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Thanks for clarification, I agree this is a reasonable view of the situation. Though I also don't really have problems with headlines like "AI tried to kill a

Thanks for clarification, I agree this is a reasonable view of the situation. Though I also don't really have problems with headlines like "AI tried to kill a man". True LLM can't be held responsible, but so are e.g. animals. If an unleashed dog kills a man, the owner will be responsible but the headlines will be still about the dog. Then it can be argued that LLMs don't have intent while the dog had, and many more analogies, arguments and nuances will follow. My point is, this headline is still at an acceptable level of accuracy, unlike many other headlines that distort the reality completely.

mindslight 2y ago
The key difference is that everyone mostly understands a dog's capabilities. A reader knows there must be a larger context. Even in your simple example you felt the need to elaborate that it was an "unleashed" dog. If I merely say "a dog killed a man", the reader is left grasping for that larger context and defaulting to thinking a human must ultimately be responsible (most dogs are human owned rather than in wild packs). If I say "a bear killed a man", a similar grasping occurs but defaults to assuming the deceased likely got too close to a wild bear. Society has no such general understanding for LLMs. If we did, we wouldn't have situations like this in the first place, because people wouldn't be expecting them to generate instructions that can be followed verbatim. Instead we get the marketing buzz of anthropomorphized "AI" as if they're super-human intelligent entities capable of conversing as humans do, but also better. And when they inevitably fail to live up to that, the narrative shifts to the need for "alignment" and "safety", which seems to mostly mean adding some words to the short priming prompt to make it avoid outputting some specific type of thing that was found to be problematic (with the definition of problematic generally being the creation a public relations shitstorm while also not creating profit). But us humans, our only benchmark for comparison, develop our sense of wisdom much slower through repeated learning and development stages. You can't simply read a child an essay of any length about how to drive safely and then hand them the keys to the family car.

mindslight 2y ago

The key difference is that everyone mostly understands a dog's capabilities. A reader knows there must be a larger context. Even in your simple example you felt the need to elaborate that it was an "unleashed" dog. If I merely say "a dog killed a man", the reader is left grasping for that larger context and defaulting to thinking a human must ultimately be responsible (most dogs are human owned rather than in wild packs). If I say "a bear killed a man", a similar grasping occurs but defaults to assuming the deceased likely got too close to a wild bear. Society has no such general understanding for LLMs. If we did, we wouldn't have situations like this in the first place, because people wouldn't be expecting them to generate instructions that can be followed verbatim. Instead we get the marketing buzz of anthropomorphized "AI" as if they're super-human intelligent entities capable of conversing as humans do, but also better. And when they inevitably fail to live up to that, the narrative shifts to the need for "alignment" and "safety", which seems to mostly mean adding some words to the short priming prompt to make it avoid outputting some specific type of thing that was found to be problematic (with the definition of problematic generally being the creation a public relations shitstorm while also not creating profit). But us humans, our only benchmark for comparison, develop our sense of wisdom much slower through repeated learning and development stages. You can't simply read a child an essay of any length about how to drive safely and then hand them the keys to the family car.