General principles for the use of AI at CERN

https://home.web.cern.ch/news/official-news/knowledge-sharing/general-principles-use-ai-cern

by singiamtel • 8 months ago

104 78 8 months ago

home.web.cern.ch

singiamtel• 8 months ago

I found this principle particularly interesting:

    Human oversight: The use of AI must always remain under human control. Its functioning and outputs must be consistently and critically assessed and validated by a human.

conartist64• 8 months ago

It's still just a platitude. Being somewhat critical is still giving some implicit trust. If you didn't give it any trust at all, you wouldn't use it at all! So they endorse trusting it is my read, exactly the opposite of what they appear to say!

It's funny how many official policies leave me thinking that it's a corporate cover-your-ass policy and if they really meant it they would have found a much stronger and plainer way to say it

miningape2• 8 months ago

I think you're more reading what you want to read out of that - but that's the problem, it's too ambiguous to be useful

hgomersall• 8 months ago

That doesn't follow. Say you write a proof for a something I request, I can then check that proof. That doesn't mean I don't derive any value from being given the proof. A lack of trust does not imply no use.

MaybiusStrip• 8 months ago

"You can use AI but you are responsible for and must validate its output" is a completely reasonable and coherent policy. I'm sure they stated exactly what they intended to.

SiempreViernes5• 8 months ago

So they endorse trusting it is my read, exactly the opposite of what they appear to say!

They endorse limited trust, not exactly a foreign concept to anyone who's taken a closer look at an older loaf of bread before cutting a slice to eat.

Sharlin4• 8 months ago

Interesting in what sense? Isn't it just stating something plainly obvious?

jacquesm5• 8 months ago

It is, but unfortunately the fact that to you - and me - it is obvious does not mean it is obvious to everybody.

SiempreViernes5• 8 months ago

Did you forget the entire DOGE episode where every government worker in the US had to send an weekly email to an LLM to justify their existence?

mk89• 8 months ago

I want to see how obvious this becomes when you start to add agents left and right that make decisions automagically...

xtiansimon• 8 months ago

Where is “human oversight” in an automated workflow? I noticed the quote didn’t say “inputs”.

And with testing and other services, I guess human oversight can be reduced to _looking at the dials_ for the green and red lights?

SiempreViernes5• 8 months ago

Someone's inputs is someone else's outputs, I don't think you have spotted an interesting gap. Certainly just looking at the dials will do for monitoring functioning, but falls well short of validating the system performance.

monkeydust• 8 months ago

The real interesting thing is how does that principle interplay with their pillars and goals i.e. if the goal is to "optimize workflow and resource usage" then having a human in the loop at all points might limit or fully erode this ambition. Obviously it not that black and white, certain tasks could be fully autonomous where others require human validation and you could be net positive - but - this challenge is not exclusive to CERN that's for sure.

contrarian1234• 8 months ago

Do they hold the CERN Roomba to the same standard? If it cleans the same section of carpet twice is someone going to have to do a review?

conartist64• 8 months ago

Feels like the useless kind of corporate policy, expressed in terms of the loftiest ideals instead of how to make real trade offs with costs

jordanpg• 8 months ago

Organizations above a certain size absolutely cannot help themselves but publish this stuff. It is the work of senior middle managers. Ark Fleet Ship B.

I work in a corporate setting that has been working on a "strategy rebrand" for over a year now and despite numerous meeting, endless powerpoint, and god knows how much money to consultants, I still have no idea what any of this has to do with my work.

alkonaut• 8 months ago

99% of corporate policies are to be able to point to a document that says "well it's not my fault, I made the policy and someone didn't follow it".

marginalia_nu• 8 months ago

You don't even need to go as far as saying someone didn't follow the policy, you can just say you need to review the policies. That way, conveniently enough, nobody is really ever at fault!

SiempreViernes5• 8 months ago

It is a organisation wide document of "General principles", how could it possibly have something more specific to say that about the inherently context specific trade-offs of each specific use of AI?

mariusor• 8 months ago

Well, CERN is not a corporation, it can afford not optimizing for "costs", whatever you mean by that in this context.

oytis2• 8 months ago

What's so special about military research or AI that the two can't be done together even though the organization is not in principle opposed to either?

LudwigNagasena• 8 months ago

CERN is in principle opposed to military research. That and stuff like lawfulness, fairness, sustainability, privacy are just general CERN principles restated for fluff.

oblio4• 8 months ago

CERN’s convention states: “The Organization shall have no concern with work for military requirements and the results of its experimental and theoretical work shall be published or otherwise made generally available.”

CERN was founded after WW2 in Europe, and like all major European institutions founded at the time, it was meant to be a peaceful institution.

oytis2• 8 months ago

Sorry, looks like I misunderstood what "having no concern" means.

jacquesm5• 8 months ago

It's a bit of a fig leaf though, any high energy physics has military implications.

GuB-42• 8 months ago

One reason I can think of is with regard to confidentiality. A lot of AI services are controlled by companies in the US or China, and they may not want military research to leak to these countries.

Classified project obviously have stricter rules, such as airgaps, but sometimes, the limits are a bit fuzzy, like a non-classified project that supports a classified project. And I may be wrong but academics don't seem to be the type who are good at keeping secrets nor see the security implication of their actions. Which is a good thing in my book, science is about sharing, not keeping secrets! So no AI for military projects could be a step in that direction.

Temporary_31337• 8 months ago

blah, blah,people will simply use it as they see fit

Schlagbohrer• 8 months ago

It's about as detailed and helpful as saying, "Don't be an asshole"

elashri2• 8 months ago

In such scientific environment, There are gentlemen agreements about many things that boils down to "Don't be an asshole" or "Be considerate of the others" with some hard requirements at this or that point for things that are very serious.

blitzar• 8 months ago

"Don't be an asshole" could solve world peace.

eisbaw• 8 months ago

So general that it says nothing. Very corporate.

DisjointedHunt2• 8 months ago

This corporate crap makes me want to puke. It is a consequence of the forced bureaucracy from European regulations, particularly the EU AI act which is not well thought out and actively adds liability and risk to anyone on the continent touching AI including old school methods such as bank credit scoring systems.

fsh• 8 months ago

CERN is neither corporate, nor in the EU.

DisjointedHunt2• 8 months ago

The content is corporate. The EU AI Act is extra judicial. You don't have to be in the EU to adopt this very set of "AI Principles", but if you don't, you carry liability.

GranularRecipe• 8 months ago

What I find interesting is the implicit priorisation: explainability, (human) accountability, lawfulness, fairness, safety, sustainability, data privacy and non-military use.

peepee1982• 8 months ago

Might be implicit prioritization, but I don’t think it’s prioritized by importance, rather than by likelihood of being a problem.

annjose• 8 months ago

I agree, though I would prefer to highlight the first half of the first item - transparency. Also, perhaps make Safety an independent principle than combining with Security.

These are a good set of principles for any company (or individual) can follow to guide them how they use AI.

macleginn2• 8 months ago

‘Sustainability: The use of AI must be assessed with the goal of mitigating environmental and social risks and enhancing CERN's positive impact in relation to society and the environment.’ [1]

‘CERN uses 1.3 terawatt hours of electricity annually. That’s enough power to fuel 300,000 homes for a year in the United Kingdom.’ [2]

I think AI is the least of their problems, seeing as they burn a lot of trees for the sake of largely impractical pure knowledge.

[1] https://home.web.cern.ch/news/official-news/knowledge-sharin... [2] https://home.cern/science/engineering/powering-cern

hengheng2• 8 months ago

That is equivalent to a continuous draw of 150 MW. Not great, not terrible.

Far less power than those projected gigawatt data centers that are surely the one thing keeping AI companies from breaking even.

macleginn2• 8 months ago

I presume that this policy is not about building data-centres but about the use of AI by CERN employees, so essentially about marginal cost of generating an additional Python script, or something. Don't know if this calculation ever makes sense on the global scale, but if one’s job is to literally spend energy to produce knowledge, it becomes even less straightforward.

tempfile2• 8 months ago

How did that turn into "not great, not terrible"? That's still 300,000 homes that could otherwise be powered. It's an enormous amount of electricity!

Jean-Papoulos• 8 months ago

Humans have poured resources into the pursuit of largely impractical pure knowledge for millenia. This has been said of an incredible number of human scientific endeavors, before they found use in other domains.

Also, the web was invented at CERN.

piokoch2• 8 months ago

All this impractical knowledge people accumulated over centuries gave you cars, planes, computers, air condition, antibiotics, iphones, and, in fact, everything you have when human kind left the trees. So I would rather burn this 1,3 terawatt on this than on, say, running Facebook or bitcoins mining.

hexo• 8 months ago

from that picture it looks like they want to do everything with AI. this is very sad.

dude250711• 8 months ago

Responsibility and accountability: The use of AI, including its impact and resulting outputs throughout its lifecycle, must not displace ultimate human responsibility and accountability.

This is critical to understand if the mandate to use AI comes from the top: make sure to communicate from day 1, that you are using AI as mandated and not increasing the productivity as mandated. Play it dumb, protect yourself from "if it's not working out then you are using it wrong" attacks.

mark_l_watson• 8 months ago

Good guidelines. My primary principle for using AI is that it should be used as a tool under my control to make me better by making it easier to learn new things, offer alternative viewpoints. Sadly, AI training seems headed towards producing ‘averaged behaviors’ while in my career the best I had to offer employers was an ability to think outside the box, have different perspectives.

How can we train and create AIs with diverse creative viewpoints? The flexibility and creativity of AIs, or lack of, guides proper principles of using AI.

nathan_compton• 8 months ago

I'm not optimistic about this in the short term. Creative and diverse viewpoints seem to come from diverse life experiences, which AI does not have and, if they are present in the training data, are mostly washed out. Statistical models are like that. The objective function is to predict close to the average output, after all.

In the long term I am at least certain that AI can emulate anything humans do en masse, where there is training data, but without unguided self evolution, I don't see them solving truly novel problems. They still fail to write coherence code if you go a little out of the training distribution, in my experience, and that is a pretty easy domain, all things considered.

bryanlarsen• 8 months ago

The vast majority of advances seem to be of the form "do X for Y", where neither X nor Y is novel but the combination is. I have no idea whether AI is going to better than humans at this, but it seems like it could be.

General principles for the use of AI at CERN

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