I think breaking a law is more unethical than not breaking a law.
Also, legality isn't the only difference in the VW case. With VW, they had a "good emissions" mode. They enabled the good emissions mode during the test, but disabled it during regular driving. It would have worked during regular driving, but they disabled it during regular driving. With compilers, there's no "good performance" mode that would work during regular usage that they're disabling during regular usage.
> I think breaking a law is more unethical than not breaking a law.
It sounds like a mismatch of definition, but I doubt you're ambivalent about a behavior right until the moment it becomes illegal, after which you think it unethical. Law is the codification and enforcement of a social contract, not the creation of it.
But following the law is itself a load bearing aspect of the social contract. Violating building codes, for example, might not cause immediate harm if it's competent but unusual, yet it's important that people follow it just because you don't want arbitrariness in matters of safety. The objective ruleset itself is a value beyond the rules themselves, if the rules are sensible and in accordance with deeper values, which of course they sometimes aren't, in which case we value civil disobedience and activism.
Also, while laws ideally are inspired by an ethical social contract, the codification proces is long, complex and far from perfect. And then for rules concerning permissible behavior even in the best of cases, it's enforced extremely sparingly simply because it's not possible nor desirable to detect and deal with all infractions. Nor is it applied blindly and equally. As actually applied, a law is definitely not even close to some ethical ideal; sometimes it's outright opposed to it, even.
Law and ethics are barely related, in practice.
For example in the vehicle emissions context, it's worth noting that even well before VW was caught the actions of likely all carmakers affected by the regulations (not necessarily to the same extent) were clearly unethical. The rules had been subject to intense clearly unethical lobbying for years, and so even the legal lab results bore little resemblance to practical on-the-road results though systematic (yet legal) abuse. I wouldn't be surprised to learn that even what was measured intentionally diverged from what is harmfully in a profitable way. It's a good thing VW was made an example of - but clearly it's not like that resolved the general problem of harmful vehicle emissions. Optimistically, it might have signaled to the rest of the industry and VW in particular to stretch the rules less in the future.
>I doubt you're ambivalent about a behavior right until the moment it becomes illegal, after which you think it unethical.
There are many cases where I think that. Examples:
* Underage drinking. If it's legal for someone to drink, I think it's in general ethical. If it's illegal, I think it's in general unethical.
* Tax avoidance strategies. If the IRS says a strategy is allowed, I think it's ethical. If the IRS says a strategy is not allowed, I think it's unethical.
* Right on red. If the government says right on red is allowed, I think it's ethical. If the government (e.g. NYC) says right on red is not allowed, I think it's unethical.
The VW case was emissions regulations. I think they have an ethical obligation to obey emissions regulations. In the absence of regulations, it's not an obvious ethical problem to prioritize fuel efficiency instead of emissions (that's I believe what VW was doing).
unless following an unethical law would in itself be unethical, then breaking the unethical law would be the only ethical choice. In this case cheating emissions, which I see as unethical, but also advantageous for the consumer, should have been done openly if VW saw following the law as unethical. Ethics and morality are subjective to understanding, and law only a crude approximation of divinity. Though I would argue that each person on the earth through a shared common experience has a rough and general idea of right from wrong...though I'm not always certain they pay attention to it.
I think you're talking about something different from what sigmoid10 was talking about. sigmoid10 said "manipulate behaviour during those benchmarks". I interpreted that to mean the compiler detects if a benchmark is going on and alters its behavior only then. So this wouldn't impact real life use cases.
I agree that ethics should inform law. But I live in a society, and have an ethical duty to respect other members of society. And part of that duty is following the laws of society.
I disagree- presumably if an algorithm or hardware is optimized for a certain class of problem it really is good at it and always will be- which is still useful if you are actually using it for that. It’s just “studying for the test”- something I would expect to happen even if it is a bit misleading.
VW cheated such that the low emissions were only active during the test- it’s not that it was optimized for low emissions under the conditions they test for, but that you could not get those low emissions under any conditions in the real world. That's "cheating on the test" not "studying for the test."
How so? VW intentionally changed the operation of the vehicle so that its emissions met the test requirements during the test and then went back to typical operation conditions afterwards.
VW was breaking the law in a way that harmed society but arguably helped the individual driver of the VW car, who gets better performance yet still passes the emissions test.
That is not true. Even ChatGPT understands how they are different, I won’t paste the whole response but here are the differences it highlights:
Key differences:
1. Intent and harm:
• VW’s actions directly violated laws and had environmental and health consequences. Optimizing LLMs for chess benchmarks, while arguably misleading, doesn’t have immediate real-world harms.
2. Scope: Chess-specific optimization is generally a transparent choice within AI research. It’s not a hidden “defeat device” but rather an explicit design goal.
3. Broader impact: LLMs fine-tuned for benchmarks often still retain general-purpose capabilities. They aren’t necessarily “broken” outside chess, whereas VW cars fundamentally failed to meet emissions standards.
I think breaking a law is more unethical than not breaking a law.
Also, legality isn't the only difference in the VW case. With VW, they had a "good emissions" mode. They enabled the good emissions mode during the test, but disabled it during regular driving. It would have worked during regular driving, but they disabled it during regular driving. With compilers, there's no "good performance" mode that would work during regular usage that they're disabling during regular usage.
> I think breaking a law is more unethical than not breaking a law.
It sounds like a mismatch of definition, but I doubt you're ambivalent about a behavior right until the moment it becomes illegal, after which you think it unethical. Law is the codification and enforcement of a social contract, not the creation of it.
But following the law is itself a load bearing aspect of the social contract. Violating building codes, for example, might not cause immediate harm if it's competent but unusual, yet it's important that people follow it just because you don't want arbitrariness in matters of safety. The objective ruleset itself is a value beyond the rules themselves, if the rules are sensible and in accordance with deeper values, which of course they sometimes aren't, in which case we value civil disobedience and activism.
Also, while laws ideally are inspired by an ethical social contract, the codification proces is long, complex and far from perfect. And then for rules concerning permissible behavior even in the best of cases, it's enforced extremely sparingly simply because it's not possible nor desirable to detect and deal with all infractions. Nor is it applied blindly and equally. As actually applied, a law is definitely not even close to some ethical ideal; sometimes it's outright opposed to it, even.
Law and ethics are barely related, in practice.
For example in the vehicle emissions context, it's worth noting that even well before VW was caught the actions of likely all carmakers affected by the regulations (not necessarily to the same extent) were clearly unethical. The rules had been subject to intense clearly unethical lobbying for years, and so even the legal lab results bore little resemblance to practical on-the-road results though systematic (yet legal) abuse. I wouldn't be surprised to learn that even what was measured intentionally diverged from what is harmfully in a profitable way. It's a good thing VW was made an example of - but clearly it's not like that resolved the general problem of harmful vehicle emissions. Optimistically, it might have signaled to the rest of the industry and VW in particular to stretch the rules less in the future.
>I doubt you're ambivalent about a behavior right until the moment it becomes illegal, after which you think it unethical.
There are many cases where I think that. Examples:
* Underage drinking. If it's legal for someone to drink, I think it's in general ethical. If it's illegal, I think it's in general unethical.
* Tax avoidance strategies. If the IRS says a strategy is allowed, I think it's ethical. If the IRS says a strategy is not allowed, I think it's unethical.
* Right on red. If the government says right on red is allowed, I think it's ethical. If the government (e.g. NYC) says right on red is not allowed, I think it's unethical.
The VW case was emissions regulations. I think they have an ethical obligation to obey emissions regulations. In the absence of regulations, it's not an obvious ethical problem to prioritize fuel efficiency instead of emissions (that's I believe what VW was doing).
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unless following an unethical law would in itself be unethical, then breaking the unethical law would be the only ethical choice. In this case cheating emissions, which I see as unethical, but also advantageous for the consumer, should have been done openly if VW saw following the law as unethical. Ethics and morality are subjective to understanding, and law only a crude approximation of divinity. Though I would argue that each person on the earth through a shared common experience has a rough and general idea of right from wrong...though I'm not always certain they pay attention to it.
Overfitting on test data absolutely does mean that the model would perform better in benchmarks than it would in real life use cases.
I think you're talking about something different from what sigmoid10 was talking about. sigmoid10 said "manipulate behaviour during those benchmarks". I interpreted that to mean the compiler detects if a benchmark is going on and alters its behavior only then. So this wouldn't impact real life use cases.
ethics should inform law, not the reverse
I agree that ethics should inform law. But I live in a society, and have an ethical duty to respect other members of society. And part of that duty is following the laws of society.
I disagree- presumably if an algorithm or hardware is optimized for a certain class of problem it really is good at it and always will be- which is still useful if you are actually using it for that. It’s just “studying for the test”- something I would expect to happen even if it is a bit misleading.
VW cheated such that the low emissions were only active during the test- it’s not that it was optimized for low emissions under the conditions they test for, but that you could not get those low emissions under any conditions in the real world. That's "cheating on the test" not "studying for the test."
> The only difference is the legality. From an integrity point of view it's basically the same
I think cheating about harming the environment is another important difference.
How so? VW intentionally changed the operation of the vehicle so that its emissions met the test requirements during the test and then went back to typical operation conditions afterwards.
VW was breaking the law in a way that harmed society but arguably helped the individual driver of the VW car, who gets better performance yet still passes the emissions test.
It might sound funny in retrospect, but some of us actually bought VW cars on the assumption that, if biodiesel-powered, it would be more green.
And afaik the emissions were still miles ahead of a car from 20 years prior, just not quite as extremely stringent as requested.
"not quite as extremely stringent as requested" is a funny way to say they were emitting 40 times more toxic fumes than permitted by law.
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Right - in either case it's lying, which is crossing a moral line (which is far more important to avoid than a legal line).
That is not true. Even ChatGPT understands how they are different, I won’t paste the whole response but here are the differences it highlights:
Key differences:
1. Intent and harm: • VW’s actions directly violated laws and had environmental and health consequences. Optimizing LLMs for chess benchmarks, while arguably misleading, doesn’t have immediate real-world harms. 2. Scope: Chess-specific optimization is generally a transparent choice within AI research. It’s not a hidden “defeat device” but rather an explicit design goal. 3. Broader impact: LLMs fine-tuned for benchmarks often still retain general-purpose capabilities. They aren’t necessarily “broken” outside chess, whereas VW cars fundamentally failed to meet emissions standards.