Share AI Safety Ideas: Both Crazy and Not. №2

A major problem with the setup of our forum: currently it's possible to go here or to any post and double downvote all the new posts in mass (please, don't! Just believe me it's possible), so writers who were writing their AI safety proposal for months will have their posts ruined (almost no one reads posts with negative rating), will probably abandon our cause and go become evil masterminds.

Solution: UI proposal to solve the problem of demotivating writers, helps to teach writers how to improve their posts (so it makes all the posts better), it keeps the downvote buttons, increases signal to noise ratio on the site because both authors and readers will have information why the post was downvoted:

• It’s important to ask for reasons why a downvoter downvotes if the downvote will move the post below zero in karma. The author was writing something for maybe months, the downvoter if it’s important enough to downvote, will be able to spend an additional moment to choose between some popular reasons to downvote (we have a lot of space on the desktop, we can put the most popular reasons for downvotes as buttons like Spam, Bad Title, Many Tags, Type...) or to choose some reason later on some special page. Else the writer will have no clue, will rage quit and become Sam Altman instead.

1. More serious now: On desktop we have a lot of space and can show buttons like this: Spam (this can potentially be a big offense, bigger than 1 downvote), Typo (they probably shouldn't lower the post as much as a full downvote), Too Many Tags, basically the popular reasons people downvote. We can make those buttons appear when hovering on the downvote button or always. This way people still click once to downvote like before.
2. Especially if a downvoter downvoted so much, the post now has negative karma, we show a bubble in a corner for 30 seconds that says something like this: "Please choose one of those other popular reasons people downvote or hover here to type a word or 2 why you double downvoted, it'll help the writer improve."
3. Downvoters can hover over the downvote button, it’ll hijack their typing cursor so they can quickly type a word or two why they downvote and press enter to downvote. Again very elegant UI.
4. If they just click downvote (you can still keep this button), show a ballon for 30 secs where a downvoter can choose a popular reasons for downvoting or again hover and instantly type a word or 2 and press enter to downvote
5. A page “Leave feedback for your downvotes”: where we show downvotes that ruined articles, then double downvotes then the rest. We can say it honestly in our UI: those are new authors and your downvote most likely demotivated them because the article has negative karma now, so please write how can they improve. And we maybe can write that feedback for popular articles (with comments, from established writers and/or above zero karma posts) is not as important, so you don’t need to bother.
6. Phone UI is similar but we don’t have hovering. So we can still show popular reasons to downvote on top maybe as icons: Spam, Typo, etc and a button to Type and Downvote that looks like a typing cursor & Downvote icon - by tapping it the keyboard autoappears, you enter a word or two and press return to downvote. So again one tap to downvote like before in most cases. We just gave the downvoters more choices to express themselves.
7. As I said before we need this at least when the downvote will ruin the post - put it into the negative karma territory. This way we prioritizing teaching people how to write better and more, instead of scaring them away to abandon our website. Everybody wins.

Thank you for reading and making the website work!

The only complete and comprehensive solution that makes AIs 100% safe: in a nutshell we need to at least lobby politicians to make GPU manufacturers (NVIDIA and others) to make robust blacklists of bad AI models, update GPU firmwares with them. It's not the full solution: please steelman and read the rest to learn how to make it much safer and why it will work (NVIDIA and other GPU makers will want to do it because it'll double their business and all future cash flows. Gov will want it because it removes all AI threats from China, all hackers, terrorists and rogue states):

1. The elephant in the room: even if current major AI companies will align their AIs, there will be hackers (can create viruses with agentic AI component to steal money), rogue states (can decide to use AI agents to spread propaganda and to spy) and military (AI agents in drones and to hack infrastructure). So we need to align the world, not just the models:
2. Imagine a agentic AI botnet starts to spread on user computers and GPUs, GPUs are like nukes to be taken, they are not protected from running bad AI models at all. I call it the agentic explosion, it's probably going to happen before the "intelligence-agency" explosion (intelligence on its own cannot explode, an LLM is a static geometric shape - a bunch of vectors - without GPUs). Right now we are hopelessly unprepared. We won't have time to create "agentic AI antiviruses".
3. To force GPU and OS providers to update their firmware and software to at least have robust updatable blacklists of bad AI (agentic) models. And to have robust whitelists, in case there will be so many unaligned models, blacklists will become useless.
4. We can force NVIDIA to replace agentic GPUs with non-agentic ones. Ideally those non-agentic GPUs are like sandboxes that run an LLM internally and can only spit out the text or image as safe output. They probably shouldn't connect to the Internet, use tools, or we should be able to limit that in case we'll need to.
5. This way NVIDIA will have the skin in the game and be directly responsible for the safety of AI models that run on its GPUs.
6. The same way Apple feels responsible for the App Store and the apps in it, doesn't let viruses happen.
7. NVIDIA will want it because it can potentially like App Store take 15-30% cut from OpenAI and other commercial models, while free models will remain free (like the free apps in the App Store).
8. Replacing GPUs can double NVIDIA's business, so they can even lobby themselves to have those things. All companies and CEOs want money, have obligations to shareholders to increase company's market capitalization. We must make AI safety something that is profitable. Those companies that don't promote AI safety should go bankrupt or be outlawed.