Imagine an AGI (Artificial General Intelligence) that could perform any task a human can do on a computer, but at a much faster pace. This AGI could create an operating system, produce a movie better than anything you've ever seen, and much more, all while being limited to SFW (Safe For Work) content. What are the first things you would ask it to do?
I'd want a familiar/daemon that was running an AI personality to act as a personal assistant, friend and interactive information source. It could replace therapy and be a personalized tutor, and it would always be up to date on the newest science and global happenings.
That's possible now. I've been working on such a thing for a bit now and it can generally do all that, though I wouldn't advise it to be used for therapy (or medical advice), but mostly for legal reasons rather than ability. When you create a new agent, you can tell it what type of personality you want. It doesn't just respond to commands but also figures out what needs to be done and does it independently.
Yeah I haven't played with it much but it feels like ChatGPT is already getting pretty close to this kind of functionality. It makes me wonder what's missing to take it to the next level over something like Siri or Alexa. Maybe it needs to be more proactive than just waiting for prompts?
I'd be interested to know if current AI would be able to recognize the symptoms of different mental health issues and utilize the known strategies to deal with them. Like if a user shows signs of anxiety or depression, could the AI use CBT tools to conversationally challenge those thought processes without it really feeling like therapy? I guess just like self-driving cars this kind of thing would be legally murky if it went awry and it accidentally ended up convincing someone to commit suicide or something haha.
That last bit already happened. An AI (allegedly) told a guy to commit suicide and he did. A big part of the problem is while GPT4 for instance knows all about all the things you just said and can probably do what you're suggesting, nobody can guarantee it won't get something horribly wrong at some point. Sort of like how self driving cars can handle like 95% of things correctly but that 5% of unexpected stuff that maybe takes some extra context that a human has and the car was never trained on is very hard to get past.
Thanks for the link, that sounds like exactly what I was asking for but gone way wrong!
What do you think is missing to prevent these kinds of outcomes? Is AI simply incapable of categorizing topics as 'harmful to humans' on it's own without a human's explicit guidance? It seems like the philosophical nuances of things like consent or dependence or death would be difficult for a machine to learn if it isn't itself sensitive to them. How do you train empathy in something so inherently unlike us?
In the case I mentioned, it was just a poorly aligned LLM. The ones from OpenAI would almost definitely not do that. That's because they go through a process called RLHF where those sorts of negative responses get trained out of them for the most part. Of course there's still stuff that will get through, but unless you are really trying to get it to say something bad, it's unlikely to do something like in that article. That's not to say they won't say something accidentally harmful. They are really good at telling you things that sound extremely plausible but are actually false because they don't really have any way of checking by default. I have to cross check the output of my system all the time for accuracy. I've spent a lot of time building in systems to make sure it's accurate and it generally is on the important stuff. Tonight it did have an inaccuracy, but I sort of don't blame it because the average person could have made the same mistake. I had it looking up contractors to work on a bathroom remodel (fake test task) and it googled for the phone number of the one I picked from its suggestions. Google proceeded to give a phone number in a big box with tiny text saying a different company's name. Anyone not paying close attention (including my AI) would call that number instead. It wasn't an ad or anything, just somehow this company came up in the little info box any time you searched for the other company.
Anyway, as to your question, they're actually pretty good at knowing what's harmful when they are trained with RLHF. Figuring out what's missing to prevent them from saying false things is an open area of research right now, so in effect, nobody knows how to fix that yet.