Comment by throwaway1389z
3 days ago
> a nuke would be malfunctioning if it failed to explode, even if that is morally better.
Something failing can be good. When you talk about "bad or the wrong", generally we are not talking about operational mechanics but rather morals. There is nothing good or bad about any mechanical operation per se.
Bad: 1) of poor quality or a low standard, 2) not such as to be hoped for or desired, 3) failing to conform to standards of moral virtue or acceptable conduct.
(Oxford Dictionary of English.)
A broken tool is of poor quality and therefore can be called bad. If a broken tool accidentally causes an ethically good thing to happen by not functioning as designed, that does not make such a tool a good tool.
A mere tool like an LLM does not decide the ethics of good or bad and cannot be “taught” basic ethical behavior.
Examples of bad as in “morally dubious”:
— Using some tool for morally bad purposes (or profit from others using the tool for bad purposes).
— Knowingly creating/installing/deploying a broken or harmful tool for use in an important situation for personal benefit, for example making your company use some tool because you are invested in that tool ignoring that the tool is problematic.
— Creating/installing/deploying a tool knowing it causes harm to others (or refusing to even consider the harm to others), for example using other people’ work to create a tool that makes those same people lose jobs.
Examples of bad as in “low quality”:
— A malfunctioning tool, for example a tool that is not supposed to access some data and yet accesses it anyway.
Examples of a combination of both versions of bad:
— A low quality tool that accesses data it isn’t supposed to access, which was built using other people’s work with the foreseeable end result of those people losing their jobs (so that their former employers pay the company that built that tool instead).
Hope that helps.
To use a dictionary to understand contextual meaning is like trying to assert the season based on a thermometer, shortsighted.
That’s why everybody uses context to understand the exact meaning.
The context was “when would an AI agent doing something it’s not permitted to do ever not be bad”. Since we are talking about a tool and not a being capable of ethical evaluation, reasoning, and therefore morally good or bad actions, the only useful meaning of “bad” or “wrong” here is as in “broken” or “malfunctioning”, not as in “unethical”. After all, you wouldn’t talk about a gun’s trigger failing as being “morally good”.
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