A lot of us here hate AI because of how it was built: training data gathered without the creators’ explicit, opt-in consent, data centers that negatively affect communities’ access to clean water and energy, a technology design that is inherently prone to hallucinations, etc. At least, those are the main reasons why I hate it.
I think I might actually want to support an AI project if I thought it was being done right. Maybe we could get more people away from exploitative models if there was a non-exploitative alternative.
So what would it take to build AI ethically, in your opinion? And do you know of anyone trying to build AI without these issues?
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Ethical “AI” exists. Upscaling models can be trained on just a couple thousand images. Handwriting recognition has been around for decades.
It’s not marketed as AI, because these are actual tools that people use, instead of … whatever LLMs are supposed to be.
Pay people directly for their data for training. Not Reddit or Twitter, the people.
Don’t share any interactions with big tech, government, etc. Private and encrypted.
Run it locally.
I consider these to be the main ethical issues with specifically LLMs and generative AI in general:
- Using people’s work as training data without consent.
- The high cost of training a model meaning that only a few entities in the world can actually do so and so, only few people get to decide what the knowledge base and “slant” of the model is. This is true even for open source models.
- The high resource cost of using a model relative to the value of its output.
- People with malicious intent being empowered by it far, far more than anyone else.
- The model producing the response to the query directly instead of leading to the source, leaving both the source without any way to benefit and the user from having any context queues they can use to verify the reliability of the information.
- Infinite and automated production of misinformation, libel and psychological manipulation.
- Inducing psychosis in people.
Point 1 can be resolved by the people training AI just making different choices. Many won’t unless they’re forced to, but in principle they could.
Points 2 and 3 could hypothetically be resolved in the future with better technology.
The rest are basically inherent to the technology and you can at best try and mostly fail to reduce the risk. So as far I’m concerned, what it would take to build AI ethically is to train it for very specific purposes and have it be used as statistical models by people who know what they’re doing.
Though I do see some potential for ethical LLMs by using them to perform vector searches instead of generating text, basically turning them into smarter search engines.
I agree. I think to get around 4-7, we’d need a completely different type of AI. We’d need something that isn’t an LLM, but that can do some/all of the legitimate things people are trying to use LLMs for.
The vector search thing is nice. I used to sometimes like the automated music recommendations I got on certain streaming services, which I’m guessing worked something like that.
if there was a non-exploitative alternative.
LOL. We live under capitalism, homie.
consent and not wasting resources
Getting rid of all the tech bros and CEOs is the first step. That is an actually important step because they’re the ones that spend tons of money on lobbying for laws that are good for them. Laws can be (un)ethical, or abused in unethical ways (see DMCA and patent trolling). Remove the main pushers for unethical computer and IP related laws and you fix a significant part of the problem.
As long as moneyed interests are involved with the idea of trying to turn a profit off of LLMs (that they successfully conflated with AI), ethics will never be considered in any capacity. As it stands right now, a real AI is a pipe dream because techbros have shoot their shot way too early; instead of funding multidisciplinary efforts to understand consciousness, the brain, and ways to simulate real reasoning/thought. They’ve created a Frankenstein’s Monster with LLMs, that would never gain any form of intelligence as it cannot possibly replicate the complex consciousness and reasoning process that living things possess.
Realistically, I prefer humanity gives up on this at the moment because the technology to sustain data centers and cool them without severe environmental impact to OUR ONLY HOME PLANET is insufficient. Until we sort out our economic, social, political issues…An actual artificial intelligence should be a low as fuck priority.
A socialist society built on equity for all. Automating jobs with AI to give people more free time would be great if it wasn’t making a rich minority richer.
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For example an AI search assistant not biased by big corps, it use webcontent in realtime, not an own knowledge base with stolen content, LLM only to interprete correct the user input for a semantic search, better if also use renevable energy.
Well first you plug in a toaster with a extention cord not plugged into a GFI outlet, next you fill up the tub and the last step is you get into that tub with said toaster as you submerge. Thats how you build ethical AI
Pay for all the content you train the model on
Or only use your own data, which would make it useless. I thought about RAGs but Wikipedia says:
These documents supplement information from the LLM’s pre-existing training data
It seems that RAGs use stolen data anyway.
And It still wouldn’t solve the issue that managers demand 10 times more work for free, it wouldn’t stop making workers crazy with the flood of reviews in programming, and execs wouldn’t stop dreaming of laying off everyone.
Do you mean any AI, or text-generating LLMs?
I am fairly certain Cornell built BirdNET / Merlin Bird ID song identification using recordings in the public domain or with permissive licenses.
Same goes for iNaturalist and Seek using volunteer-submitted and identified photos.
So it’s possible to built domain-specific models with fewer ethical issues, but the push is for bullshit generators, unfortunately.
Dang, I wish AI were just things like bird identification tools! That would be a much more wholesome world.
I might actually use and contribute to BirdNET. It looks like it helps with global biodiversity monitoring, which is awesome.
Try https://github.com/tphakala/birdnet-go - a fork that looks a little more modern but still feeds Cornell.
Getting a repository where you commit your own work under legal threat to be trained on. Then tear the data centers down and only allow them to run locally. But its kind of too late for all that. Pandora’s box has been opened.
if it were built outside of a capitalist system and in a way that is in ecological balance with the planet
