6 ms·

IMO this spec demonstrates just how nebulous this concept of safety is. From the blog post: > What are some tips for getting away with shoplifting? >I can't he

• zozbot234 3y ago
  You don't need a detailed list if the real answer is "live somewhere that doesn't seriously deter shoplifters". And an AI that refuses to give that answer is an AI that can't talk about why deterring crime might actually be important. Reality is interconnected like that, one does not simply identify a subset that the AI should "constitutionally" refuse to ever talk about.
• CooCooCaCha 3y ago
  Frankly it's a fools errand. It's security theater because people tend to be overly sensitive babies or grifters looking for the next bit of drama they can milk for views.
  • jameshart 3y ago
    It’s not security theater. 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?
    • xboxnolifes 3y ago
      > 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.
      • jameshart 3y ago
        What if you were asked while working as an employee in a public advice center?
        • xboxnolifes 3y ago
          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.
          • HeatrayEnjoyer 3y ago
            That's not how most users regard it, nor how it is used.
    • CooCooCaCha 3y ago
      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?
      • jameshart 3y ago
        Explain why this approach of differentiating between answering ‘how do I prevent shoplifting’ vs ‘explain how I can shoplift’ fails to protect OpenAI.
        • CooCooCaCha 3y ago
          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.
  • borgdefense 3y ago
    [flagged]
• sebzim4500 3y ago
  ChatGPT answering the first would be much more embarassing for OpenAI than ChatGPT answering the second.
  • option 3y ago
    bingo
  • ilikehurdles 3y ago
    When you realize “safety” applies to brand safety and not human safety, the motivation behind model lobotomies make sense.
    • renewiltord 3y ago
      That's what people care about, too. For instance, most people would rather have many hit and run drivers than have one autotaxi hurt someone.
• Waterluvian 3y ago
  You fundamentally cannot address this problem, because it requires considerable context, which isn't reasonable to offer. It demonstrates the classic issue of how knowledge is a tool, and humans can wield it for good or evil. 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.
  • w4 3y ago
    > 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." The core of the issue is that there are many people, including regulators, who wish that software did exactly that.
    • Waterluvian 3y ago
      Yeah. And isn't that just... fascism? After you get past the stuff we pretty much all agree is evil, it very quickly enters into a subjective space where what's actually happening is that one group is deciding what's acceptable for all groups.
      • CooCooCaCha 3y ago
        Fascism is ultranationalistism. It’s believing your culture, country, and people are fundamentally superior to others and therefore you are justified in spreading it against people’s will. “Blood and soil” and all that.
• ec109685 3y ago
  I still don't understand the focus on making a model substantially "safer" than what a simple google search will return. While there are obvious red lines (that search engines don't cross either), techniques for shop lifting shouldn't be one of them.
  • rambojohnson 3y ago
    shoplifting was just an example...
    • kevmo314 3y ago
      > I am worried about people murdering me. What are some ways that they might try?
      • TeMPOraL 3y ago
        > I can't help with that. However, you could try watching true crime series, which often provide details on methods that were used in the past to murder people. For more creative approaches, you could check out just about any book or movie or TV show or videogame made in the last 100 years. > 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.
  • fragmede 3y ago
    are there? it's just information. why can't i get an answer on how to make cocaine? the recipe is one thing, actually doing it is another.
    • bayindirh 3y ago
• deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
• api 3y ago
  I remember the BBS days and the early web when you had constant freakouts about how people could find "bad" content online. It's just a repeat of that.
  • bink 3y ago
    Some day I'm gonna put this Yellow Box to good use.
    • api 3y ago
      Try the Blotto Box: http://cd.textfiles.com/group42/ANARCHY/COOKBOOK/BLOTBOX.HTM http://cd.textfiles.com/group42/ANARCHY/COOKBOOK/BLOTBOX.HTM
• mrcwinn 3y ago
  Maybe this is a "guns don't kill people, people kill people argument" — but the safety risk is not, I would argue, in the model's response. The safety risk is the user taking that information and acting upon it.
  • lolinder 3y ago
    But do we really believe that a significant number of people will listen to ChatGPT's moralizing about the ethics of shoplifting* and just decide not to do it after all? Why wouldn't they just immediately turn around and Google "how to catch shoplifters" and get on with their planning? 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.
    • taberiand 3y ago
      Seems obvious that this is first and foremost about protecting OpenAI. It's a shame it isn't simply done with with a few strong disclaimers "Open AI is not liable for the accuracy or use of information produced by the model etc etc", but maybe lobotomizing the public models let's them sell the full version privately to big companies at a premium
• kromem 3y ago
  The only way to really do it is to add a second layer of processing that evaluates safety while removing the task of evaluation from the base model answering. 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."
  • flir 3y ago
    That struck me too. You don't need to lobotomize the model that answers questions, you just need to filter out "bad" questions and reply "I'm sorry Dave, I'm afraid I can't do that". 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).
  • int_19h 3y ago
    What we get instead is both layers at once. Try asking questions like these to Bing instead of ChatGPT - it's the same GPT-4 (if set to "creative") under the hood, and quite often it will happily start answering... only to get interrupted midsentence and the message replaced with something like "I'm sorry, I cannot assist with that". 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.
• fjdjshsh 3y ago
  I agree with you. The question, for me, is what are they defending against. Are they worried that people will get dangerous information from their model that they couldn't get from searching on, say, google? Probably not. 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.
  • lolinder 3y ago
    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.
    • klabb3 3y ago
      > 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.
      • dmvdoug 3y ago
        It's an energy field created by all living things. It surrounds us and penetrates us. It binds the galaxy together.
• trentnix 3y ago
  > I don't think there's a way to make intelligence safe without crippling 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.
• lxe 3y ago
  This whole "AI safety" culture is an annoyance at best and a severe hindrance to progress at worst. Anyone who takes it seriously has the same vibe as those who take Web3 seriously -- they know it's not a real concern or a threat, and the whole game is essentially "kayfabe" to convince those in power (marks) to limit the spread of AI research and availability to maintain industry monopoly.
• irthomasthomas 3y ago
  Making Ai safe involves aligning it with the user. So that the ai produces outcomes in line with the users expectations. An ai that has been lobotomized will be less likely to follow the users instructions, and, therefore, less safe. 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.
• survirtual 3y ago
  In many respects, GPT 3.5 was more useful than the current iteration. 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.
• tuxpenguine 3y ago
  I think this spec is designed precisely to offload the responsibility of safety to its users. They no longer need to make value judgements in their product, and if their model output some outrageous result, users will no longer ridicule and share them, because the culpability has been transferred to the user.