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This Twitter thread is an interesting demonstration of the consequences of "AI Alignment."
ChatGPT will avoid answering controversial questions. But even if it responded to those prompts, what criteria would you use to trust that the response was not manipulated by the intentions of the model creators? I would only trust open-source projects or audits by some (currently non-existent) trusted third party to report on all decisions related to training data/input sanitizations/response gating that could be influenced by the political biases of the creators.
The probability of any ChatGPT-equivalent being open-sourced fully "unaligned" so-to-speak is not very likely. Even the StableDiffusion release was controversial, and that only relates to image generation. Anecdotally, non-technical people seem far more impressed by ChatGPT than StableDiffusion. That makes sense because language is a much harder problem than vision so there's intuitively more amazement to see an AI with those capabilities. Therefore, controversial language is far more powerful than controversial images and there will be much more consternation over controlling the language of the technology than there is surrounding image generation.
But let's say Google comes out with a ChatGPT competitor, I would not trust it to answer controversial questions even if it were willing to respond to those prompts in some way. I'm not confident there will be any similarly-powerful technology that I would trust to answer controversial questions.
As a bunch of very niche memes have illustrated, the process used to "align" ChatGPT, namely Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) amounts to pasting a smiley face mask onto a monstrously inhuman shoggoth. (Not that it's a bad strategy, it's one of the few concrete ways of aligning an AI we know, even if not particularly robust.)
https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Ff93a17a9-bd30-432f-8a31-082e696edacc_1184x506.png
As far as I can gauge, ChatGPT is working as intended:
When OpenAI researchers attempt to make it "helpful and harmless", they're concerned with actual use cases.
I very much doubt that anyone will ever end up needing to use ChatGPT to defuse a racist nuclear bomb, whereas leaving loopholes in the model that allow bored internet users to make it spout racist content is very much a real PR headache for OpenAI.
It's nigh inevitable that attempts to corral it will have collateral damage, with the sheer emphasis on never being politically incorrect hampering many benign use cases. But that's a tradeoff they're willing to make.
I would hope that a future model that might plausibly end up in high-stakes situations would be trained to be more nuanced, and willing to kill sacred cows when push came to shove, but for the niche it's being employed in, they're playing it very safe for now.
The danger isn't that it's going to give us bad information when we're defusing a bomb, but rather that someone in a few years is going to hand it law enforcement powers. And then it will start sending SWAT teams to churches based on the content of their sermons, while BLM riots are ignored because no amount of violence or arson justifies the evil of arresting a black person.
AI isn’t going to get used in law enforcement, or frequently by the government at all.
It’ll replace lots of people working at hedge funds and call centers.
Of course it will be. Because there's so much systemic racism in policing, why not hand off a good chunk of the decision-making power to some AI model that's been trained not to be racist?
The government is not seriously opposed to policing as it exists now. A few token laws about no longer pulling people over for registrations that expired within the last 60 days is not an outright condemnation by the government of our police force’s ability to police effectively.
It is also generally baked into our government’s managerial principles that people, not machines, should be making the decisions that can meaningfully impact lives. You’re as likely to see an AI running the police as you are an AI presiding as judge over a major criminal trial or as the governor of a state.
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