Should AI help you get away with killing your spouse?
Tech commentator George Hotz has sparked debate by arguing for locally controlled AI models, even if they lack the safety guardrails of centrally managed services. The discussion touches on the ethics of AI alignment and the potential for misuse in personal applications.
Why it matters
The tension between open-source, user-controlled AI and centralized, safety-aligned AI is a central conflict in the future development of the technology.
Quick question: Do you want AI to be so well trained, it could help husbands (or wives, for that matter) plan the perfect murder of their spouses? Probably not, right? Just as a gut reaction, that feels like a no. I wouldn’t even think it was a particularly hard question.
But America contains many diverse perspectives, and one such perspective was shared by Comma AI founder and longtime jailbreaker George Hotz over the weekend.
The post comes in response to a bunch of big-picture AI alignment plans, most recently the AI 2040: Plan A policy paper from the AI Futures institute. That paper envisions a world in which the world’s researchers collectively choose to slow down AI development for 14 years for the good of humanity. But of course, not everyone who read the paper agrees with its premises or conclusion.
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