This is the answer. "AI safety" in most cases has nothing to do with actually keeping anyone safe, it's about avoiding being the party responsible for handing someone information that they use to commit a crime.

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.

> it's about avoiding being the party responsible

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

It's an energy field created by all living things. It surrounds us and penetrates us. It binds the galaxy together.

May the torts be with you.

Entirety of human politics and governance over all of history has just been one long exercise in avoiding or shifting liability.

> it's about avoiding being the party responsible for handing someone information that they use to commit a crime.

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.

It's an absurd level of puritanism. E.g.: The Azure Open AI GPT 4 Service (an API!) refused to translate subtitles for me because they contained "violence".

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.

We're allowed to drive cars, own guns, skydive, swallow swords, you name it. There are some rough edges, but society mostly works.

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.

Eighteen year olds are given guns and told to go die for their country.

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."

You should read through the full examples in the attached document. They are trying to express what rules they would like to enforce, and your example is one that they would like their AI to be able to help with. They give specific examples of translating material as being something that they don't want to block.

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

Absolutely agree with this (and with the parent). It’s insanely frustrating that every conversation with GPT-3 basically started with “I can’t do that, you should talk to an expert”. I absolutely am not gonna wheedle and argue with a god damned statistical model to do what I tell it.

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.

the most frustrating one is sometimes the model will claim it can't do something and the fix for that is to respond "yes you can, and it'll just go and do the thing it just said it can't do. that's what ever come up with technology? a practice to practice really basics social engineering techniques?

I know it doesn't address the larger issue, but Whisper can generate and translate decent subtitles with off the shelf software like Whisperer

I view this as they are trying to lay bare the disagreements that everyone has about how these models “should” work. People from all different backgrounds and political affiliations completely disagree on what is inappropriate and what is not. One person says it is too censored, another person says it is revealing harmful information. By putting the policy out there in the open, they can move the discussion from the code to a societal conversation that needs to happen.

AI safety is about making OpenAI safe from PR disasters.

No idea if its a valid approach but possibly train with a hidden layer containing a “role”?