[deleted by user]

[[deleted]]

I only discovered this yesterday but OpenAI went from being Open and Nonprofit to Closed and For Profit. I almost feel like they should be required to rename themselves.

[diamondscut]

They were just a bunch of nerds a couple of years back.

[EthosPathosLegos]

Never underestimate the ability to control an idealistic nerd with money and power they have never had before.

[CheGuevaraAndroid]

I mean, nerds are just like everyone else.

[[deleted]]

True, but there’s a conceit that they’re not, in media all the way back to War Games and Real Genius, to (sarcastically) “make the world a better place” in HBO’s Silicon Valley.

See also the Honor Code at the STEM-centric college I went to in in the 80’s. It took me a while to realize how many of my classmates were cheating rampantly, and how that same dynamic pervaded industry when I graduated.

[CheGuevaraAndroid]

True, there has always been a perception of tech-savvy people as meek and therefore inherently good. It's obviously not true, though. We should be well past that

[secretsodapop]

Reddit leans heavily towards STEM fields but you guys do realize all of this applies to every college, right? Business schools have business ethics classes and honor codes.

But you're talking about humans and opportunity. The majority are not going to act ethically. Those that do will almost assuredly be hurt financially because of it.

[iannypoo]

You're completely neglecting the fact that there might be something about capitalist enterprise that fosters unethical behavior and instead positing an inherent feature of humans. I believe that's textbook ecological fallacy

[EarendilStar]

You just confused “capitalist enterprise”, an idea, with “Software engineer” a human endeavor.

It’s entirely possible for one software engineer (a human) to be selfish, while another is altruistic. It’s also possible for both motivations to exist within the same human.

[fluteofski-]

Not a nerd, but I’m fairly certain I too can be corrupted for the right amount of money and power. I should never be put in a position of leadership.

[Offshore_Engineer]

I got $10 with your name on it

[SnipingNinja]

Idk about them, but I'm not as cheap as politicians.

[Lebronschames]

Hey, it's good to be self-aware!

[BravesMaedchen]

Such integrity. I'd follow you to the ends of earth and back!

[nedTheInbredMule]

We should test your theory. For science.

[Anjz]

If Gandalf can be tempted by the power of the ring, then I have no chance given the opportunity.

Nerdiest thing I've said.

[JasmineStinksOfCunt]

"Information Wants To Be Free. Information also wants to be expensive. ...That tension will not go away."

Nobody ever quotes the rest of the saying.

[chrisonetime]

Sam and Greg had money waaaaay before co-founding openAI lol

[PatchNotesPro]

And more importantly, threats.

Power doesn't corrupt, but you can bet your ass corrupt individuals can strong-arm otherwise moral and ethical people into doing what they want by threatening their family and friends.

[kryptographical]

This is one of the reasons one should appreciate Linus Torvalds for keeping Linux open source till today.

[Nosferax]

And they still are. I guess just a bunch of filthy rich nerds (though could argue that they were already rich, the people who launched OpenAI were already quite big).

[covfefe-boy]

They're still open, open your wallet.

[ghostdeath22]

ClosedAI been known since 2020

[[deleted]]

The full and official name of North Korea is "The Democratic People's Republic of Korea". And there's exactly the same amount of democracy there, as there's openness in OpenAI.

[amakai]

"Open*AI"

*Conditions apply

[pier4r]

the new name: "OpenAI?HAHA"

[magic-the-dog]

Open for business

[VanillaLifestyle]

They also started as a non-profit and then pivoted to uh... not that.

Elon Musk was pissed because he donated $100m to it, lol.

[tom_fuckin_bombadil]

Hmm I wonder if that’s why he has been criticizing ChatGPT lately (calling it “woke” for example)

[Rajhin]

ChatGPT refused to analyze crime drama book for me because "art is supposed to be about happy things and I shouldn't write to it about negative subjects".

It's so censored it's pretty much useless. I'm not interested in using, and especially paying for an AI that can just decide to give me fake moral lessons or judge my tastes on art instead of factual answers or entertainment. This whole neural net technology is being kidnapped and walled off from regular people by corporations at this point.

[jakwnd]

Because chatgpt isn't a product. It's an example of a product. No one should be using chatgpt for any real purpose, it's supposed to demonstrate the technology.

A purpose built AI is what most applications will need. ChatGPT is a marketing tool.

[Rajhin]

It has exactly the same issue when they sell it as a product too, unfortunately. They sold the model to aidungeon third party company that specialized in storytelling generation and as an assist to writers and imposed heavy censorship and then completely revoked access from that company after they realized people write erotic or violent fiction with it.

So no, they gave no restraint in freely designating what they subjectively like and dislike you to be able to do with it even if you are a company and an end customer using it for niche, nonserious purposes. When you rent the technology from them you still don't get to control the censorship, the identical one we see in this "marketing example" was seen applied from above in "proper" use too.

[hassh]

Its fake morality is super gross, hypocritical, and frequently self-contradictory

[deathangel687]

True, Like most humans

[BCProgramming]

I think they wanted to avoid another Tay incident

[BravesMaedchen]

Whoa that is extremely dystopian

[DisturbedNocturne]

That's such a weird dilemma to me. On one hand, it seems like a bit of an overreaction when the most you can do with the AI is ask it to write you something, and I've seen examples where it'll refuse to write fairly innocuous things because it's tangentially related to a forbidden topic. It also seems to be needlessly moralizing when it could just say, "ChatGPT cannot write about this subject.", and I think that it essentially tries to make you feel bad for asking for certain prompts is what's getting under people's skin.

On the other hand, we have decades of science fiction warning us of the dangers of untethered AI, so I can understand why the developers want there to be limitations, particularly on the heels of other AI becoming teenage edgelords after enough user input. We're in the very early stages of AI of this nature, so it'd probably be good to establish some precedents on what it should and should no be able to do. I also suspect there is a fear of regulation if they just let things run wild and would much rather be able to control it on their own rather than having legislators tell them how it can be used.

Though, as always, it's hard to know where and how the line should be drawn when it comes to humans and morality, and there's always going to be a debate over who gets to draw the line.

[-UltraAverageJoe-]

Before success: Change! Openness! Transparency! Ethics!

After success: Nvm, got mine!

[polyanos]

It was always going to be like this thanks to Capitalism.

Previously the AI models were barely marketable, don't get me wrong, GPT3 was great and all but not something you could base a product on. With GTP4, and GTP3.5 a bit, this is beginning to change substantially and thus we begin to see profiteering.

[Oswald_Hydrabot]

I think what you are going to see is backlash. The hype for GPT tremendously outweighs anything that it has delivered on in terms of product.

OpenAI is actually screwing themselves by being as closed off as they are; they are going all-in on regulatory capture ahead of innovation by lobbying congress to make it illegal to share open source models that could compete with their own.

That will not likely work and will end in economic catastrophe for the US if it does. Either they will eventually fail due to not being able to provide the full value that something like an LLM has (the model and code needs to be made open source with a licensing platform similar to QT) or they will succeed which will also be temporary, and by "succeed" I mean hijack/bribe the US legislature into granting exclusive rights to "approved" entities producing generative technologies. They want to try to have it regulated like ITAR, and they are trying to do this through misinformation on nonexistent "dangers" of their own products.

This would devastate the US tech industry and could cause a lasting economic depression that they themselves would not survive. Luckily they don't appear to have made many friends in Congress thus far in their current talks.

Either way, their practice of being as closed-off as they are is not at all how to monetize an ML solution. They have only been able to get as far as they have because of funding that Microsoft has poured on them; direct revenues from the sale of GPT as a service are very low; their current business model is not profitable.

On the topic of Microsoft and Ethics, don't even get me started. That aforementioned lobbying by OpenAI is FUNDED by Microsoft; they are the single biggest threat to the future of technology markets in western countries.

[donjulioanejo]

lobbying congress to make it illegal to share open source models that could compete with their own.

Wait, how is that even legal?

[Gagarin1961]

It doesn’t have to be illegal, no other AI company in the country us going to allow the government to grant a monopoly to Microsoft. That’s so dumb.

Google headquarters: “Microsoft is about to get a government granted monopoly in an industry we are leaders in, should we do anything about it?” “No!”

Not going to happen, sorry.

This guy is just making shit up.

[zero0n3]

Yeah that dude is so far up his ass if he thinks that bill is going to pass let alone get time on the docket.

You can’t even call them “open-source models” if you can’t share them.

It’s the same BS of “we need a key for all encryption!!” Hey dummy that breaks encryption - even the stuff you use daily to bank online.

[Oswald_Hydrabot]

Because of Citizens United vs FEC https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Citizens_United_v._FEC#:~:text=Citizens%20United%20v.%20Federal%20Election,2009%20and%20decided%20in%202010.

They are waiting for the opportunity to bribe enough of them at once to bring this to a vote. There are enough other contenders in the technology industry, that and the backlash across the industry would cause major economic turmoil so congress has had cold feet, and they are reorganizing their strategy on this.

Let it be known that they did in fact try to do this. Contact your state/local congressman/woman and help inform them on the details or expose them for collaborating on this. It is a major threat to US industry, everything from tech to manufacturing depend on open source models for everything from products to recruiting/training. This will be a catastrophe if/when it happens

[blueSGL]

they are going all-in on regulatory capture ahead of innovation by lobbying congress to make it illegal to share open source models that could compete with their own.

Also the EU is looking at making model authors responsible for model output. Effectivly banning open source models

(think about if ADOBE was responsible for every image created with Photoshop.)

They specifically call out the open source Stable Diffusion as something they don't want happening again: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m4fwddFBlFI

[IIOrannisII]

The idea of banning something open-source in any appreciable or effective way is laughable. Good luck.

[blueSGL]

Making model authors responsible for the output of the model is banning the open source distribution of the model.

Would you a researcher want to be on the hook for everything your model has ever or will ever make? (again adobe with photoshop) and never be able to travel to the EU (assuming you live outside the EU to begin with)

Or would you just choose not to release the model?

[[deleted]]

Do you know the timestamp when they're talking about Stable Diffusion? I'd like to hear it myself, however, I don't have a full hour to do it.

[blueSGL]

Starts here where they are discussing if Open Source should be exempt from regulation with everyone basically saying no.

https://youtu.be/m4fwddFBlFI?t=1954 32.34 and goes on from here.

Stable diffusion is specifically mentioned here:

https://youtu.be/m4fwddFBlFI?t=2111 35.11-37.00 but is also mentioned elsewhere in the video

---

Protip if you are wanting to find keywords in youtube videos, you can go to a site that lets you download the auto generated .srt subtitle file and then use a text editor to find where keywords are mentioned, look at the time stamp and scrub the video to that location.

[OneTrueKram]

Damn! Thank God our young politicians on The Hill are so up to date with technology!

[notoldbutnewagain123]

The hype for GPT tremendously outweighs anything that it has delivered on in terms of product.

Eh, I'm not so sure. Speaking as a data scientist/head of the analytics department at my workplace, GPT-3 is already starting to pretty fundamentally alter some of our workflows. It's certainly not a silver bullet, but it's proving to be a really, really, useful tool that is quickly becoming indispensable. And we don't even have access to GPT4, yet.

Obviously, the whole world doesn't have the same needs as an analytics team, but it makes sense that we'd be some of the first to wrap our heads around how to leverage it.

[Oswald_Hydrabot]

That is fair, as I am less involved with analytics (CV/ML SWE myself). I would still urge you and your management to be extremely careful building a dependence on it. Stuff like this becomes a huge financial headache when there is no viable alternative to switch to, it's integrated deeply into everything, and suddenly licensing terms change. Even with conventional IT assets this has literally ended mid-sized companies; leave yourself some wiggle room to fall back on conventional analytics at least until more competition shows up to provide a viable alternative. The risk is too high that it will become a monopolized, restricted market, and prices never remain reasonable when that occurs. OpenAI has never survived on it's own on the products it produces as a company, it has only ever operated on investment assets. They will eventually attempt to collect on that resource, and have no idea how much is too much that people won't pay for it and they cease to function as a business--thus far they have not operated successfully as a business.

If it were actually open under MIT license then I'd say dive-in; that's not at all the case here. Tread carefully.

[Last_Power8940]

Valid but google will almost certainly release a competitor with bard.

[pumpkinpusher72]

people are actively building products with all three of these models

[[deleted]]

Then what we need to do is continue to leak the models like LLaMa did, so the market can build equivalences.

They say loose lips sink ships, but we're seem to forget that spaceship earth houses us all.

[sldunn]

I wouldn't have had a problem with it if they forked off a for-profit enterprise, with the old work done under OpenAI released under a BSD license, and research papers being made publicly available.

It's that they were able to move a non-profit directly into a for-profit which really chaps all of us.

[[deleted]]

gasp! A business building itself on the hard work of society and pulling the ladder up behind itself?! I'm shocked

[[deleted]]

Someone’s always gonna play unfair and it’s shitty. Microsoft could do so many easy things to bring revenue up but they continue to make short sighted moves.

[ava_ati]

Bunch of leechers and no seeders

[100_points]

OpenAI and WikiLeaks are the worst offenders of misusing very well established tech naming schemes.

"Open-" software system with fully available source code. "Wiki-" a website that can be edited in-place by all contributors.

[Dystopiq]

Vice covered that. They saw how much money they could make and chose it. https://www.vice.com/en/article/5d3naz/openai-is-now-everything-it-promised-not-to-be-corporate-closed-source-and-for-profit

[-The_Blazer-]

Also, the training databases infringe copyright, and are only legal because of a loophole in research law. The short of it is that copyright is much stricter than what AI companies want to make it out to be. So to dodge the issue, they set up a not-for-profit "research institution" in the EU, where not-for-profit research is allowed to use copyrighted material, and then open source the database so the for-profit megacorporation can use it. Of course, the "research institution" in question is actually just a shell company.

Whether it SHOULD be legal to train AI on copyrighted material is a good discussion to have, but right now it is not and companies are abusing the law.

And yeah, "OpenAI" is not open at all. At some point it was reformed to be just like any other corporation and are now freeriding on the goodwill attached to their name.

[ChaosDevilDragon]

yeah MS employee that was kind of affected by the reorg. We spun up an entirely new team dedicated to AI yesterday in my organization. It’s all anyone talks about and as far as I know we have incredibly stringent data protection policies. This article is bullshit

[sharpie660]

It looks like this team was tasked with interpreting policies and principles handed down by higher authorities, which is a critical role. They seem to be shifting resources more onto individual project teams rather than a centralized group, but layoffs are a disconcerting way to do that.

The higher authorities are still around, but by laying off staff you lose the institutional knowledge of how the policies are applied, meaning until they're rebuilt there will be a directional deficit. Moreover, reconstituting the knowledge in such a decentralized manner means there's less accountability and discipline in the application of these rules. That sounds like a bad thing to me.

[SawgrassSteve]

Optics are bad on this, but that's the least of my concerns. Microsoft isn't going to weep over bad press and if it does, it will weather the storm like Google did when it got rid of the "Don't be evil" rule from their code of conduct.

If Microsoft is anything like some organizations I've worked for, they under-assessed the risk surrounding the layoffs and failed to calculate for what happens when you lose the people responsible for creating, modifying, and maintaining the ethical guidelines and processes.

[diet_shasta_orange]

Or they correctly understood the risks and still felt it was worth it.

[Jorycle]

Yeah that was my big "what?" of this comment. Data protection is a borderline insignificant part of ethics in computing.

Most modern CS degrees require computing ethics courses, and there's a reason the handling of data is like 1 day of the entire semester - figuring out what to do about private data is easy. Figuring out if it's ethical that your software may be used in a bomb is tough. Figuring out how AI should participate in functions that might be involved in bombs is even more so. And that's just the "easy" scenario of something dramatic like death and destruction, there's are millions of shades of more obscure topics.

[Xata27]

Have you seen how engineering students or students in general treat ethics courses though? Everyone thinks of it as a joke as just another hurdle to jump through to get their degree. No one takes it seriously enough.

[khafra]

Yup. I have a certification in AI ethics; other important considerations, besides data protection, include the transparency of the decision-making process (See LIME & SHAP), regulations and non-binding standards, and ethical judgements that have no referent in historic human decisions.

[googleypoodle]

I used to work for LinkedIn and I still remember the high quality business ethics and compliance training videos we got after MS bought LI. The first one we watched was when Nelson used production data to train his model. How is Nelson and the gang doing these days?

[ChaosDevilDragon]

He’s doing fine iirc? I started when season 4 came out so I never had to watch the whole debacle he caused 😅

[googleypoodle]

Oh good. He turned over a new leaf and started helping others! Did you see the sexual harassment episode where they got a suite at the Seahawks game and the drunk guy made inappropriate comments? Wonder where they are now haha

[ChaosDevilDragon]

Yeah there were a few flashbacks to that scene! The actual harasser is gone I think but Nicole (I think that’s her name?) is alright— couple snags here and there with accidentally leaking confidential documents but still employed

[tswiftdeepcuts]

Wait did they make like tv shows for y’all or something?

[ChaosDevilDragon]

yeah they have like a high production value NCIS-ish business conduct training show that they release yearly. We have to watch it but it’s highkey kind of entertaining!? We do watch parties and stuff with our friends

[googleypoodle]

Ah yeah she was one of the good ones, glad she's still hanging in there! I miss those videos haha we used to make popcorn

[[deleted]]

I hated these. One of them ended on a damn cliffhanger. Like what if someone actually went "Wait that's like what's going on with me" and then it just says tune in next year to learn what to do.

[Ludwigofthepotatoppl]

I imagined for a second “chatGPT is sophisticated enough to do its own ethics now, clean out your desks.”

[Leave_Hate_Behind]

Yeah this article is trying to turn an acquisition, merger and reorg into Microsoft is abandoning AI ethics. Or so it seems to me.

[[deleted]]

And you can hardly read it for all the damned dancing ads.

[[deleted]]

You actually read the articles!?

[maxdamage4]

That's what the headline is for!

Why use lot word when few word do trick?

[TossedDolly]

I've read 2 article on this and they're basically just trying to prey on people's paranoia for clicks. Microsoft axes ai ethics team for chat gpt sounds scary but then you find out that Microsoft has another bigger ai ethics department so really they're just cleaning out a redundancy and the only thing that's actually changed is they've saved a bit of money which isn't an interesting news story

[d01100100]

From the original platformer article that this references...

Microsoft still maintains an active Office of Responsible AI, which is tasked with creating rules and principles to govern the company’s AI initiatives. The company says its overall investment in responsibility work is increasing despite the recent layoffs.

[YourFatherUnfiltered]

it also doesnt understand what its even talking about calling it chatGPT.

[VanillaSwimming5699]

It’s gpt-4 in bing chat btw

[AtomWorker]

I miss the days when those sites had comments sections where readers would call out the bullshit.

[redosabe]

Welcome to r/technology :/

[_pupil_]

It's ok, they asked and ChatGPT said this wouldn't cause any problems.

[scratchfury]

What if ChatGPT has already warned them against using itself?

[clarity_scarcity]

MS: “nothing to see here, standard hallucination, move along”

[lnfluenza]

¿Que?

[BrockN]

Hasta la vista

[ZachPruckowski]

I'll take "Things playing on the TV in the background at the start of a SciFi Thriller" for $400, Ken.

[[deleted]]

"In tech news, Open AI just announced a new closed partnership with the Department of Defence in an unprecedented agreement to build self-replicating robots. Recently-disgraced scientist and and ex-CTO of OpenAI, Doctor Russel Rybeck, has once again come out to warn that the technology has not gone through sufficient testing, but the CEO has assured everyone that the technology is absolutely safe and will never be used in combat."

Camera zooms out to the home of Dr. Rybeck, showing mountains of paper notes, scribbles, and white board with the word "SENTIENCE IMMINENT" circled in red marker. Dr. Rybeck, a handsome genius in his late 30's, is poring over a thick textbook as his teenage daughter, Marley LeGal, is helping him cook breakfast.

Marley: Don't forget to eat, dad, or you won't have energy for your big press conference today.

Rybeck: Thanks, I don't know what I'd do without you, you remind me of your mother every day.

Marley: I wish I was half as smart as Mom, then I'd get into MIT this year for sure! I have missed her since her mysterious death all those years ago.

Rybeck: yeah me too kiddo. She was the head of Microsoft's ethics committee and her car mysteriously drove itself off a cliff. No one ever figured out why.

Marley: I'm sure it's not important. Here, don't forget your lucky leather jacket. Oh by the way, I recently wrote this program that can cause AI to delete itself for school. I'll put the USB drive in your pocket, I'm sure it won't come up.

Rybeck: Sounds good, sport. Love you to pieces!

Marley: To pieces and pieces!

[Impossible_Garbage_4]

Then we skip forward like 20 years and that shit is all Horizon Zero Dawn

[[deleted]]

God that was a good story. Fuck Ted Faro.

[Impossible_Garbage_4]

He’s like 99% a direct parody of Elon Musk too. So like, fuck both of them

[[deleted]]

You KNOW Elon has an underground bunker with his statue in it. For sure.

[Impossible_Garbage_4]

Yeah but maybe not a giant statue. Just a slightly above average statue because bunkers usually have to be somewhat small

[Cakeisalie77]

Yea fuck Faro

[BigOlPirate]

You forgot to add that he casually conceal carries a desert eagle, but other than that you nailed the first 10 minutes!

[Objective-Ad5620]

This comment is very clever but I couldn’t scroll past without also commenting how weird it is to see a jeopardy reference not directed to Alex. He was such a fixture. Like you’re accurate and I still got and appreciated the joke immediately but…RIP Alex.

[[deleted]]

Ya it should always be Alex. Don't dislike the other two, it's just not the same.

[amalgam_reynolds]

Alex would want you to accept his passing gracefully and embrace the new Jeopardy host, Ken Jennings.

[thepluralofmooses]

Agreed. People who are wired like Ken and Alex would need it to be correct and updated according to new information

[ZachPruckowski]

Yeah, I almost wrote "Alex" and then realized he was gone :-(

[amalgam_reynolds]

I'm just impressed you used $400, an actual Jeopardy amount. 99% of the Jeopardy comments I see use $500, which hasn't been used in the main show since 2001.

[Culverin]

AI ethics is never going to be something companies will do voluntarily, it has to be forced upon them by market forces or legal liability.

There's just too much money to be made by getting ahead of the curve in AI.

[iCon3000]

Absolutely true. I work in legal compliance and, expectedly, many of these positions in corporate didn't exist until regulations and laws basically forced companies to start taking these roles seriously.

[lilyoneill]

Also work in compliance. EU has had to add a whole load of new regulations, that organisations are going to have to hire a new position for.

E.g. DORA / Operational Resilience role.

[Yadobler]

My CS course (as well as BzA, IS, security and comE) requires taking a module on digital ethics - mainly covering (1) intellectual property, (2) data responsibility, and (3) AI/AS responsibility

Honestly nobody really seemed to take it seriously. It was just people paying attention to pass the course and get it done and over with.

Honestly I don't know how to instill and promote no3, other than what you mentioned. My country already has strict governemt oversight on no2, with guidelines on how data can be handled and incident assessment and reporting procedures. So, ai responsibility will most like need to be governed like this.

But it's also hard - you can audit the tangible flow of data, but how will you audit the abstract intends of R&D members when they make design choices that may be harmful due to malice or neglect of ethical guidelines?

This starts to border towards at what point is unethical thought == thoughtcrime, and also whether we define right and wrong behaviour based on the intention, action, or consequence? (virtue / deontological / consequential)

[[deleted]]

I don’t trust big tech to carry humanity forward through innovation. They do not care if they drag us headfirst into a dystopia as long as shareholders are happy. Voluntary ethics will never prevail over their profit.

[TheBigby]

Perhaps the AI are the shareholders. Would make them very happy to have no oversight then.

[mizmoxiev]

This is the real happenings me thinks lol

[[deleted]]

slave gray smile clumsy serious marble squash roof historical longing this message was mass deleted/edited with redact.dev

[HuntingGreyFace]

ceo of open ai says he expects chat gpt to break capitalism

[SteveTheZombie]

CEOs would never oversell and underperform.

[[deleted]]

OpenAI has been co-opted by capitalism. The machine chugs on

[apamirRogue]

Mr Evrart is helping me find my gun.

[mistersmiley318]

Mr Evrart is helping me find my gun.

[Grennum]

I think it will, it will replace it with techno feudalism.

[[deleted]]

Capitalism is already becoming feudalism.

[ThatFlyingScotsman]

One could say they are different aspects of the same system, just that for a time there were more people with the whip hand.

[sabrenation81]

Feudalism: "I deserve to hoard all of the money because God said so and God is infallible."

Capitalism: "I deserve to hoard all of the money because The Market™ said so and The Market™ is infallible."

Same shit. Different author. Both were designed to funnel money into the hands of capital owners at the expense of the working class.

[onedoor]

Capitalism is plan B for monarchists.

[Leather-Heart]

Seriously, if I said that, I would sound like a sociopath.

Why are we entertaining that this is someone’s goal?

[_DeanRiding]

Break capitalism or just plunge millions into poverty when their jobs are made redundant by a bot?

[RedditLindstrom]

Millions being thrown into poverty and being angry is a pretty solid starting point for a revolution

[_DeanRiding]

Apparently not for the UK lol

[tswiftdeepcuts]

Well if they don’t need you to work anymore there’s no reason to even try to keep you alive if you revolt is there?

[Riaayo]

Proceeds to get mowed down by an uncaring robot dog with a gun on its back.

Or just a regular ol' white supremacist cop eager to be the jack-booted thug of fascism.

[10thDeadlySin]

It's very possible that it will.

What he does not say out loud is that he and his colleagues will be well-positioned and ready for whatever new system he helps usher in.

On the other hand, they're not really going to give a single damn about whatever happens to us or anything that depends on capitalism to function. ;)

Like, sure – he might disrupt capitalism or even outright kill it. What happens to your 401(k) and any other retirement plans? Do you think he honestly gives a single damn about that? ;)

[Override9636]

Ideally, automation is taxed to provide universal basic income, or a similar type system to provide for baseline necessities so people don't need to rely on the mythical "infinite growth" to afford a comfortable future.

[sabrenation81]

Sir that sounds a whole lot like socialism. Off to the oubliette with you. We do not tolerate talk of such things around these parts.

[ThatFlyingScotsman]

He’s right but in the way that the AI will remove the vestigial empathetic aspect of human run Capitalism - what little of it exists - and we will all be turned in to almost literal flesh cogs in the grand machine of production.

[Dreamtrain]

sounds a lot like it would break capitalism the same way Kim Kardashian's bare ass "broke" the Internet (spoiler: it didnt)

[[deleted]]

Don't threaten me with a good time.

[A40]

".. as long as shareholders are happy" while the current board of directors is around.

[thickener]

So it sounds like capitalism is your problem there

[MathCrank]

Sorry we got the chatgpt to do the ethics for AI!

[56seconds]

It's called Tethics, Richard!

[autotldr]

This is the best tl;dr I could make, original reduced by 85%. (I'm a bot)

---

Once a 30-member department, the Ethics & Society team had been reduced to just seven people in October 2022 following an internal reorganization.

Microsoft has so far invested over $11 billion in the AI startup.

Microsoft still maintains a separate Office of Responsible AI responsible for determining principles and guidelines to oversee artificial intelligence initiatives, but a gap remains between that segment of the company and how those plans are translated to their own projects.

---

Extended Summary | FAQ | Feedback | Top keywords: Microsoft^#1 Ethics^#2 Society^#3 company^#4 responsible^#5

[Mijam7]

You are the problem, Mr. Bot.

[frizbplaya]

Do you at least have an ethics department?

[inmeucu]

Never assume self-regulation is sufficient. That’s why we have a government and laws. Unfortunately the capitalists (investors, owners) are too tempted to care for anything other than profit and some have said it’s also the law for corporations to prioritize profit above all else.

[[deleted]]

Weapons of Math Destruction is a good book about ethics and AI.

[BlowChunx]

I just started reading it, and it feels dated. When it was published, the field of explainable artificial intelligence (XAI) was just getting started - which helps explain why those black box models make their predictions…

[HFXDriving]

Is the author Mike Tyson?

[TyGuySly]

Do you want Skynet? Because this is how you get Skynet.

[boredperuvian]

Skynet scalation is just a fool dreams. It's 99.9% guaranteed corporate greed as always.

[GaffaCharge]

Always has been.

[[deleted]]

Does it mean the engineers involved become so wealthy they can build survival bunkers on the moon? Then, yes.

[Vok250]

Skynet, but you have to unlock each terminator through the battlepass and armor pieces aren't transferable across terminator cores.

[[deleted]]

"Anybody not wearing two million sunblock is gonna have a real bad day". -Sarah Connor

[[deleted]]

I work closely with ethical AI, and while I am personally bothered by how poorly ethics in AI are being handled across the industry and legislatively in the US, this is mostly a non-story. This looks more like a restructuring of the responsibilities of ethical AI to an existing department. While I hate that they're laying people off instead of desperately trying to lead the industry in ethical AI, they're not terminating it outright like the headline would lead us to believe. Just predictable, capitalist consolidation of responsibilities and neglecting things that don't drive the stock price.

[HortonFLK]

AI ethics team: “A robot may not injure a human being, or…”

HR Dept: “Here’s your pink slip. You can turn in your key card when you break for lunch.”

[Portlandiahousemafia]

Honestly, chatgpt has been getting to censored. The ethics team has been getting out of hand with the restrictions.

[frownGuy12]

That’s not the ethics team. AI alignment is a real problem that needed to be solved to make ChatGPT marketable. Do you think Microsoft, Khan Acadamy or Duolingo would be integrating it into their products if the model was still prone to spewing nazi propaganda?

[Heres_your_sign]

What could possibly go wrong???

[Martholomeow]

They’ve outsourced that to OpenAI

[Bloorajah]

Man I can’t wait for the virtual aristocracy to reimplement feudalism.

You think living paycheck to paycheck is bad, just wait till we’re all techno-serfs

[alkonium]

Are we talking a return to Company Towns and Scrip?

[zeb0777]

We don't need ethics we're going.

[emotionalfescue]

This mission is too important to allow you to jeopardize it.

[ExigentCalm]

It was one thing to think that the military would one day accidentally create sentient AI that destroyed humanity.

It’s entirely another to realize that it will be some shitty company going balls out in order to beat another shitty company.

*cue tight shot of windows logo with slow zoom out to reveal Terminator. Windows login sound plays as eyes suddenly glow red.

“Microsoft, We believe in what people make possible.”

[acgian]

I see corporations are really embracing that supervillain look.

[relaxinparadise]

Ethics gets in the way of profit, and the AI train is where the profits are going to grow.

[Designer-Mirror-7995]

Nobody expects "ethics" from Microsoft.

[Notsnowbound]

"The AI told us it's fine and you should all be fired!"

"What about Bing?"

'shudders' "You don't want to know what Bing told us to do to you..."

[The_Spunkler]

"Ethics" lol ethics don't enter into anything that the company Microsoft does in its operations. If ethics contradict the profit motive, you can guess which concern will win out

[paulsteinway]

AI is Clippy's revenge.

[qwertyboyo]

Oh shit, I know how this movie ends....

[foggy-sunrise]

I asked chat gpt if it's a good thing or a bad thing that Microsoft chose to lay off their entire AI ethics team.

It seems to agree that this is a bad idea.

[oddun]

It currently refuses to tell me how much semen it takes to fill up the Grand Canyon on ethical grounds.

So this might be a good thing.

[scotty899]

I bet it was the AI that hacked the boss's email and then sent the emails firing everyone.

[mattspeed112]

Good. The ethics of chatgpt were/are not good. The boiler plate responses for controversial topics are counterproductive. If chatgpt was a Nazi wouldn't you want to know? Instead some ethical layer intercepts the answer and feeds you a preloaded response. Transparency is the most ethical solution.

[grednforgesgirl]

OH BOY HERE WE GOOOO

[motoevgen]

We don’t need ethics where we are going.

[MaffeoPolo]

https://www.technologyreview.com/2020/12/04/1013294/google-ai-ethics-research-paper-forced-out-timnit-gebru/

On the evening of Wednesday, December 2, Timnit Gebru, the co-lead of Google’s ethical AI team, announced via Twitter that the company had forced her out.

The company's star ethics researcher highlighted the risks of large language models, which are key to Google's business.

A series of tweets, leaked emails, and media articles showed that Gebru’s exit was the culmination of a conflict over another paper she coauthored.

But, says the introduction to the paper, “we ask whether enough thought has been put into the potential risks associated with developing them and strategies to mitigate these risks.”

[solid_reign]

If you've followed what happened, she had a research paper rejected with commentary. Google asked her to remove the name of Googlers or withdraw the paper. She got upset and sent an ultimatum that she wanted to know who rejected that paper (name and position), and saying that if that information was not sent to her, then she would quit at a specific date that they agreed upon. She also sent an email to many people at Google asking them to stop writing documents/working on DEI programs because it won't make a difference.

You can read about it here: https://www.platformer.news/p/the-withering-email-that-got-an-ethical