So if someone discovered a weapon of mass destruction (say some kind of supervirus) that could be produced and bought cheaply and could be programmed to only kill a certain class of people, then you'd want the recipe to be freely available?
This poses no direct threat to human life though. (Unlike, say, guns - which are totally fine for everyone in the US!)
The direct threat to society is actually this kind of secrecy.
If ordinary people don't have access to the technology they don't really know what it can do, so they can't develop a good sense of what could now be fake that only a couple of years ago must have been real.
Imagine if image editing technology (Photoshop etc) had been restricted to nation states and large powerful corporations. The general public would be so easy to fool with mere photographs - and of course more openly nefarious groups would have found ways to use it anyway. Instead everybody now knows how easily we can edit an image and if we see a shot of Mr Trump apparently sharing a loving embrace with Mr Putin we can make the correct judgement regarding a probable origin.
The bottleneck for bioterrorism isn't AI telling you how to do something, it's producing the final result. You wanna curtail bioweapons, monitor the BSL labs, biowarfare labs, bioreactors, and organic 3D printers. ChatGPT telling me how to shoot someone isn't gonna help me if I can't get a gun.
This isn't related to my comment. I wasn't asking what if an AI invents a supervirus. I was asking what if someone invents a supervirus. AI isn't involved in this hypothetical in any way.
I was replying to a comment saying that nukes aren't commodities and can't target specific classes of people, and I don't understand why those properties in particular mean access to nukes should be kept secret and controlled.
I understand your perspective regarding the potential risks associated with freely available research, particularly when it comes to illegal weapons and dangerous viruses. However, it's worth considering that by making research available to the world, we enable a collaborative effort in finding solutions and antidotes to such threats. In the case of Covid, the open sharing of information led to the development of vaccines in record time.
It's important to weigh the benefits of diversity and open competition against the risks of bad actors misusing the tools. Ultimately, finding a balance between accessibility and responsible use is key.
What guarantee do we have that OpenAI won't become an evil actor like Skynet?
I'm not advocating for or against secrecy. I'm just not understanding the parent comment I replied to. They said nukes are different than AI because they aren't commodities and can't target specific classes of people, and presumably that's why nukes should be kept secret and AI should be open. Why? That makes no sense to me. If nukes had those qualities, I'd definitely want them kept secret and controlled.
