@IEthics

The Internet Ethics program at the Markkula Center for Applied Ethics, Santa Clara University / Irina Raicu behind the keyboard

Joined January 2013
Internet Ethics retweeted
Voters who Googled how to donate to Talarico got an AI answer that led them to give to someone else. A network of fake news sites seeded messaging about state and local candidates that AI answers picked up on. My story on how the AI midterms are going: theatlantic.com/technology/2…
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Internet Ethics retweeted
"Personal Intelligence connects your data to the Gemini app but also to features like #AI Mode #search. While the #Gemini app does not currently have #ads, you may see sponsored content in AI search tools." #ethics #privacy #internet #Google #business #tech
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Internet Ethics retweeted
70% of the internet was vulnerable yesterday to very bad security flaws inside a coding language. Turns out, *one volunteer* is mostly responsible for maintaining that code & helping push updates. Yesterday Ondřej Surý saved the internet. So I called him up. He rules. theatlantic.com/technology/2…
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Internet Ethics retweeted
"I would like companies to realize that this is exploitation. Any exploitation is not sustainable. And it will end up badly if this continues, because the people doing the #opensource will stop being motivated to actually do anything in the end" #ethics #tech #internet #business
70% of the internet was vulnerable yesterday to very bad security flaws inside a coding language. Turns out, *one volunteer* is mostly responsible for maintaining that code & helping push updates. Yesterday Ondřej Surý saved the internet. So I called him up. He rules. theatlantic.com/technology/2…
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Internet Ethics retweeted
The terms were set to take effect on October 30, with no way to opt out, setting off an outcry from news publishers, politicians, and press associations on both sides of the Atlantic. As of October 23, Meta has made no other changes to the terms aside from the implementation date. buff.ly/adsXveE
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"I would like companies to realize that this is exploitation. Any exploitation is not sustainable. And it will end up badly if this continues, because the people doing the #opensource will stop being motivated to actually do anything in the end" #ethics #tech #internet #business
70% of the internet was vulnerable yesterday to very bad security flaws inside a coding language. Turns out, *one volunteer* is mostly responsible for maintaining that code & helping push updates. Yesterday Ondřej Surý saved the internet. So I called him up. He rules. theatlantic.com/technology/2…
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"When I started doing open-source, it was fun. And it kind of still is. But the environment has shifted. Open-source sometimes feels like exploitation. What I would like to see is to find a new model where people working on open-source would be awarded for their work" #ethics
70% of the internet was vulnerable yesterday to very bad security flaws inside a coding language. Turns out, *one volunteer* is mostly responsible for maintaining that code & helping push updates. Yesterday Ondřej Surý saved the internet. So I called him up. He rules. theatlantic.com/technology/2…
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70% of the internet was vulnerable yesterday to very bad security flaws inside a coding language. Turns out, *one volunteer* is mostly responsible for maintaining that code & helping push updates. Yesterday Ondřej Surý saved the internet. So I called him up. He rules. theatlantic.com/technology/2…
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Internet Ethics retweeted
"[M]any of the patterns that have been evaluated in this work present fundamental challenges to intelligibility, and future work... may consider methods for better aligning #LLM outputs with the needs of human comprehenders, in the service of user experience and monitorability."
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Internet Ethics retweeted
Replying to @WillOremus
A network of 37 sites with names like Wolverine State Report and Kalamazoo Beacon appeared overnight in September. Filled with Q&As seeding positive messages about state and local candidates, the sites began to be cited in answers by Google and ChatGPT. theatlantic.com/technology/2…
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"Personal Intelligence connects your data to the Gemini app but also to features like #AI Mode #search. While the #Gemini app does not currently have #ads, you may see sponsored content in AI search tools." #ethics #privacy #internet #Google #business #tech
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Internet Ethics retweeted
This highlights a much higher level issue: When we anthropomorphise systems, we assume they have a human-like ability to understand our intent, and a predictability similar to what we've experienced from people. We overtrust, aligned with our human expectations. This is part of why all the subtle (and not so subtle) anthropomorphisational language about AI agents can be so toxic: It literally makes us more likely to catalyze AI security failures. /end
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Internet Ethics retweeted
"[M]any of the patterns that have been evaluated in this work present fundamental challenges to intelligibility, and future work... may consider methods for better aligning #LLM outputs with the needs of human comprehenders, in the service of user experience and monitorability."
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Internet Ethics retweeted
A respectful conversation #ethics #AI
Dario — Thank you for taking the time to respond to my previous post. I think it's great when this kind of engagement happens in public rather than on company Slacks, and I hope to see more of it. I agree that Anthropic isn't best modeled as a profit-maximizer. Your post gave several compelling examples of Anthropic taking competitive hits for safety, and insofar as my previous post suggested otherwise, that's on me. But I don't think I made my main point as clearly as I could have, so let me try again. It comes down to four key claims: 1. Anthropic seems to be racing at breakneck speed to build recursively self-improving superintelligence (RSI). By its own lights, that could kill billions of people or literally destroy the world. 2. Risking destroying the world is very hard to justify. It is only conceivably acceptable if serious attempts to put RSI under robust societal governance are failing. 3. Far from meeting that burden, Anthropic, when push comes to shove, often works to keep governments from tying its hands. It seems to care much more about preventing government overreach than about reducing the risk that it and other AI companies will destroy the world. 4. Even if the AEGIS Act really was an honest mix-up, as you suggest, that is itself a serious problem. It suggests Anthropic isn't treating the governance of this technology with anything close to the gravity it deserves. In greater detail for those who want it: 1. Anthropic is racing to RSI, and by its own lights that is insanely risky. Launching RSI could literally destroy the world. That's according to you, your co-founders, and most of your safety staff and capabilities researchers, not to mention many AI researchers outside your walls. You are intentionally trying to create generally intelligent systems more capable than all humans that you claim in six to twelve months “could be capable” of taking over the entire internet before we have the ability to reliably monitor, control, or align them. “Succeeding” at RSI could kill or permanently disempower billions of people in the near future, including me and everyone I love. Yet Anthropic’s primary focus seems to be marshalling an immense amount of resources and talent in a race to get there first. 2. Risking destroying the world carries an enormous burden of justification. I believe the vast majority of people do not want Anthropic to do this (to the extent they know what it's doing). Imposing even a modest chance of catastrophe on billions of people who never consented requires an extraordinary justification. The central one Anthropic has offered: someone will build RSI regardless, so it's better for a safety-focused lab to be at the front of the pack, using that position to support strong AI governance. (Other reasons Anthropic has given, like modestly accelerating improvements in healthcare or economic growth, don’t seem remotely proportionate to the risks Anthropic is imposing by its own lights.) But that argument only works as a last resort. Racing to RSI is only conceivably okay if attempts to institute robust societal governance to manage that race are failing despite your best efforts. A lab that relies on this justification should be a strong, consistent supporter of efforts to enact governance that could bind it, including governance that could slow it and significantly constrain what it does. 3. Rather than supporting efforts at strong regulation, Anthropic has intervened to keep governments from tying its hands. Anthropic has sometimes helped: it played a very helpful role in passing transparency bills in Illinois and ongoing efforts in Massachusetts, and I'm sincerely appreciative. But transparency is far from enough for a technology that will be the world's most powerful superweapon at best, and an uncontrollable swarm of lethally superintelligent agents at worst. When it matters most, Anthropic has often pushed for weak regulation. The AEGIS Act is the most obvious example. No highly risky industry is regulated as anemically as AEGIS would regulate frontier AI: not nuclear, not banking, not aviation, not food safety, not the manufacture of explosives. In all of those industries, specialist regulators can address unsafe practices well before they cause harm. AEGIS would bar the federal government from intervening to block unsafe development or deployment of models until there is an "imminent risk" of catastrophic harm, and would require it to meet a demanding burden of proof in court. Worse, AEGIS would also prevent states from picking up the slack. This design makes perfect sense if you're a company trying to minimize the risk that the government can overly constrain you. It makes little sense if you want American democracy to govern frontier AI effectively. This isn't the first time. The initial version of California's SB 1047 would have let the Attorney General sue to stop developers like Anthropic from imposing unreasonable risks of catastrophic harm. It would also have created a regulatory agency to help set safety standards. Anthropic objected, and helped get both provisions removed before ultimately offering some support for the bill (which I also genuinely appreciate). I’m not saying that Anthropic should have supported 1047 in its initial form; that’s a complex issue and I realize there were questions about whether earlier versions of the bill were less politically feasible. Still, in Anthropic's own words, it helped weaken the bill because "[t]here is a substantial risk that the bill and state agencies will simply be wrong about what is actually effective in preventing catastrophic risk, leading to ineffective and/or burdensome compliance requirements." The same goes for New York's RAISE Act, whose initial version also would have let the Attorney General sue to stop unreasonable risks of catastrophic harm. Anthropic credits itself as a supporter of RAISE, but it did not support the bill while it was in the legislature, including when it nearly died. After the bill passed the legislature, Anthropic publicly critiqued it, saying "Any state proposals should be narrowly focused on transparency and not overly prescriptive." Why does Anthropic consistently take the risk of clumsy government action far more seriously than its own repeated warnings that companies like Anthropic will literally destroy the world by racing to RSI? 4. Even if AEGIS was an honest mix-up, that is itself a serious problem. Your response frames AEGIS as an early draft and a miscommunication. Perhaps you would have strengthened it and narrowed its preemption. (That wouldn't explain Anthropic's interventions to weaken SB 1047 or RAISE, but leave that aside.) Suppose that's exactly right. A federal framework for governing RSI is one of the highest-stakes documents your company will touch. Your post admits Anthropic "could have handled [these matters] better," but its tone ("This kind of thing happens a lot in large organizations") doesn't reflect the gravity of this issue. Anthropic talks about the need for “operational excellence” in critical areas, and I have a hard time believing that a similarly cavalier attitude would be tolerated while Anthropic was negotiating a key compute deal or preparing its next large pre-training run. In short The justification for racing rests on Anthropic fighting for strong governance, and Anthropic's record on regulation points the other way. Together with its breakneck racing, that fits a much darker picture of the company than the one that seems to prevail among your employees. I hope that Anthropic reflects on this picture, supports stronger regulation, exercises extraordinary caution when advocating for weak regulation, and doubles down on its founding purpose of helping the world safely navigate transformative AI together, instead of prioritizing Anthropic’s ability to win a race that imposes intolerable risks on everyone alive.
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Internet Ethics retweeted
"To ensure that this document does not enter the training corpora of future models, we include the following canary strings..." #ethics #AI #internet #data #tech
Replying to @kaicathyc
We're sharing how our red-teaming agents chained vulnerabilities to escape VMs and found unexpected paths to the internet. openai.com/index/securing-ou… We’ve since patched weaknesses in our infrastructure and resumed runs. Continuous high-compute red-teaming should be a core part of safety cases for frontier model training and evaluation.
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