/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
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.
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.