It sounds like you’re excluding cases where weights are stolen—makes sense in the context of adversarial robustness, but seems like you need to address those cases to make a general argument about misuse threat models
Agreed, I should have been more clear. Here I’m trying to argue about the question of whether people should work on research to mitigate misuse from the perspective of avoiding misuse through an API.
There is a separate question of reducing misuse concerns either via:
Trying to avoid weights being stolen/leaking
Trying to mitigate misuse in worlds where weights are very broadly proliferated (e.g. open source)
I do think these arguments contain threads of a general argument that causing catastrophes is difficult under any threat model. Let me make just a few non-comprehensive points here:
On cybersecurity, I’m not convinced that AI changes the offense defense balance. Attackers can use AI to find and exploit security vulnerabilities, but defenders can use it to fix them.
On persuasion, first, rational agents can simply ignore cheap talk if they expect it not to help them. Humans are not always rational, but if you’ve ever tried to convince a dog or a baby to drop something that they want, you’ll know cheap talk is ineffective and only coercion will suffice.
Second, AI is far from the first dramatic change in communications technology in human history. Spoken language, written language, the printing press, telephones, radio, TV, and social media all might be bigger changes than e.g. changed how people can be persuaded. These technologies often contributed to political and social upheaval, including catastrophes for particular ways of life, and AI might do the same. But overall I’m glad these changes occurred, and I wouldn’t expect the foreseeable versions of AI persuasion (i.e. personalized chatbots) to be much more impactful than these historical changes. See this comment and thread for more discussion.
Bioterrorism seems like the biggest threat. The obstacles there have been thoroughly discussed.
If causing catastrophes is difficult, this should reduce our concern with both misuse and rogue AIs causing sudden extinction. Other concerns like military arms races, lock-in of authoritarian regimes, or Malthusian outcomes in competitive environments would become relatively more important.
If causing catastrophes is difficult, this should reduce our concern with both misuse and rogue AIs causing sudden extinction. Other concerns like military arms races, lock-in of authoritarian regimes, or Malthusian outcomes in competitive environments would become relatively more important.
I agree that “causing catastrophes is difficult” should reduce concerns with “rogue AIs causing sudden extinction (or merely killing very large numbers of people like >1 billion)”.
However, I think these sorts of considerations don’t reduce AI takeover or other catastrophe due to rogue AI as much as you might think for a few reasons:
Escaped rogue AIs might be able to do many obviously bad actions over a long period autonomously. E.g., acquire money, create a cult, use this cult to build a bioweapons lab, and then actually develop bioweapons over long-ish period (e.g., 6 months) using >tens of thousands of queries to the AI. This looks quite different from the misuse threat model which required that omnicidal (or otherwise bad) humans possess the agency to make the right queries to the AI and solve the problems that the AI can’t solve. For instance, humans have to ensure that queries were sufficiently subtle/jailbreaking to avoid detection via various other mechanisms. The rogue AI can train humans over a long period and all the agency/competence can come from the rogue AI. So, even if misuse is unlikely by humans, autonomous rogue AIs making weapons of mass destruction is perhaps more likely.
Escaped rogue AIs are unlike misuse in that even if we notice a clear and serious problem, we might have less we can do. E.g., the AIs might have already built hidden datacenters we can’t find. Even if they don’t and are just autonomously replicating on the internet, shutting down the internet is extremely costly and only postpones the problem.
AI takeover can route through mechanisms other than sudden catastrophe/extinction. E.g., allying with rogue states, creating a rogue AI run AI lab which builds even more powerful AI as fast as possible. (I’m generally somewhat skeptical of AIs trying to cause extinction for reasons discussed here, here, and here. Though causing huge amounts of damage (e.g. >1 billion) dead seems somewhat more plausible as a thing rogue AIs would try to do.)
It sounds like you’re excluding cases where weights are stolen—makes sense in the context of adversarial robustness, but seems like you need to address those cases to make a general argument about misuse threat models
Agreed, I should have been more clear. Here I’m trying to argue about the question of whether people should work on research to mitigate misuse from the perspective of avoiding misuse through an API.
There is a separate question of reducing misuse concerns either via:
Trying to avoid weights being stolen/leaking
Trying to mitigate misuse in worlds where weights are very broadly proliferated (e.g. open source)
I do think these arguments contain threads of a general argument that causing catastrophes is difficult under any threat model. Let me make just a few non-comprehensive points here:
On cybersecurity, I’m not convinced that AI changes the offense defense balance. Attackers can use AI to find and exploit security vulnerabilities, but defenders can use it to fix them.
On persuasion, first, rational agents can simply ignore cheap talk if they expect it not to help them. Humans are not always rational, but if you’ve ever tried to convince a dog or a baby to drop something that they want, you’ll know cheap talk is ineffective and only coercion will suffice.
Second, AI is far from the first dramatic change in communications technology in human history. Spoken language, written language, the printing press, telephones, radio, TV, and social media all might be bigger changes than e.g. changed how people can be persuaded. These technologies often contributed to political and social upheaval, including catastrophes for particular ways of life, and AI might do the same. But overall I’m glad these changes occurred, and I wouldn’t expect the foreseeable versions of AI persuasion (i.e. personalized chatbots) to be much more impactful than these historical changes. See this comment and thread for more discussion.
Bioterrorism seems like the biggest threat. The obstacles there have been thoroughly discussed.
If causing catastrophes is difficult, this should reduce our concern with both misuse and rogue AIs causing sudden extinction. Other concerns like military arms races, lock-in of authoritarian regimes, or Malthusian outcomes in competitive environments would become relatively more important.
I agree that “causing catastrophes is difficult” should reduce concerns with “rogue AIs causing sudden extinction (or merely killing very large numbers of people like >1 billion)”.
However, I think these sorts of considerations don’t reduce AI takeover or other catastrophe due to rogue AI as much as you might think for a few reasons:
Escaped rogue AIs might be able to do many obviously bad actions over a long period autonomously. E.g., acquire money, create a cult, use this cult to build a bioweapons lab, and then actually develop bioweapons over long-ish period (e.g., 6 months) using >tens of thousands of queries to the AI. This looks quite different from the misuse threat model which required that omnicidal (or otherwise bad) humans possess the agency to make the right queries to the AI and solve the problems that the AI can’t solve. For instance, humans have to ensure that queries were sufficiently subtle/jailbreaking to avoid detection via various other mechanisms. The rogue AI can train humans over a long period and all the agency/competence can come from the rogue AI. So, even if misuse is unlikely by humans, autonomous rogue AIs making weapons of mass destruction is perhaps more likely.
Escaped rogue AIs are unlike misuse in that even if we notice a clear and serious problem, we might have less we can do. E.g., the AIs might have already built hidden datacenters we can’t find. Even if they don’t and are just autonomously replicating on the internet, shutting down the internet is extremely costly and only postpones the problem.
AI takeover can route through mechanisms other than sudden catastrophe/extinction. E.g., allying with rogue states, creating a rogue AI run AI lab which builds even more powerful AI as fast as possible. (I’m generally somewhat skeptical of AIs trying to cause extinction for reasons discussed here, here, and here. Though causing huge amounts of damage (e.g. >1 billion) dead seems somewhat more plausible as a thing rogue AIs would try to do.)
Yep, agreed on the individual points, not trying to offer a comprehensive assessment of the risks here.