Friendly AI ideas needed: how would you ban porn?

But suppose that approach was not available to you - what methods would you implement to distinguish between pornography and eroticism, and ban one but not the other? Sufficiently clear that a scriptwriter would know exactly what they need to cut or add to a movie in order to move it from one category to the other? What if the nude "Pirates of of Penzance" was at a Pussycat Theatre and "Fuck Slaves of the Caribbean XIV" was at the Met?

Not saying that I would endorse this as a regulatory policy, but it's my understanding that the strategy used by e.g. the Chinese government is to not give any explicit guidelines. Rather, they ban things which they consider to be out of line and penalize the people who produced/distributed them, but only give a rough reason. The result is that nobody tries to pull tricks like obeying the letter of the regulations while avoiding the spirit of them. Quite the opposite, since nobody knows what exactly is safe, people end up playing it as safe as possible and avoiding anything that the censors might consider a provocation.

Of course this errs on the side of being too restrictive, which is a problem if the eroticism is actually something that you'd want to encourage. But then you always have to err in one of the directions. And if you do a good enough job at picking the people who you make public examples of, maybe most people will get the right message. You know it when you see it, so punish people when you do see something wrong, and let them off when you don't see anything wrong: eventually people will be able to learn the pattern that your judgments follow. Even if they couldn't formulate an explicit set of criteria for porn-as-defined-by-you, they'll know it when they see it.

Short answer: Mu.

Longer answer: "Porn" is clearly underspecified, and to make matters worse there's no single person or interest group that we can try to please with our solution: many different groups (religious traditionalists, radical feminists, /r/nofap...) dislike it for different and often conflicting reasons. This wouldn't be such a problem -- it's probably possible to come up with a definition broad enough to satisfy all parties' appetites for social control, distasteful as such a thing is to me -- except that we're also trying to leave "eroticism" alone. Given that additional constraint, we can't possibly satisfy everyone; the conflicting parties' decision boundaries differ too much.

We could then come up with some kind of quantification scheme -- show questionable media to a sample of the various stakeholders, for example -- and try to satisfy as many people as possible. That's probably the least-bad way of solving the problem as stated, and we can make it as finely grained as we have money for. It's also one that's actually implemented in practice -- the MPAA ratings board works more or less like this. Note however that it still pisses a lot of people off.

I think a better approach, however, would be to abandon the question as stated and try to solve the problem behind it. None of the stakeholders actually care about banning media-labeled-porn (unless they're just trying to win points by playing on negative emotional valence, a phenomenon I'll contemptuously ignore); instead, they have different social agendas that they're trying to serve by banning some subset of media with that label. Social conservatives want to limit perceived erosion of traditional propriety mores and may see open sexuality as sinful; radical feminists want to reduce what they see as exploitative conditions in the industry and to eliminate media they perceive as objectifying women; /r/nofap wants what it says on the tin.

Depending on the specifics of these objections, we can make interventions a lot more effective and less expensive than varying the exact criteria of a ban: we might be able to satisfy /r/nofap and some conservatives, for example, by instituting an opt-out process by which individuals could voluntarily and verifiably bar themselves from purchasing prurient media (or accessing websites, with the help of a friendly ISP). If we have a little more latitude, we could even look at these agendas and the reasoning behind them, see if they're actually well-founded and well-targeted, and ignore them if not.

distinguish between pornography and eroticism

Aren't you assuming these two are at different sides of a "reality joint"?

I tend to treat these words as more or less synonyms in that they refer to the same thing but express different attitude on the part of the speaker.

To construct a friendly AI, you need to be able to make vague concepts crystal clear, cutting reality at the joints when those joints are obscure and fractal - and them implement a system that implements that cut.

I don't think that this is true. Reductionist solutions to philosophical problems typically pick some new concepts which can be crisply defined, and then rephrase the problem in terms of those, throwing out the old fuzzy concepts in the process. What they don't do is to take the fuzzy concepts and try to rework them.

For example, nowhere in the "Free Will Sequence" does Eliezer give a new clear definition of "free will" by which one may decide whether something has free will or not. Instead he just explains all the things that you might want to explain with "free will" using concepts like "algorithm".

For another example, pretty much all questions of epistemic rationality are settled by Bayesianism. Note that Bayesianism doesn't contain anywhere a definition of "knowledge". So we've successfully dodged the "problem of knowledge".

So the answer to the title question is to ask what you want to achieve by banning porn, and then ban precisely the things such that banning them helps you achieve that aim. Less tautologically, my point is that the correct way of banning porn isn't to make a super precise definition of "porn" and then implement that definition.

To construct a friendly AI, you need to be able to make vague concepts crystal clear, cutting reality at the joints when those joints are obscure and fractal - and them implement a system that implements that cut.

Strongly disagree. The whole point of Bayesian reasoning is that it allows us to deal with uncertainty. And one huge source of uncertainty is that we don't have precise understandings of the concepts we use. When we first learn a new concept, we have a ton of uncertainty about its location in thingspace. As we collect more data (either through direct observation or indirectly through communication with other humans), we are able to decrease that uncertainty, but it never goes away completely. An AI which uses human concepts will have to be able to deal with concept-uncertainty and the complications that arise as a result.

The fact that humans can't always agree with each other on what constitutes porn vs. erotica demonstrates that we don't all carve reality up in the same places (and therefore there's no "objective" definition of porn). The fact that individual humans often have trouble classifying edge cases demonstrates that even when you look at a single person's concept, it will still contain some uncertainty. The more we discuss and negotiate the meanings of concepts, the less fuzzy the boundaries will become, but we can't remove the fuzziness completely. We can write out a legal definition of porn, but it won't necessarily correspond to the black-box classifiers that real people are using. And concepts change - what we think of as porn might be classified differently in 100 years. An AI can't just find a single carving of reality and stick with it; the AI needs to adapt its knowledge as the concepts mutate.

So I'm pretty sure that what you're asking is impossible. The concept-boundaries in thingspace remain fuzzy until humans negotiate them by discussing specific edge cases. (And even then, they are still fuzzy, just slightly less so.) So there's no way to find the concept boundaries without asking people about it; it's the interaction between human decision makers that define the concept in the first place.

This is a sorites problem and you want to sort some pebbles into kinds. You've made clear that externalism about porn may be true (something may begin or stop being porn in virtue of properties outside it's own inherent content, such as where it is and contextual features).

It seems to me that you have to prioritize your goals in this case. So the goal "ban porn" is much more important then the goal "leave eroticism alone". My response would be to play safe and ban all footage including genitals, similar to what the Japanese already do with pubes etc...

This response is analogous to your Oracle AI paper suggestion, only mine is less sophisticated.

Now, I can steelman your request, you must ban all porn and with the exact same importance you must endorse that eroticism take place. Then I'd evoke the works of skeptical philosophers about the sorites problem, like Paul Unger, who doesn't think people nor himself exist (while still thinking you should not "live high and let die").

I'd argue that these theorists are right, and that thus there is no matter of fact as to where porn stops and erotism begins.

The goal is still there though, the goal is embedded in Nature, regardless of what we think about it? Ok. Now if we know there is no fact of the matter, and erring in both directions would be equally bad, we should make pools to find out the general opinion on the porn eroticism divide (seems safe to bet that porn is porn in virtue of its relation to human minds, since chimp porn is not attractive to us). Those pools would be compulsory, like voting is in some places, we'd have as good an idea about what the human mind considers porn as we can. Like hot or not, there would be worldwide porn or not websites.

This would go on (causing a lot of damage every time someone had to detect porn) for a while, until the best algorithms of the time could do the detecting indistinguishably from the average of all humans to some approximation. When that was done, anyone attempting to create eroticism would have their files automatically scanned for porn-ness by the narrow AI.

We would have the best system possible to avoid infractions in both directions of the sorites problem. For every doubling of the human population from then on, re-check to see if our senses have shifted drastically from the previous ones and adapt the algorithm.

Seems desirable to over the long run make sure cultural globalization of morals is very intense, so I'd ban immigration laws to make sure humanity clusters around a narrow subset of mindspace as it regards porn or not.

Depending on how that goal factors in with every single other goal we have ever had, it may be good to destroy lots of resources after the moral globalization process is done, so that people spend more resources on survival and have fewer chances of drifting morally apart. Following the same reasoning, it may be desirable to progressively eliminate males, since males are less biologically necessary, and porn judgement varies significantly by gender.

The distinction between eroticism and pornography is that it's porn of a typical viewer wanks to it. Like the question of whether something is art, the property is not intrinsic to the thing itself.

That this question was so easy, very slightly decreases my difficulty estimate for Friendliness.

I'll cite the comment section on this post to friends whenever I need to say: "And this, my friends, is why you don't let rationalists discuss porn" http://imgs.xkcd.com/comics/shopping_teams.png

In terms of AI, this is equivalent with "value loading": refining the AI's values through interactions with human decision makers, who answer questions about edge cases and examples and serve as "learned judges" for the AI's concepts. But suppose that approach was not available to you

But it is, and the contrary approach of teaching humans to recognize things doesn't have an obvious relation to FAI, unless we think that the details of teaching human brains by instruction and example are relevant to how you'd set up a similar training program for an unspecified AI algorithm. If this is the purported connection to FAI it should be spelled out explicitly, and the possible failure of the connection spelled out explicitly. I'm also not sure the example is a good one for the domain. Asking how to distinguish happiness from pleasure, what people really want from what they say they want, the difference between panic and justified fear? Or maybe if we want to start with something more object-level, what should be tested and when you should draw confident conclusions about what someone's taste buds will like (under various circumstances?), i.e., how much do you need to know to decide that someone will like the taste of a cinnamon candy if they've never tried anything cinnamon before? Porn vs. erotica seems meant to take us into a realm of conflicting values, disagreements, legalisms, and a large prior literature potentially getting in the way of original thinking - if each of these aspects is meant to be relevant, then can the relevance of each aspect be spelled out?

I like the "What does it take to predict taste buds?" question, of those I brainstormed above, because it's something we could conceivably test in practice. Or maybe an even more practical conjugate would be Netflix-style movie score prediction, only you can ask the subject whatever you like, have them rate particular other movies, etc., all to predict the rating on that one movie.

This thread should provide interesting examples of the Typical Mind Fallacy... :-D

An alternative to trying to distinguish between porn and erotica on the basis of content or user attitudes: teach the AI to detect infrastructures of privacy and subterfuge, and to detect when people are willing to publicly patronize and self-identify with something. Most people don't want others to know that they enjoy porn. You could tell your boss about the nude Pirates you saw last weekend, but probably not the porn. Nude Pirates shows up on the Facebook page, but not so much the porn. An online video with naked people that has half a million views, but is discussed nowhere where one's identity is transparent, is probably porn. It's basic to porn that it's enjoyed privately, erotica publicly.

I would guess that eroticism is supposed to inspire creativity while pronography supposedly replaces it. So if the piece in question were to be presented to people while their brain activity is being monitored I would expect to see an increase of activity throughout the brain for eroticism while I'd expect a decrease or concentration of activity for pornography. Although I have no idea if that is actually the case.

Without reference to sexual stimulation this would include a lot of things that are not currently thought of as pornography, but that might actually be intentional depending on the reason why someone would want to ban pornography.

I think there is no fundamental difference between porn and erotica, it's just that one is low status and the other is high status (and what's perceived as highs status depends greatly on the general social milieu so it's hard to give any kind of stand-alone definition to delineate the two). It only seems like there are two "clusters in thingspace" because people tend to optimize their erotic productions to either maximize arousal or maximize status, without much in between (unless there is censorship involved, in which case you might get shows that are optimized to just barely pass censorship). Unfortunately I don't think this answer helps much with building FAI.

A couple of thoughts here:

1. Set a high minimum price for anything arousing (say $1000 a ticket). If it survives in the market at that price, it is erotica; if it doesn't, it was porn. This also works for $1000 paintings and sculptures (erotica) compared to $1 magazines (porn).

2. Ban anything that is highly arousing for males but not generally liked by females. Variants on this: require an all-female board of censors; or invite established couples to view items together, and then question them separately (if they both liked it, it's erotica). Train the AI on examples until it can classify independently of the board or couples.

Just criminalize porn, and leave it to the jury to decide whether or not it's porn. That's how we handle most moral ambiguities, isn't it?

I will assume that the majority of the population shares my definition of porn and is on board with this, creating low risk of an activist jury (otherwise this turns into the harder problem of "how to seize power from the people".)

Edit: On more careful reading, I guess that's not allowed since it would fall in the "I know it when I see it" category. But then, since we obviously are not going to write an actual algorithm, how specific does the answer need to be?

Would "It is pornography if the intention is primarily to create sexual arousal, and it's up to the jury to decode intention" be an acceptably well-defined answer? Would "I'm going to use theoretically possible mind-reading technology to determine whether or not the viewer / creator of the pornography were primarily intending to view / create sexually arousing stimuli" be an acceptably well defined answer? Do I have to define the precise threshold upon which something is "primarily" about a factor with neuron-level accuracy, or can I just approximately define the threshold of "primarily" via a corpus of examples?

I guess what I'm saying is... "how to ban pornography" seems to be "solved" in the abstract as soon as you adequately define pornography, and the rest is all implementation.

To construct a friendly AI, you need to be able to make vague concepts crystal clear, cutting reality at the joints when those joints are obscure and fractal - and them implement a system that implements that cut.

I don't think that's how the solution to FAI will look like. I think the solution to FAI will look like "Look, this a human (or maybe an uploaded human brain), it is an agent, it has a utility function. You should be maximizing that."

After refining my thoughts, I think I see the problem:

1: The Banner AI must ban all transmissions of naughty Material X.

1a: Presumably, the Banner must also ban all transmissions of encrypted naughty Material X.

2: The people the Banner AI is trying to ban from sending naughty transmissions have an entire field of thought (knowledge of human values) the AI is not allowed to take into account: It is secret.

3: Presumably, the Banner AI has to allow some transmissions. It can't just shut down all communications.

Edit: 4: The Banner AI needs a perfect success rate. High numbers like 97.25% recognition are not sufficient. I was previously presuming this without stating it, hence my edit.

I think fulfilling all of these criteria with sufficiently clever people is impossible or nearly so. If it is possible, it strikes me as highly difficult, unless I'm making a fundamental error in my understanding of encryption theory.

what methods would you implement to distinguish between pornography and eroticism, and ban one but not the other

There's a heuristic I use to distinguish between the two that works fairly well: in erotica, the participants are the focus of the scene. In pornography, the camera (and by implication the viewer) is the true focus of the scene.

That being said, I have a suspicion that trying to define the difference explicitly is a wrong question. People seem to use a form of fuzzy logic[1] when thinking about the two. What we're really looking at is gradations; a better question might be "how far does something have to be along a pornographic axis before being banned, and what factors determine a position on that axis?"

[1]: Damn I hope I'm using that term right....

Well, there's Umberto Eco's famous essay on the subject. (The essay is not long so read the whole thing.)

One notable thing about his criterion is that it makes no reference to nudity, thus it's a horrendous predictor on the set of all possible movies, it just happens to work well on the subset of possible movies a human would actually want to watch.

Suppose you're put in change of some government and/or legal system, and you need to ban pornography, and see that the ban is implemented. Pornography is the problem, not eroticism. So a lonely lower-class guy wanking off to "Fuck Slaves of the Caribbean XIV" in a Pussycat Theatre is completely off. But a middle-class couple experiencing a delicious frisson when they see a nude version of "Pirates of Penzance" at the Met is perfectly fine - commendable, even.

I have no idea what distinction you're trying to draw here. And I say this as someone who opposes porn but is willing to permit artistic nudes. (I'm not sure what you mean by "erotica" but your example is something I'd probably classify as porn.) I say probably because it's theoretically possible to do it artistically but given the state of the current art world the chances that such a performance be done artistically is low.

To ban anything, by law or less formally, is to use might in the service of right. For an AI to ban anything, it would need to have the ability to cause physical harm or death to humans. Just like we humans do to ourselves. All law is rooted in enfranchising a minority to commit violence and disenfranchising the majority to do the same. This is part of what it would mean for an AI to ban porn.