traits that help define a psychopath, someone who lives among us but doesn’t have the empathy and ethics necessary to behave in a civilized, or even safe, fashion.Unfortunately, it’s also increasingly clear that these are the traits that define the most powerful artificial intelligence models being developed at alarming speed by for-profit corporations — corporations that would like us to believe that slowing down this roll toward AI dominance is somewhere between impossible and foolhardy.
It is neither, and that’s not a progressive take — it’s bipartisan common sense.“New rules are needed for this new tech frontier—not to stifle innovation, but to make sure our innovations do not outpace our protections,” Texas Republican Rep.
Nathaniel Moran wrote on social media.He was responding to an incident disclosed in recent days that shows why we probably shouldn’t make artificial psychopaths without at least thinking it through a bit.
OpenAI, the Silicon Valley giant run by Sam Altman, gave two of its models a test recently to judge how well they can hack on their own.Spoiler: Really well.
The test takes hundreds of known flaws in software — they have already been fixed for general use — and asks the models to find a way to use them, exploit them if you will, to do something bad, like hacking into a secure system.It’s like showing a burglar a vulnerable window, then asking him to figure out the best way to break inside and pillage the place.
A real strike on civilization as we know it occurred in Silicon Valley, where a new AI super-brain was locked up because it’s too powerful — and unpredictable.These OpenAI models are very smart.They could have done what was expected and tried e...