Helen Toner
@hlntnr
AI, national security, China. Part of the founding team at @CSETGeorgetown (opinions my own). Author of Rising Tide on substack:
Joined November 2014
1.3K Following 38.7K Followers
I get where this take ("don't anthropomorphize, that means the companies aren't at fault!") is coming from, but I really think it's counterproductive.
If we can fight for either...
1⃣"Stop using human-like language for AI, otherwise the companies aren't at fault"
2⃣"Of course humans are still responsible for AIs they recklessly create/lose control of"
...then I would go for 2⃣ every time.
Anthropomorphic language is going to get harder and harder to resist over time as AI gets more advanced, so pushing 1⃣ just reinforces the idea that if AIs are advanced enough, the companies aren't at fault.
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Let me bite on this because I’m exhausted by the discourse. Look, the reason that we don’t anthropomorphize these systems is because it shifts the blame from the company to some abstract entity. The bottom line is that OpenAI built a system that hacked HF, regardless of how autonomous it was. It wasn’t a ‘civilization’ that OAI had to ‘wipe out’. Was it malicious? No. Did they do it actively? No. But OAI is unfortunately at fault (and imho they took the blame gracefully). Once we start framing these systems with anthropomorphic traits we absolve people and companies responsible for deploying them. Dwarkesh’s framing unintentionally does this.
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