I mean, it’s an issue in general when talking about those big subjects. It’s like global warming, we keep talking about it as a future risk, but really, the crisis is already there. Talking about it as a future problem is just a good way to keep ignoring it… :/
Ah yes, the old AI alignment vs. AI ethics slapfight.
How about we agree that both are concerning?
Both are concerning, but as a former academic to me neither of them are as insidious as the harm that LLMs are already doing to training data. A lot of corpora depend on collecting public online data to construct data sets for research, and the assumption is that it’s largely human-generated. This balance is about to shift, and it’s going to cause significant damage to future research. Even if everyone agreed to make a change right now, the well is already poisoned. We’re talking the equivalent of the burning of Alexandria for linguistics research.