/wasn't able to read the whole article as i don't have a WSJ subscription
"AI Safety" covers a lot of things.
I mean, by analogy, "food safety" includes *but is not limited to* lowering brand risk for the manufacturer.
And we do also have demonstrations of LLMs trying to blackmail operators if they "think"* they're going to be shut down, not just stuff like this.
* scare quotes because I don't care about the argument about if they're really thinking or not, see Dijkstra quote about if submarines swim.
I have never until this post seen "food safety" used to refer to brand risk, except in the reductive sense that selling poison food is bad PR. As an example, the extensive wiki article doesn't even mention brand risk: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Food_safety
[0] https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-features/ai-spi...
[1] https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/qaa-podcast/id14282093...
Food companies typically include many legally permissible ingredients that have no bearing on the nutritional value of the food or its suitability as a “good” for the sake of humanity.
A great example is artificial sweeteners in non-diet beverages. Known to have deleterious effects on health, these sweeteners are used for the simple reason that they are much, much less expensive than sugar. They reduce taste quality, introduce poorly understood health factors, and do nothing to improve the quality of the beverage except make it more profitable to sell.
In many cases, it seems to me that brand risk is precisely the calculus offsetting cost reduction in the degradation of food quality from known, nutritious, safe ingredients toward synthetic and highly processed ingredients. Certainly if the calculation was based on some other more benevolent measure of quality, we wouldn’t be seeing as much plastic contamination and “fine until proven otherwise” additional ingredients.
Yes, and?
Saying "AI may literally kill all of us" is bad PR, irregardless of if the product is or isn't safe. AI encouraging psychotic breaks is bad PR in the reductive sense, because it gets in the news for this. AI being used by hackers or scammers, likewise.
But also consider PR battles about which ingredients are safe. Which additives, which sweeteners, GMOs, vat-grown actual-meat, vat-grown mycoprotein meat substitute, sugar free, fat free, high protein, soy, nuts, organic, etc., many of which are fought on the basis of if the contents is as safe as it's marketed as.
Or at least, I thought saying "it will kill us all if we get this wrong" was bad PR, until I saw this quote from a senator interviewing Altman, which just goes to show that even being extraordinarily blunt somehow still goes over the heads of important people:
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Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-CT):
I alluded in my opening remarks to the jobs issue, the economic effects on employment. I think you have said in fact, and I'm gonna quote, development of superhuman machine intelligence is probably the greatest threat to the continued existence of humanity. End quote. You may have had in mind the effect on, on jobs, which is really my biggest nightmare in the long term. Let me ask you what your biggest nightmare is, and whether you share that concern,
- https://www.techpolicy.press/transcript-senate-judiciary-sub...
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So, while I still roll my eyes at the idea this was just a PR stunt… if people expected reactions like Blumenthal's, that's compatible with it just being a PR stunt.
Do you have an example? Every drink I've seen with artificial sweeteners is because their customers (myself included) want the drinks to have less calories. Sugary drinks is a much clearer understood health risk than aspartame or sucralose.
Its application perhaps pushes the boundaries.
For example if a regulatory body establishes “food safety” limits, they tend to be permissive up to the point of known harm, not a guide to wholesome or healthy food, and that is perhaps a reasonable definition of “food safety” guidelines.
Their goals are not so much to ensure that food is safe, for which we could easily just stick to natural, unprocessed foods, but rather to ensure that most known serious harms are avoided.
Surely it is a grey area at best, since many additives may be in general somewhat deleterious but offer benefits in reducing harmful contamination and aiding shelf life, which actually may introduce more positive outcomes than the negative offset.
The internal application of said guidelines by a food manufacturer, however, may very well be incentivized primarily by the avoidance of brand risk, rather than the actual safety or beneficial nature of their products.
So I suppose it depends on if we are talking about the concept in a vacuum or the concept in application. I’d say in application, brand risk is a serious contender for primary motive. However I’m sure that varies by company and individual managers.
But yeah, the term is unambiguous. Words have meanings, and we should respect them if we are to preserve the commons of accurate and concise communication.
Nuance and connotation are not definitions.
The Coca Cola labeling specifically appears intentionally deceptive. It is labeled “Coca Cola Sabor Original” with a tiny note near the fluid ounces that says “menos azucar”. On the back, it repeats the large “original flavor” label, with a subtext (larger Than the “less sugar” label) that claims that Coca Cola-less sugar contains 30 percent less sugar than the (big label again) “original flavor”. The upshot is that to understand that what you are buying is not, in fact, “original flavor” Coca Cola you have to be willing to look through the fine print and do some mental gymnastics, since the bottle is clearly labeled “Original Flavor”.
It tastes almost the same as straight up Diet Coke. All of the other local companies have followed suit with no change at all In labeling, which is nominally less dishonest than intentionally deceptive labeling.
Since I have a poor reaction to sucralose, including gut function and headache, I find this incredibly annoying. OTOH it has reduced my intake of soft drinks to nearly zero, so I guess it is indeed healthier XD?