Protest against Meta's irreversible proliferation (Sept 29, San Francisco)

Protests are by nature adversarial and high-variance actions prone to creating backlash, so I think that if you're going to be organizing them, you need to be careful to actually convey the right message (and in particular, way more careful than you need to be in non-adversarial environments—e.g. if news media pick up on this, they're likely going to twist your words). I don't think this post is very careful on that axis. In particular, two things I think are important to change:

"Meta’s frontier AI models are fundamentally unsafe."

I disagree; the current models are not dangerous on anywhere near the level that most AI safety people are concerned about. Since "current models are not dangerous yet" is one of the main objections people have to prioritizing AI safety, it seems really important to be clearer about what you mean by "safe" so that it doesn't sound like the protest is about language models saying bad things, etc.

Suggestion: be very clear that you're protesting the policy that Meta has of releasing model weights because of future capabilities that models could have, rather than the previous decisions they made of releasing model weights.

"Stop free-riding on the goodwill of the open-source community. Llama models are not and have never been open source, says the Open Source Initiative."

This basically just seems like a grab-bag accusation... you're accusing them of not being open-source enough? That's the exact opposite of the other objections; I think it's both quite disingenuous and also a plausible way things might backfire (e.g. if this is the one phrase that the headlines run with).

(speaking in a personal capacity) I currently plan to go. I'm willing to be talked out of it. Some meta^[1]-level reasons:

• I think I'm too biased towards balance and nuance etc. Sometimes it's good to to call bad things bad.
• I think it's helpful to have more "skin in the game" and not just be abstract and cerebral all the time, or be involved in overly meta activities like grantmaking, fundraising, and EA Forum comments.
• I'm pretty uncertain whether this specific protest is net good or bad; though I think most healthy movements or causes have a public protest/public action component as well, so this is a reasonable guess to the portfolio approach.
• Compared to most people in positions like mine, I think I'm less likely to get industry jobs in AI companies, or AI policy jobs^[2] in the US gov't, going forwards.
  • So I'm relatively burning less career capital from doing this than most people in my position.
  • There's a bit of "if not me, then who?" comparative advantage angle here.
• Like most EAs, some of my funding likely indirectly comes from Meta, and I think it's worthwhile to try to control for or counteract this bias.

1. ^{^}

   lol

2. ^{^}

   wrong ethnicity/nationality

I intend to go even though I'm vaguely against trying to stop AI development right now. I think it's true that:

1. The benefit/harm ratio for open sourcing AI seems much different than traditional software, and I don't think a heuristic of "open sourcing is always better" is reasonable.
2. If you have access to the model weights, then you can relatively easily bypass the safety measures. I don't think the Llama models are dangerous right now, but it is good to push back against the idea that making a model "safe" is simply a matter of making the original weights safe.
3. If Meta continues to open source their models, then this will eventually enable terrorists to use the models to asymmetrically harm the world. I think a single bio-terrorist attack would likely reverse all the positive gains from Meta open sourcing their models.
4. Meta's chief AI scientist, Yann LeCun, mostly has terrible arguments against taking AI safety seriously.

Out of the four major AI companies, three of them seem to be actively trying to build God-level AGI as-fast-as-possible. And none of them are Meta. To paraphrase Conner Leahy, watch the hands, not the mouth. Three of them talk about safety concerns, but actively pursue a reckless agenda. One of them dismisses safety concerns, but seems to lag behind the others, and is not currently moving at breakneck speed. I think the general anti-Meta narrative in EA seems to be because the three other AI companies have used EAs for their own benefit (poaching talent, resources, etc.) I do not think Meta has yet warranted being a target.

Cool idea!

What's your theory of change for this protest? For example, do we know for a fact that there are AI researchers working out of that office?

It seems to me like your theory of change should inform your actions a fair amount. For example, if your goal is to change the thinking of Meta employees, actions like the following could make sense:

• During the sign-making party, do some roleplays where someone pretends to be a Meta employee and asks the sort of questions a Meta employee might ask.

• People who seem good at answering Meta employee questions could write something like "Ask me questions!" on their sign. (Also, people with relevant credentials could write that on their sign, e.g. "I have an AI PhD".)

• Try to look friendly and inviting during the protest. Since the protest is happening around the time employees get off work anyways, have a goal of getting at least one Meta employee embroiled in conversation to join you for drinks after the protest. Maybe by spacing protestors out a little -- you could make it so even if they don't talk to the first protestor they see, they think for a bit and then talk to the 2nd or 3rd.

It seems like most protests are fairly confrontational. I'm not sure if that's just the nature of politics, or because confrontational protests work well according to some particular theory of change. I think I would favor a less-confrontational strategy just because you can always switch to being confrontational later. (Also: "In the qualitative responses about the readings, there were some recurring criticisms, including: a desire to hear from AI researchers, a dislike of philosophical approaches, a dislike of a focus on existential risks or an emphasis on fears, a desire to be “realistic” and not “speculative”, and a desire for empirical evidence." Source. I wonder if Bing Chat would be a good case study to highlight?)

It seems like the sign-making strategy is fairly different if you want to do a confrontational protest. E.g. for a non-confrontational protest, I imagine that funny or inviting signs could be good (perhaps something like: "Only you can save us from irreversible AI proliferation!") For a confrontational protest, I imagine it's better to have accusatory signs, plus bring a bunch of extra signs and try to get passerby to join you.

BTW, a mental model that might describe what's going on at Meta: It's like an online echo chamber. Researchers at Meta self-select for being unconcerned about safety. Once they're hired, they participate in internal discussions (probably in private Facebook groups) where the consensus is that AI risk fears are alarmist. Best-case outcome for a protest is inspiring a few people to speak up in favor of safety during internal discussions. (If you do manage to have a conversation with a Meta person, you could ask them if this mental model is accurate!)

PS -- Another possible theory of change for protests is: use conversations to refine messaging that actually persuades AI risk skeptics, then broadcast that messaging later. Relevant post

I'll be going to this. I just listened to your podcast with Daniel Filan and I thought your point about protests being underrated was a good one

I think the protests could benefit from "gears-level" detail on the sort of proximate effect as well as medium-long term effects:

1. What literally do people do in a protest, how should they dress, speak, what impression should they induce in their audience and what is their audience?
2. What could the medium or long term effects of the protest be? E.g. press, online discussion, awareness, sentiment

I think there is a good understanding here based on the comments from the OP below.  Note that this doesn't have to be airtight or 100% accurate. But this would help discourse and understanding.

I'm slightly worried/skeptical that the discourse around them isn't high-quality, e.g. many of these comments are speculative expressions of personal feelings.

Maybe you could suggest a new Motto for them too.

"Meta AI: move fast and break everything" ;)

The decision to attend this particular protest is actually a difficult one. Normally, most EA-minded people consistently do not vote or attend protests, since whether or not the protest succeeds depends on the non-EA masses who don't do EV evaluations. Your decision not to attend predicts the decision of other EA-minded people not to attend, but does not predict the decision of non-EA people who almost entirely determine whether the protest/vote succeeds or fails.

However, with this specific protest, EA-minded people are the ones who almost entirely determine whether the protest succeeds or fails, because this is a protests by elites, against elites, and the general population is unwilling/unable to do EV calculations and will not attend either away. Therefore, your decision not to attend predicts whether this protest succeeds or fails. If a third of EA-affiliated people attend, then it actually probably intimidates Facebook quite a bit, whereas if it fails and only 12 people attend, then it might even embolden Facebook.

I'm someone who would normally not go to protests, because, in my own words, "that is obviously something that the world already has plenty of people doing", and many people affiliated with EA have an extremely similar knee-jerk response to public protests. But this situation is different.

Change log: I removed the point about llama 2 not being true open source because it was too confusing.