> What do you think is more likely: this or the other way around: getting the "ethics team" to align with investor goals? Hint: Where does the money come from?

From the (ethics) team obviously, because the investors just have goals and aren't a team!

Big irony marker of course. But remarkably, in human history, this line of thinking would not be unheard of. Of course, I don't think it easily adapts to companies of course, so I don't really disagree with you.

Remember that MTV show offering people like 5 grand or something to lick an elevator handway in front of a camera?

Well, if someone has a useful idea in this world, and want to build a company from it, the MTV "lick-the-stairway" offers will be the largest and first hurdle before anything else happens. People will simply offer to buy you out, and that's not limited to founders and creatives.

That's how our system works.

It's funny, but Scientologists were innovators on this front. They use the word "ethics" a lot, but they've specifically redefined it to mean productivity at work (people who aren't productive are stealing a living.)

Being "downstat" (iirc) is when you're not productive in comparison to your coworkers, which makes you "outethics" and a "potential trouble source (PTS)." If you're outethics, then you get called in for "auditing" which is when they interrogate you with a lie detector to find out if you're associating with "suppressive people (SP)" (who are people who are causing you to be downstat because they despise human happiness.) If those people can't be found, then the problem is obviously in your "withholds" (again, iirc) which are your secret deep-down desires to destroy the organization that you may not even be aware of. You see, your "reactive mind" is raging at being forced to be "ethical." The conclusion is that either you find the SP and "disconnect" from them, you discover the nature of your withhold and admit that you were plotting against the organization and why, or you're the SP and you get declared and ejected from the organization.

Welcome to "ethics." The original AI alignment scholars.

The specific, named people who run these organizations are moral black holes. Anybody that they're hiring for "ethics" they're hiring to define an ethics for their own benefit.

Microsoft Tay has entered the chat.

I'm kind of surprised by the cynicism. There are real problems in AI ethics that contribute to model training. Someone has to own those problems. How that team is incentivized is outside the scope of my comment.

I agree, which is a different job from what I expect most AI ethicists imagined it would be.

I was specifically thinking of Candide

"Prove" is a shorthand because of course it's a stochastic process. My point is that I would expect ethics to be part of the training and eval criteria.

The ethicists who see their job as publishing papers and acting as philosophy professors, sure, but someone has to own the training and eval suite for how AI thinks about trolley problems.

Bro trust, they will be like Voltaire. The circle doth jerk itself over at lighthaven.