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Re:Ask HN: Is AI safety simply the thought police? by king_magic on Wednesday November 22, 2023 @09:52PM (#38388653)
It feels like the stakes are kind of different when a LLM could give you the recipe and accurate instructions for creating, say, chemical weapons.
Re:Ask HN: Is AI safety simply the thought police? by apantel on Wednesday November 22, 2023 @09:56PM (#38388677)
What I’ve learned from a lot of productive coding with ChatGPT as a soundboard and generator is that you need to review everything it generates in order to catch little issues as well as ways things could be done better. Only an extremely competent chemist could try suggestions from an LLM without blowing themselves up or melting a hole in the floor. In other words, only someone already capable of designing chemical weapons could be helped by an LLM in the design of chemical weapons.
Re:Ask HN: Is AI safety simply the thought police? by _factor on Wednesday November 22, 2023 @10:16PM (#38388794)
Right, so stop teaching chemistry in schools. Make sure there are only 3 experts allowed to work on the field, and lock their knowledge away from humanity. That will solve it. While you're at it, take away all the guns and any computers that can be used to hack. God forbid dangerous knowledge ever becomes available again. Almost forgot, people really shouldn't learn how to drive cars either. Very very dangerous.

Practical solution. Fingerprint the conversations and images. Do something naughty, go to jail.

Re:Ask HN: Is AI safety simply the thought police? by TapWaterBandit on Wednesday November 22, 2023 @10:24PM (#38388855)
Let's not forget how many crimes are committed with vehicles. Not just the terror attack style seen in recent years, get away cars for various crimes, scooter drug dealers, boats used to smuggle all sorts of stuff. Far too dangerous got the public to be able to use.
Re:Ask HN: Is AI safety simply the thought police? by mcphage on Thursday November 23, 2023 @08:39AM (#38392608)
Well, you do need to get licensed to be a driver, and register your vehicle with the government, and you get fined—or worse—if you don’t operate it properly and safely.

So is what you’re asking for? That level of security around AI usage?

Re:Ask HN: Is AI safety simply the thought police? by ultrarunner on Thursday November 23, 2023 @11:33AM (#38394531)
Let's be honest, though: these are mostly just a grift. People kill other people in vehicles every single day. It's almost always referred to as an "accident", given nearly zero investigation, and there are zero consequences. The licensing & registration is mostly about paying a fee in many areas (and being taxed on the same thing over and over) and the last fee I paid for not "operating it properly" was along with 5 other people with out-of-state plates in a shakedown where the traffic light wouldn't change.

Arguing that these things are primarily in the interest of safety is tenuous at best. A fitting parallel for the levels of risk that chatbots present.

Re:Ask HN: Is AI safety simply the thought police? by mcphage on Thursday November 23, 2023 @12:56PM (#38395453)
Is there grift involved? Sure. Would we be better off or safer without the regulations? Hell no.
Re:Ask HN: Is AI safety simply the thought police? by voitvoder on Thursday November 23, 2023 @06:16AM (#38391587)
There is a much easier solution to all of this. Children should stop learning to read.

The safest way to handle large language models is simply to have a more illiterate society.

It is disgusting people would talk about destroying data centers when we have such safer options like this.

Re:Ask HN: Is AI safety simply the thought police? by toyg on Thursday November 23, 2023 @07:13AM (#38391926)
This is why nerds are kept far away from the seats of power.

The world is about shades of gray and (typically) minimising harm. We all know people fully bent on doing antisocial things will likely get there, one way or the other, but we still try to make it hard for them. That's why professional locksmiths typically have to register with the police, you can't buy all medicines over the counter, etc etc.

With this view, reducing access to information that is useful almost exclusively when committing crimes, is absolutely fair. It will not solve all problems but it will make it a bit harder to do bad stuff.

Re:Ask HN: Is AI safety simply the thought police? by ndriscoll on Wednesday November 22, 2023 @09:59PM (#38388695)
People need to know how to create chemical weapons at home so that they don't do it on accident using common cleaning supplies. That e.g. bleach and vinegar create deadly gas when mixed is extremely important for every adult to know.
Re:Ask HN: Is AI safety simply the thought police? by Turing_Machine on Wednesday November 22, 2023 @11:34PM (#38389309)
> LLM could give you the recipe and accurate instructions for creating, say, chemical weapons.

Like, say,

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bis(2-chloroethyl)sulfide

or:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phosgene

or:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sarin

Re:Ask HN: Is AI safety simply the thought police? by kylebenzle on Wednesday November 22, 2023 @09:55PM (#38388672)
LLMs only know what they have been trained on. So in what cases should the data used to train the LLM, that is generally freely available not be available through another format.

Your complaint is a perfect example of how these "safety" issues are simply not logical and seems to assume that an LLM and generate new information, not just repeat what its been trained on.