The public is getting played.
Played HARD. By corporations and the AI community.
Please, smart people who are my friends, do not fall for this.
There are three teams right now in the AI community: the RED TEAM, the BLUE TEAM, and the ETHICS TEAM.
You’re not hearing much from the Ethics Team because they’ve all been fired by the corporations and muted by the media.
The Red Team and the Blue Team *sound* different but they’re both on the same side — the side that wants to accelerate AI development, regardless of the harm, and regardless of the BS that’s coming out of their mouths.
Red Team exists to scare you. AI is taking over! We can’t control it! We don’t know what we’ve unleashed! High profile Red Teamers are dramatically quitting their jobs and proclaiming the End is Nigh… but once they’re off camera, look for news that they’ve started their own “safe AI” company and it’s Full Steam Ahead! After all, they’re SAVING THE WORLD!
Blue Team exists to tell you that everything is fine and those Red Teamers are just extremists who don’t understand how tremendously *useful* AI is — it’s going to cure cancer and climate change! It’s going to Save The World! Blue Team also has a lot of legit lunatics like Longtermists and Singultarians/Transhumanists and straight-up eugenicists. These are people who think we should sacrifice folks now for the great Singularity Future where we’ll expand out into the cosmos like locusts and upload our brains to the cloud. A surprising number of Blue Team CEOs are 100% loons who believe this stuff. Just read Sam Altman’s blog (OpenAI CEO).
Both Red and Blue teams are allergic to regulation. You can’t slow us down! We’re saving the world! And besides, if you slow us down, then China will unleash the Evil AI (which is absolutely not what WE are doing right this minute).
Nevermind that China’s restrictions on AI are far FAR greater than the US. Because they don’t care about your AI HYPE they just want to control information access to keep political power. They’ll be the LAST to unleash doomer AI on the world. They don’t even trust their own people with chatGPT.
And the Ethics Team? They’re the only ones who have any sense in all of this. They want big-time regulation of the entire tech industry. They want an AI Bill of Rights, privacy laws, transparency about who AI stole their data from, outlawing the stealing of data, restrictions on what AI can be used for (namely nothing with potential bias impacts in housing, employment, healthcare, etc).
Who is on the Ethics Team? People like Emily Bender (Univ. Washington Professor of Computational Linguistics) and Timnit Gebru (fired from Google’s Ethics team). And Adam Conover’s video with them is Must Watch to understand all this.
PLEASE. Do not fall for the “oh no a vaunted AI dude is calling for caution because the AI is going to kill us all!” — That’s a Red Teamer playing his part. Watch for those Red Teamer’s to start their own AI startup to “save” you from the apocalypse.
“Alignment” is also a huge red flag term now — it refers to “aligning” the AI to make “good AI” as in “AI could be the apocalypse! It could be terrible! You have to let us keep working on it so we can develop the GOOD AI, one that’s “aligned” with human interests! If we can just solve the “alignment” problem then we’ll have the AI Utopia! Just whatever you do, don’t slow us down, don’t stop us, don’t regulate us. WE ARE SAVING THE WORLD.”
“Alignment” is Red Team hype.
Listen to Team Ethics. Leave a well-written comment for the Feds on AI regulation. Contact your reps and demand they move hard to regulate AI. And whatever you do, don’t fall for the hype. That’s how they muddy the waters and keep us from clamping down hard on this bullshit exploitation where they just steal everyone’s stuff and use it to build their crazy AI Utopia (and make piles of money along the way).
This video is Team Ethics — the people you should listen to in order to understand what’s really going on.
Go here to leave a comment for the Feds about regulation of AI during their open comment period (by June 10th, 2023).
We should all care about the harms that AI can do (particularly for the arts, that’s just who they’re exploiting first and hardest). Don’t fall for the hype — there is, in fact, a growing backlash to this industrial scale theft of humanity’s labor to turn a profit for Microsoft and fund the AI Utopia fever dreams of the lunatic CEOs. That’s why the hype machine has been turned up to 11 — they’re playing on the public’s fears and lack of understanding to achieve their goals. Silicon Valley has always lived on hype, but these AI products they’re rolling out are based on theft and do real damage to people’s lives and livelihoods — they have to snow you extra hard to keep you from rejecting it out of hand and clamping down on them with regulation.
Which is exactly the right response.
Sue’s AI-related posts:
1 – The Dangers of AI for Artists of All Kinds
2 – The Growing AI Backlash
3 – The AI Hype Machine