OpenAI changes policy to allow military applications

40 pointsposted 16 hours ago
by miles
(techcrunch.com)

17 Comments

austinkhale

13 hours ago

Good. In the US, we should all wake up to the fact that we enjoy the lives we lead in large part to the fact that we’re able to project strength. AI will be another piece in the puzzle of national defense.

sholladay

13 hours ago

One can support a strong military and still not want analysis or decision making to be overly automated. Certainly not by an LLM that could easily hallucinate that World War 3 has started.

One can also want to contribute to the military via taxes or service but not personal data. Just as one can be pro-police while also pro-fourth amendment. Respect people’s privacy or you won’t have a country worth protecting.

John23832

10 hours ago

But nobody said that there is any move to overtly automated decision making.

That’s a proposal that you made.

osmsucks

12 hours ago

I had missed this news... However, this seems to be from January?

ein0p

13 hours ago

That’s how you get Skynet bros. AGI + military applications seems like the worst possible combo in the history of our species. Note that I’m not against the use of machine learning in military applications _so as long as it’s not smart enough to nuke its maker_. Which this has a potential to eventually be.

greatgib

16 hours ago

Now it will be a "for-profit", so not interest for the public interest or don't care for any possible hurt to the human life if that allows more "profit" to flow in...

psunavy03

15 hours ago

Go tell the Ukrainian military that they "don't care for any possible hurt to the human life." It puzzles me how that can be going on and people still think that any military use of tech is inherently immoral. The morality is in the cause the war is being fought for.

soxletor

an hour ago

It is because I am lottery winner that was lucky enough to have been born in a time and place that going to war was never a serious consideration as a young man, unlike almost every other young man of the past. The closest I had to get was watching my country blow things up on CNN.

A person in this situation can't help but to have a ridiculous, unrealistic perspective on war.

greatgib

13 hours ago

That is unrelated. If you develop new kind of weapons, both sides will use it in the end.

And in addition, from all sides, if official military agencies want to use a tech, no one will be able to prevent them. But it is another thing to have a corporation actively supporting the military complex by working with it if it can increase their profit.

beezlewax

15 hours ago

War is never moral

psunavy03

14 hours ago

So the Ukrainians should not be defending themselves against a foreign invasion?

Defending themselves against foreign aggressors who have committed documented atrocities against their population, and who are on record as intending to commit genocide against them when they win, is immoral?

Spivak

12 hours ago

Not even the Catholic Church agrees with you and they're famously aggressively anti-war. From Pope Francis, “war is in itself a crime against humanity.” John Paul II, "No, never again war, which destroys the lives of innocent people, teaches how to kill, throws into upheaval even the lives of those who do the killing and leaves behind a trail of resentment and hatred." And yet church doctrine outlines the criteria for a just war.

1. The damage inflicted by the aggressor on the nation or community of nations must be lasting, grave, and certain.

2. All other means of putting an end to it must have been shown to be impractical or ineffective.

3. There must be serious prospects of success.

4. The use of arms must not produce evils and disorders graver than the evil to be eliminated.

The US gets tripped up on 4. a lot.

hnhg

14 hours ago

Resisting occupation?

nirav72

14 hours ago

Wars and conflicts have been around long before we had defined morals.

appendix-rock

14 hours ago

That is both utterly thought-terminating and irrelevant.

nirav72

14 hours ago

So is a reductive opinion such as “war is never moral” and completely ignoring thousands of years of human history.

peacechance

7 hours ago

The U.S. is going to get what's coming to in a form as grand as the 9/11 attacks because it failed to error correct. The U.S. is a terrorist nation and despised around the world. Truly a nation of violent psychopaths, I look forward to your unraveling. You think this Civilization play through will get you the win but in the end you'll see how wrong you were.