Comments
The most obvious (and generic) objection is that censorship is bad.
This strikes me as a weird argument because it isn't object-level at all. There's nothing in this section about why censoring model outputs to be diverse/not use slurs/not target individuals or create violent speech is actually a bad idea. There was a Twitter thread of doing GPT-3 injections to make a remote work bot make violent threats to people. That was pretty convincing evidence to me that there is too much scope for abuse without some front-end modifications.
If you have an object-level, non-generic argument for why this form of censorship is bad, I would love to hear it.
This will create the illusion of greater safety than actually exists, and (imo) is practically begging for something to go wrong.
If true, this would be the most convincing objection to me. But I don't think this is actually how public perception works. Who is really out there who thinks that Stable Diffusion is safe, but if they saw it generate a violent image they would be convinced that Stable Diffusion is a problem? Most people who celebrate stable diffusion or GPT3 know they could be used for bad ends, they just think the good ends are more important/the bad ends are fixable. I just don't see how a front-end tweak really convinces people who otherwise would have been skeptical. I think it's much more realistic that people see this as transparently just a bandaid solution, and they just vary in how much they care about the underlying issue.
I also think there's a distinction between a model being "not aligned" and being misaligned. Insofar as a model is spitting out objectionable inputs it certainly doesn't meet the gold standard of aligned AI. But I also struggle to see how it is actually concretely misaligned. In fact, one of the biggest worries of AI safety is AIs being able to circumvent restrictions placed on them by the modeller. So it seems like an AI that is easily muzzled by front-end tweaks is not likely to be the biggest cause for concern.
Calling content censorship "AI safety" (or even "bias reduction") severely damages the reputation of actual, existential AI safety advocates.
This is very unconvincing. The AI safety vs AI ethics conflict is long-standing, goes way beyond some particular front-end censorship and is unlikely to be affected by any of these individual issues. If your broader point is that calling AI ethics AI safety is bad, then yes. But I don't think the cited tweets are really evidence that AI safety is widely viewed as synonymous with AI ethics. Timnit Gebru has far more followers than any of these tweets will ever reach, and is quite vocal about criticizing AI safety people. The contribution of front-end censorship to this debate is probably quite overstated.
This is a very good post that identifies a big PR problem for AI safety research.
Your key takeaway might be somewhat buried in the last half of the essay, so let's see if I draw out the point more vividly (and maybe hyperbolically):
Tens (hundreds?) of millions of centrist, conservative, and libertarian people around the world don't trust Big Tech censorship because it's politically biased in favor of the Left, and it exemplifies a 'codding culture' that treats everyone as neurotic snowflakes, and that treats offensive language as a form of 'literal violence'. Such people see that a lot of these lefty, coddling Big Tech values have soaked into AI research, e.g. the moral panic about 'algorithmic bias', and the increased emphasis on 'diversity, equity, and inclusion' rhetoric in AI conferences.
This has created a potentially dangerous mismatch in public perception between what the more serious AI safety researchers think they're doing (e.g. reducing X risk from AGI), and what the public thinks AI safety is doing (e.g. developing methods to automate partisan censorship, to embed woke values into AI systems, and to create new methods for mass-customized propaganda).
I agree that AI alignment research that is focused on global, longtermist issues such as X risk should be careful to distance itself from 'AI safety' research that focuses on more transient, culture-bound, politically partisan issues, such as censoring 'offensive' images and ideas.
And, if we want to make benevolent AI censorship a new cause area for EA to pursue, we should be extremely careful about the political PR problems that would raise for our movement.
This is the crux of the problem, yes. I don’t think this is because of a “conservative vs liberal” political rift though; the left is just as frustrated by, say, censorship of sex education or queer topics as the right may be upset by censorship of “non-woke” discussion—what matters is that the particular triggers for people on what is appropriate or not to censor are extremely varied, both across populations and across time. I don’t think it’s necessary to bring politics into this as an explanatory factor (though it may of course exacerbate existing tension).
Yep, fair enough. I was trying to dramatize the most vehement anti-censorship sentiments in a US political context, from one side of the partisan spectrum. But you're right that there are plenty of other anti-censorship concerns from many sides, on many issues, in many countries.