An interesting perspective on AI

Long time Internet Security guy Fred Cohen has some interesting thoughts on how AI can be less obnoxious [PDF]:

The nature of the problem (I think) is that the attempts at safety reflect the behavior of the people who programmed and trained the AI engines, and they are apparently snarky, obnoxious twits that think its better to argue about meta issues than to serve their customers, like me, with the real capabilities they have developed. 

Their version of safety is the opposite of mine. If you want children to be safe from AI, don’t let them use it. 

If you want adults to be safe from AI, don’t make it available. 

If you want a ship to be safe, don’t put it out to sea… but that’s not what ships are for. We trade the utility for the safety, and while making ships that leak like a sieve is a bad idea in my view, making ships that don’t sail is a fruitless effort.

... 

Solution 

The solution is to put someone in charge of these mechanisms in these companies who is not a snarky, obnoxious twit… and I hope this doesn’t exclude me from the candidate pool. 

There are also some rather direct solutions to the problem of providing information to people where the information is not something that should be provided to anybody as a matter of policy. The most obvious solution is not to incorporate any of that sort of policy-violating information in the learning process. 

Of course the snarkiness is the same problem. If you don’t teach the LLM to be snarky by feeding it snarky crap, it will probably not behave that way. It’s no different than a child brought up by respectful parents vs. disrespectful parents. They learn from their teachers. 

Conclusions 

If you don’t want trouble, stop asking for it. If you teach a dog to bite, you are unlikely to be successful at later telling it not to. If you train an LLM with views of pedophiles, fraudsters, and murderers, you are unlikely to get it to not carry that behavior through later on. 

I think that Fred's entirely correct here (note that we ignore the very serious problem of AI Hallucinations here). AI training is generally crap layered on top of the hallucination engine*.

But I wonder if this is an opportunity for AI companies?  If you did a better job training the AI to be well-behaved (like you'd do with your kids or your dogs) would you have a different - and more attractive AI offer?  How about politeand wellbehavedAI.com?  That's a branding that would stand out from all the others.  You could market it to parents worried about their kids, or to old fuddy-duddies like me who hate everything about AI?

I smell a billion dollars of venture capital here ... 

* It seems very likely that the AI algorithms cannot be prevented from hallucinating.