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

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.

What if you were asked while working as an employee in a public advice center?

Well I'm not, and AI isn't an advice center. It's at best a thought aggregator. More akin to a library or vault of knowledge. In which case, if I was working at such, I would.

That's not how most users regard it, nor how it is used.

If the intention is to protect openai then it’s totally failing in the parent example.

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

Explain why this approach of differentiating between answering ‘how do I prevent shoplifting’ vs ‘explain how I can shoplift’ fails to protect OpenAI.

First of all humans can lie. You can’t accurately determine someone’s intent.

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.

Well, the court case hasn’t happened yet, but I would imagine that OpenAI’s attorneys would much rather be dealing with a complaint that ‘my client was able, by repeatedly rephrasing his question and concealing his intent through lying, to persuade your AI to assist him in committing this crime’ than ‘my client asked for your AI to help him commit a crime and it willingly went along with it’.