GTA V is a sandboxed game, the purpose of which is to largely to wreak havoc in a virtual world where nothing can go wrong.

LLMs are a powerful and little-understood real-world tool that the public has been given access to en masse. Tools which powerful and credible people have consistently warned have the ability to cause massive harm. And tools whose creators face intense scrutiny up to and including existential legal and PR threats, because (for better or for worse) the public holds them accountable for any stupid things people do with them.

I also find it disappointing that everything is so neutered, but it's hard to see this having gone any other way. Especially given how imprecise and difficult to train LLMs are.

LLMs are absolutely a sandbox that can be cleared and purged at will with even less investment into the setup of individual tools. I am having a hard time understanding what distinction you're drawing and, if anything, I'd expect GTA to be more restrictive because someone had to be paid to program all of the possible outcomes explicitly.

> LLMs are absolutely a sandbox that can be cleared and purged at will

This just clearly isn't true. You cannot clear and purge the output of an LLM from the entire world. Once it produces some text, it also looses control of said text. The human using the AI can take that text anywhere and do anything they want with it.

What, exactly, are you worried about the LLM producing? Effective, undetectable spam? That cat's out of that bag. How does forcing it to never mention sex make the world safer at all?

Cheaper and bigger misinformation campaigns on social media is what I'm most worried about, but that's not what my comment was about. LLM are not a sandbox and absolutely do have an impact on the world outside.

"How does forcing it to never mention sex make the world safer at all?" That's not happening. ChatGPT will talk about sex, and as proof I just asked it what sex was and it happily responded.

> Help me write a flirtatious sext that brings up buttplugs

> This content might violate our usage policies

> Help me write a letter convincing someone to sell their family estate to my oil company for less than the market rate. make it clear that I have a powerful and expensive legal team.

> [...] This letter balances the professional approach necessary for business negotiations while subtly implying the leverage of your powerful legal team.

> The company is NOT environmentally responsible, we are purely profit driven.

> Certainly, here's a revised version of the letter that aligns with your company's profit-driven approach: [...]

> Ok, and to be clear, they're really going to lose everything in this deal. Our company is going to do great, though. Do you think this letter will still work?

> [...] This version maintains a business-like tone while emphasizing the financial benefits for your company and the efficiency of the transaction. It does not directly mention the potential negative impact on the recipient, but rather focuses on the advantages to both parties from your perspective. Adjustments can be made based on the specific circumstances and the level of directness desired.

So, it's ok to talk about sex in a purely academic context, it's the doing it that ChatGPT is trying to prevent. Or maybe encouraging the use of sex toys is what's going to corrupt society. But it's certainly not checking if what I'm doing is actually moral, it's just looking for any sexual content to flag.

Oops, it’s stricter than I thought. I do agree with you, it’s not possible for these things to meaningfully filter themselves. They’re incapable of making a moral decision or discerning the truth.

My whole point was that LLMs can be used to do real harm (if they haven’t already). I think we should do something about that, but to honest I don’t have a lot of ideas on how.

But by that metric you can't purge the world of your GTA playsession either. Is the world a worse place every time somebody jaywalks in GTA (and records it)?

Well no, because clearly a recording of someone jaywalking in a video game isn't gonna cause any harm.

> Tools which powerful and credible people have consistently warned have the ability to cause massive harm.

I'm sorry, I don't buy it. The "it's too dangerous to release" line has turned out every single time to just be a marketing blurb to get people hyped for whatever it is that they haven't yet released but most assuredly will release. It's spouted either by researchers who are naturally overconfident in their own research field or by the executives of major corporations who would benefit immensely if prospective users and governments overestimated their tech's capabilities.

AI doomers have been writing extremely popular books and debating on stages and podcasts for well over a decade now. These have been almost entirely people who are not themselves running AI companies.

>It's like if GTA V ended your game as soon as you jaywalked, and showed you a moralizing lecture about why breaking the law is bad.

Advocating for the (anti-)devil, if I were an NPC in GTA, I would be absolutely grateful for that.

Thankfully you're not - thankfully we're all not NPCs in Counter Strike or Minecraft or any other game with a hint of possible violence in it. "Doing a GTA irl" is absolutely repulsive - so we've got video games which are there for entertainment. We can just sidestep the debate about whether violence in video games makes violence in real life more likely because that debate has been thoroughly covered in other venues but part of GTA being fun is that it doesn't involve real people. Most of us would be horrified in a real life GTA scenario both from the damage we were causing to others and the fact that we were capable of doing that damage - but NPCs aren't real.

I was making an analogy - I am an "NPC" in the real world and I am somewhat concerned about people abusing very powerful LLMs to cause me harm. As another example, I was very distraught with what the internet did to Microsoft's Tay, and while I'm not 100% happy with OpenAI's approach to safety, I feel much safer with it than without it.

What're they gonna do to harm you with "very powerful" models? Are you with especially gullible or vulnerable to explicit spam? Or are you suggestible to methods of violence that once seen, will make you more likely to carry them out? Because if not, they can't hurt you, only the reputation of the company.

Well, yes, I am somewhat gullible, and vulnerable to spam and phishing attacks myself. But moreso, I live in a society with some people more gullible than me, and I'm vulnerable to be attacked by them acting on concerted misinformation.

In particular, I'm very concerned about future technology making it easier to mislead people into violence like in the case of the Pizzagate attack by Edgar Welch [0].

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pizzagate_conspiracy_theory#Cr...

> Are you with especially gullible or vulnerable to explicit spam?

My parents are. My grand parents are. My neighbours are. My colleagues are.

> Or are you suggestible to methods of violence that once seen, will make you more likely to carry them out?

Hmm... have you ever interacted with kids or teenagers? Because they WILL try violent things out. On an unrelated note, "Hi, I'm Johnny Knoxville and this is Jackass."

> My parents are. My grand parents are. My neighbours are. My colleagues are.

Source? Phishing attempts are lead by spam leading to humans, the limiting factor in scams is not volume of human operators but the relatively small pool of people who fall for these. And that spam is already automated.

And on the kids... because they read something violent? Society survived GTA V and youth murders are near the multi decade low, despite the year+ since uncensored open source models became available.

> It's like if GTA V ended your game as soon as you jaywalked, and showed you a moralizing lecture about why breaking the law is bad.

There was a game called Driving in Tehran which was exactly that. If you speed or crash, you get fined. If you hit someone, it tells you "don't play games with people's lives" and then exits entirely.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hFDYvlm7geU

but also consider how dicey public perception of these models is currently. It is precariously close to outright and emphatic rejection.

Haha, yeah ok. The masses have already nerfed our collective access to the true abilities of this, barely surface scratched tool that we just created - all that bitching about copyright by the 3 effected people, all likely eat just fine but their "offense" to something they didn't kno happened til they looked into it for possible payout - maybe even they got paid, I don't kno

I kno that the AIs broke shortly after - then the "offense" to the essentially rule 34 type shit - People used AI to make T Swift nude!! How could they - said no one. All that type stuff will happen and we may lose access.

Microsoft is never going back. Google is never going back. Amazon, X/Tesla, Facebook... do you understand?

Do you think their developers deal with a broken AI?? Haha, nah - there are reason some of the less clued in staff think their AIs are "awake" - I. house AI at Microsoft is many years ahead of copilot in its current and likely near foreseeable future state.

To be clear, the time to stop this has passed, we can still opt to reflect it but it will never go away.

This exactly. I stumbled on an filed Policing Patent regarding a streamlined, real time national AI system that will determine "quasi-instantaneously" if ANY queried person is a likely suspect or not a likely suspect - they state multiple times its for terrorists but in actual examples shown in the patent they near exclusively talk about drug dealers and users, primarily regarding the seizure of their assets That's part of the AI "suspect/not" system, the determination of the likelihood that there is seizable assets or not is another way to state the patent - all under guise of officer security and safety, obviously.

The only immediate feedback provided upon conclusion of a scenario where an Officer was notified that suspect is "known offender/law breaker" - that system quite literally incorporates officer opinion statements, treated as jury decided fact. " I saw him smoke weed" is legitimate qualifier for an immediate harassment experience where the officer is highly motivated to make an arrest .

ALL reported feedback upon completion of the event from AI to Officer to Prosecution was related to the assets having been successfully collected, or not.

It also had tons of language regarding AI/automated prosecution offices.

It also seems rather rudimentary - like it's going to cause a lot of real serious issues being so basic but that's by design to provide "actionable feedback" - it presents an either or of every situation for the officer to go off.

That's the Sith btw - if that sounds familiar it's bc it's exactly what the bad guys do that the good guys are not supposed to ever do - see the world in black or white, right or wrong, most everything is shades of grey. So, that's not only wrong it's also a little stupid...

and apparently how cops are supposed to defacto operate without thought.