genericrich t1_j0ma7wr wrote on December 17, 2022 at 7:14 PM

Reply to comment by AsheyDS in Why are people so opposed to caution and ethics when it comes to AI? by OldWorldRevival

Researchers don't sell products in the marketplace. Amoral corporations which are the living embodiment of the system we've designed to centralize and amass capital are the ones who sell products. The researchers may "design" for ethics but the corporations put products into productions and if they have to make a tradeoff between profit and ethics I will give you one guess which way they're going to jump.

We've seen it now in Midjourney, etc. where they just snarfed up a bunch of copyrighted images to power their lookalike/derivative works machine (which is very cool tech, etc.), but which abuses copyright at scale. They retconn their liability by saying you can't copyright these images either but they know full well people are going to do just that for book covers, printed works, etc. It can't be stopped. By the time the glacial courts get around to addressing it, the world will have been changed and at best there will be some minor changes to the law which won't help anyone whose rights have been violated already.

Not saying we shouldn't try but the deck is stacked by capitalism against us. Corporations are never going to be ethical until they are forced to be ethical, and that takes far too long to enact meaningful course correction.

PoliteThaiBeep t1_j0qhn66 wrote on December 18, 2022 at 5:46 PM

Capitalism is not a threat but a tool. Dictatorship on the other hand is a threat, possibly greater than AI itself. Especially dictatorships we are powerless to stop - eg nuclear armed Russia and 1 billion people economic powerhouse China.

If something horrible happens in democracies usually people rise up and protest and there will be different powers colliding and fighting for change. And often we are successful, but often we are not. We kind of need to be better at this, but poor fighting is still better than no fighting.

Which is a reality of any dictatorship. Everything is in the hands of very few (read "Putin's people" by Catherine Belton) and people have zero power.

Huge country wide protests can have a limited effect, where tyrants will pretend to cave, but as soon as people go home, they quietly arrest or murder those who pose the most threat and tighten everything again but even worse than before.

And there's a vicious cycle going on there that is making any positive change extremely unlikely.

Further as soon as something horrible happens in democracies - the whole world knows it from countless journalists and investigators that are (usually) well protected by law.

If something horrible happens in dictatorships we almost never get the chance to know it and a few cases where we do will be forever denied it has happened and all journalists who were working on it have disappeared from the face of the earth.

Which creates an incredibly distorted picture where dictatorships look nice and shiny where nothing bad ever happened, while we're all incredibly focused on US problems all of which combined don't even scratch the surface of dictatorship problems.

And even if you realize it, your worldview is still warped because most of what you will read and care about are bad events happening in democracies and subconsciously you'll feel that's where most problems are.

All the while failing to realize how we're being increasingly infiltrated by a pro-dictatorship forces which in turn caused 16-year in a row drop in US (and worldwide) democracy scores. See freedomhouse.org. look at the map. Look at trends.

Do you seriously believe 'evil corporations future' that's been countlessly portrayed in pop culture, movies and video games - is a threat? Look again.