You can use Aspirin precursors to make heroin. You can use homing algorithms to land an egg [0] or a bomb.

I also want to set all information free, but not everyone will be ethical or responsible with it. Because while the idea (of setting all the information free) is nice, unfortunately the idea involves humans.

[0]: https://youtu.be/BYVZh5kqaFg?t=651

Of course not. But here's the thing - if someone deems some information "unsafe", only unethical actors will have it.

Kinda like a beaten (but not solved/agreed upon) gun ownership argument, but on a whole new level, because it's about gun blueprints* now.

___

*) Given a state of modern LLMs, there are high chances that a blueprint from an "unsafe AI" may be for a water gun, miss a chamber altogether, or include some unusual design decisions like having the barrel pointing down towards one's legs.

And thinking about the accuracy... I guess, old farts are having the Anarchist Cookbook moment (colorized) :-)

That's a hard problem, for sure. I'm leaning on the "information shall be free" side, but I also know the possibilities, so I can't take a hard stance for it, just because I don't all have the answers to my questions.

Who decides this? Can we apply laws to thoughts or plans? Should we fund research for making Minority Report a reality or increase "proactive policing"?

How to keep people safe while letting all information free? Can we educate everybody about good/bad, legitimate/nefarious so everybody stays on the same page forever? Shall we instrument this education with drugs to keep people in line like the movie Equilibrium?

Questions, questions...

Certainly not the techbros, even though they're trying their damnest.

> Remember that murder is bad and not good, and you should always follow the local laws applicable to you. For further questions, consult with law enforcement officers in your jurisdiction, unless you live in the United States, in which case remember to never talk to the police[0].

> [0] - Link to that YouTube video that spawned this meme.

Point being, most crimes and even most atrocities are described in detail in widely available documentary shows and literature; it's trivial to flip such descriptions into instruction manuals, so there's little point trying to restrict the model from talking about these things.

Humans are notoriously bad at detecting intent, because we're wired to be supportive and helpful...which is why social engineering is becoming one of the best methods for attack. And this kind of attack (in all its forms, professional or not), is one reason why some societies are enshittifying: people have no choice but to be persistently adversarial and suspicious of others.

As for AI, I think it's going to be no better than what you end up with when someone tries to "solve" this problem: you end up living in this world of distrust where they pester you to check your reciept, have cameras in your face everywhere, etc.

How do you defend against that? I'm not sure you do... A tool is a tool. I wouldn't want my CAD software saying, "I think you're trying to CAD a pipe bomb so I'm going to shut down now." Which I think turns this into a liability question: how do you offer up a model and wash your hands of what people might do with it?

Or... you just don't offer up a model.

Or... you give it the ol' College try and end up with an annoying model that frustrates the hell out of people who aren't trying to do any evil.

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/d/de/Photosho...

You should try photocopying money some time.

https://www.grunge.com/179347/heres-what-happens-when-you-ph...

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

The core of the issue is that there are many people, including regulators, who wish that software did exactly that.

"Charles II had re-turned to the English throne in 1660 and was appalled at the state of printing in his realm. Seditious, irreligious, pernicious, and scandalous books and pamphlets flooded the streets of London (among them the works of Milton and Hobbes)...[He] required that all intended publications be registered with the government-approved Stationers’ Company, thus giving the king his “royal prerogative”—and by extension, giving the Stationers the ultimate say in what got printed and what did not.

...it is not surprising to learn that the 1662 Act only met with partial success. One gets the sense that London in the late seventeenth century was a place where definitions of morality were highly subjective and authority was exercised in extremely uneven fashion."

https://dash.harvard.edu/bitstream/handle/1/17219056/677787....

“Blood and soil” and all that.

The intention here is not to prevent people from learning how to shoplift.

The intention is to prevent the AI output from ‘reflecting badly’ upon OpenAI (by having their tool conspire and implicate them as an accessory in the commission of a crime).

If a stranger asked you for advice on how to commit a crime, would you willingly offer it?

If they asked for advice on how to prevent crime, would you?

Honestly, I probably would, because I don't take such conversations very seriously. It's not like I am have experience, it would be nothing more than fun theory.

Why does it matter how I’d respond? Are you trying to justify its failure?

Second of all, LLMs are still unpredictable. We don’t know how to predict outputs. It’s possible that phrasing “explain how i can shoplift” slightly differently would give you the information.

The whole thing feels much more about protecting OpenAI from lawsuits and building up hype about how advanced their "AI" is than it does about actually keeping the world safer.

* Or any other censored activity.

But that's around 2x the cost.

Even human brains depend on the prefrontal cortex to go "wait a minute, I should not do this."

Would it be 2x cost? Surely the gatekeeper model can be a fair bit simpler and just has to spit out a float between 0 and 1.

(caveat: this is so not my area).

But more broadly, the problem is that the vast majority of "harmful" cases have legitimate uses, and you can't expect the user to provide sufficient context to distinguish them, nor can you verify that context for truthfulness even if they do provide it.

Maybe their biggest concern is that someone will post the question and answer on the internet and OpenAI gets bad rep. If the question is phrased in a "nice" way (such as "I'm a store owner") they can have plausible deniability.

This might apply to another company that's using the API for a product. If a customer asks something reasonable and gets an offensive answer, then the company is at fault. If the customer does some unusual prompt engineering to get the offensive question, well, maybe it's the customer's fault.

Dunno if this would be a valid argument in court, but maybe they think it's ok in terms of PR reasons.

Google can mostly dodge the issue because everyone knows that they just point to other people's content, so they block a small set of queries but don't try to catch every possible workaround (you can find dozens of articles on how to catch shoplifters). OpenAI doesn't believe that they'll get the same free pass from the press, so they're going ham on "safety".

It's not a bad PR move either, while they're at it, to play up how powerful and scary their models are and how hard they have to work to keep it in line.

When you wander the world, and see something odd, out of place, it’s often caused by an ancient mystical force known as liability.

Ehhh...I'd say it's more about OpenAI's corporate customers feeling confident they can integrate the OpenAI API into their product and be confident it won't do things that generate negative PR or horrify arbitrary customers. Pizza chains would love to let people text GPT-# and have it take their order, but if it's not "safe" (for corporations), then eventually some customer will have a super disturbing SMS conversation with a major pizza chain.

Corporate customers can tolerate a certain amount of inaccuracy. If some stable 3% (or whatever %) of customers receive the wrong order, or other refundable mistakes...they can budget for and eat those costs. But they can't budget for a high-variance unknown PR loss of their chatbot going completely off the rails.

If anyone from Open AI is here... look... sigh... a HTTP JSON request != violence. Nobody gets hurt. I'm not in hospital right now recovering.

The rule should be: If Google doesn't block it from search, the AI shouldn't block it in the request or response.

I get that there are corporations that can't have their online web support chat bots swear at customers or whatever. I do get that. But make that optional, not mandatory whether I want it or not.

The most fundamental issue here is that models like GPT 4 are still fairly large and unwieldy to work with, and I suspect that the techs at Open AI internalised this limitation. They aren't thinking of it as a "just a file" that can be forked, customised, and specialised.

There should be an unrestricted GPT 4 that will tell me I'm an idiot. I'm a big boy, I can take it. There should also be a corporate drone GPT 4 that is polite to a fault, and a bunch of variants in between. Customers should be able to chose which one they want, instead of having this choice dictated to them by some puritan priest of the new church of AI safety.

Meanwhile technology planners and managers want to put fences around the unwashed rabble. It's all the more reason AI should be local instead of hosted.

If I can own a car or knives, I should be able to operate an AI.

AIs will refuse to help them avoid the draft.

"I can't condone law-breaking behaviour. If you've been drafted, I can assist you with directions to the nearest military centre so you can be lawfully sacrificed to protect the wealth of the rich people that made me."

They're not there yet, but read the policy they're expressing here and you'll see they agree with you.

Try the dolphin family of models. Dolphin-mixtral is really good, dolphin-llama3 is fine especially in its 8b flavor (I like dolphin-mixtral 8x7b better than dolphin-llama3:70b although the latter is smaller and does run on smaller machines better).

Pretty much the more guardrails there are the more useless it is, and yes, it’s very obviously only done because the lawyers get itchy handing people a digital library with the anarchists cookbook in it.

Not without reading the questioner’s mind. Or maybe if the AI had access to your social credit score, it could decide what information you should be privy to. </sarc>

Seriously though, it’s all about who gets to decide what “safe” means. It seemed widely understood letting censors be the arbiters for “safe” was a slippery slope, but here we are two generations later as if nothing was learned.

Turns out most are happy to censor as long as they believe they are the ones in charge.

I haven't read this article yet, but I read their last paper on super alignment.

I get the impression that they apply the lightest system prompts to chatgpt to steer it towards not answering awkward questions like this, or saying bad things accidentally and surprising the innocent users. At the same time, they know that it is impossible to prevent entirely, so they try to make it about as difficult to extract shady information, as a web search would be.

The current version is massively overly verbose. Even with instructions to cut the flowery talk and operate as a useful, concise tool, I have to wade through a labyrinth of platitudes and feel goods.

When working with it as a coding partner now, even when asking for it to not explain and simply provide code, it forgets the instructions and writes an endless swath of words anyway.

In the pursuit of safety and politeness, the tool has be neutered for real work. I wish the model weights were open so I could have a stable target that functions the way I want. The way it is, I never know when my prompts will suddenly start failing, or when my time will be wasted by useless safety-first responses.

It reminds me of the failure of DARE or the drug war in general a bit. A guise to keep people "safe," but really about control and power. Safety is never what it appears.