8 ms·

I see this as a good thing: ‘AI safety’ is a meaningless term. Safety and unsafety are not attributes of information, but of actions and the physical environme

I see this as a good thing: ‘AI safety’ is a meaningless term. Safety and unsafety are not attributes of information, but of actions and the physical environment. An LLM which produces instructions to produce a bomb is no more dangerous than a library book which does the same thing. It should be called what it is: censorship. And it’s half the reason that all AIs should be local-only.

politician 2y ago
"AI safety" is ideological steering. Propaganda, not just censorship.
- latentsea 2y ago
  Well... we have needed to put a tonne of work into engineering safer outcomes for behavior generated by natural general intelligence, so...
codyvoda 2y ago
^I like email as an analogy if I send a death threat over gmail, I am responsible, not google if you use LLMs to make bombs or spam hate speech, you’re responsible. it’s not a terribly hard concept and yeah “AI safety” tends to be a joke in the industry
- Angostura 2y ago
  or alternatively, if I cook myself a cake and poison myself, i am responsible. If you sell me a cake and it poisons me, you are responsible.
  - kennywinker 2y ago
    So if you sell me a service that comes up with recipes for cakes, and one is poisonous? I made it. You sold me the tool that “wrote” the recipe. Who’s responsible?
    - Sleaker 2y ago
      The seller of the tool is responsible. If they say it can produce recipes, they're responsible for ensuring the recipes it gives someone won't cause harm. This can fall under different categories if it doesn't depending on the laws of the country/state. Willful Negligence, false advertisement, etc. Ianal, but I think this is similar to the red bull wings, monster energy death cases, etc.
    - hannasanarion 1y ago
      In this scenario, you would have had to go through an extensive amount of specialist effort to intentionally get the recipe generator to produce something poisonous when it never would have done so otherwise. Product warranties generally don't cover unintended usage, and liability for producers generally dosen't extend to transformative unintended uses that are achieved by circumventing safeguards. If you take a firefighter-grade angle grinder to your balcony rail and remove it, you don't then get to sue the building owner for unsafe construction.
  - actsasbuffoon 2y ago
    Sure, I may be responsible, but you’d still be dead. I’d prefer to live in a world where people just didn’t go around making poison cakes.
- SpicyLemonZest 2y ago
  It's a hard concept in all kinds of scenarios. If a pharmacist sells you large amounts of pseudoephedrine, which you're secretly using to manufacture meth, which of you is responsible? It's not an either/or, and we've decided as a society that the pharmacist needs to shoulder a lot of the responsibility by putting restrictions on when and how they'll sell it.
  - codyvoda 2y ago
    sure but we’re talking about literal text, not physical drugs or bomb making materials. censorship is silly for LLMs and “jailbreaking” as a concept for LLMs is silly. this entire line of discussion is silly
    - kennywinker 2y ago
      Except it’s not, because people are using LLMs for things, thinking they can put guardrails on them that will hold. As an example, I’m thinking of the car dealership chatbot that gave away $1 cars: https://futurism.com/the-byte/car-dealership-ai https://futurism.com/the-byte/car-dealership-ai If these things are being sold as things that can be locked down, it’s fair game to find holes in those lockdowns.
      - codyvoda 2y ago
        …and? people do stupid things and face consequences? so what? I’d also advocate you don’t expose your unsecured database to the public internet
        kennywinker 2y ago
        And yet you’re out here seemingly saying “database security is silly, databases can’t be secured and what’s the point of protecting them anyway - SSNs are just information, it’s the people who use them for identity theft who do something illegal”
        2y ago
- loremium 2y ago
  This is assuming people are responsible and with good will. But how many of the gun victims each year would be dead if there were no guns? How many radiation victims would there be without the invention of nuclear bombs? safety is indeed a property of knowledge.
  - miroljub 2y ago
    Just imagine how many people would not die in traffic incidents if the knowledge of the wheel had been successfully hidden?
    - handfuloflight 2y ago
      Nice try but the causal chain isn't as simple as wheels turning → dead people.
  - deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
  - 0x457 2y ago
    If someone wants to make a bomb, chatgpt saying "sorry I can't help with that" won't prevent that someone from finding out how to make one.
    - HeatrayEnjoyer 2y ago
      That's really not true, by that logic LLMs provide no value which is obviously false. It's one thing to spend years studying chemistry, it's another to receive a tailored instruction guide in thirty seconds. It will even instruct you how to dodge detection by law enforcement, which a chemistry degree will not.
      - 0x457 2y ago
        > That's really not true, by that logic LLMs provide no value which is obviously false. Way to leep to a (wrong) conclusion. I can lookup a word in a Dictionary.app, I can google it or I can pick up a phisical dictionary book and look it up. You don't even need to look to far: Fight Club (the book) describes how to make a bomb pretty accurately. If you're worrying that "well you need to know which books to pick up at the library"...you can probably ask chatgpt. Yeah it's not as fast, but if you think this is what stops everyone from making a bomb, then well...sucks to be you and live in such fear?
- OJFord 2y ago
  What if I ask it for something fun to make because I'm bored, and the response is bomb-building instructions? There isn't a (sending) email analogue to that.
  - BriggyDwiggs42 2y ago
    In what world would it respond with bomb building instructions?
    - OJFord 2y ago
      Why might that happen is not really the point is it? If I ask for a photorealistic image of a man sitting at a computer, a priori I might think 'in what world would I expect seven fingers and no thumbs per hand', alas...
      - BriggyDwiggs42 2y ago
        I’ll take the example as an example of an LLM initiating harmful behavior in general and admit that such a thing is perfectly possible. I think the issue is down to the degree to which preventing such initiation impinges on the agency of the user, and I don’t think that requests for information should be refused because it’s lots of imposition for very little gain. I’m perfectly alright with conditioning/prompting the model not to readily jump into serious, potentially harmful targets without the direct request of the user.
    - __MatrixMan__ 2y ago
      If I were to make a list of fun things, I think that blowing stuff up would feature in the top ten. It's not unreasonable that an LLM might agree.
    - QuadmasterXLII 2y ago
      if it used search and ingested a malicious website, for example.
      - 2y ago
- kelseyfrog 2y ago
  There's more than one way to view it. Determining who has responsibility is one. Simply wanting there to be fewer causal factors which result in death threats and bombs being made is another. If I want there to be fewer[1] bombs, examining the causal factors and affecting change there is a reasonable position to hold. 1. Simply fewer; don't pigeon hole this into zero.
- BobaFloutist 2y ago
  > if you use LLMs to make bombs or spam hate speech, you’re responsible. What if it's easier enough to make bombs or spam hate speech with LLMs that it DDoSes law enforcement and other mechanisms that otherwise prevent bombings and harassment? Is there any place for regulation limiting the availability or capabilities of tools that make crimes vastly easier and more accessible than they would be otherwise?
  - 3np 2y ago
    The same argument could be made about computers. Do you prefer a society where CPUs are regulated like guns and you can't buy anything freer than an iPhone off the shelf?
  - BriggyDwiggs42 2y ago
    I mean this stuff is so easy to do though. An extremist doesn’t even need to make a bomb, he/she already drives a car that can kill many people. In the US it’s easy to get a firearm that could do the same. If capacity + randomness were a sufficient model for human behavior, we’d never gather in crowds, since a solid minority would be rammed, shot up, bombed etc. People don’t want to do that stuff; that’s our security. We can prevent some of the most egregious examples with censorship and banning, but what actually works is the fuzzy shit, give people opportunities, social connections, etc. so they don’t fall into extremism.
Angostura 2y ago
So in summary - shut down all online LLMs?
freeamz 2y ago
Interesting. How does this compare to abliteration of LLM? What are some 'debug' tools to find out the constrain of these models? How does pasting a xml file 'jailbreaks' it?
SpicyLemonZest 2y ago
A library book which produces instructions to produce a bomb is dangerous. I don't think dangerous books should be illegal, but I don't think it's meaningless or "censorship" for a company to decide they'd prefer to publish only safer books.
Der_Einzige 2y ago
I’m with you 100% until tool calling is implemented property which enables agents, which takes actions in the world. That means that suddenly your model can actually do the necessary tasks to actually make a bomb and kill people (via paying nasty people or something) AI is moving way too fast for you to not account for these possibilities. And btw I’m a hardcore anti censorship and cyber libertarian type - but we need to make sure that AI agents can’t manufacture bio weapons.
linkjuice4all 2y ago
Nothing about this is censorship. These companies spent their own money building this infrastructure and they let you use it (even if you pay for it you agreed to their terms). Not letting you map an input query to a search space isn’t censoring anything - this is just a limitation that a business placed on their product. As you mentioned - if you want to infer any output from a large language model then run it yourself.
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
taintegral 2y ago
> 'AI safety' is a meaningless term I disagree with this assertion. As you said, safety is an attribute of action. We have many of examples of artificial intelligence which can take action, usually because they are equipped with robotics or some other route to physical action. I think whether providing information counts as "taking action" is a worthwhile philosophical question. But regardless of the answer, you can't ignore that LLMs provide information to _humans_ which are perfectly capable of taking action. In that way, 'AI safety' in the context of LLMs is a lot like knife safety. It's about being safe _with knives_. You don't give knives to kids because they are likely to mishandle them and hurt themselves or others. With regards to censorship - a healthy society self-censors all the time. The debate worth having is _what_ is censored and _why_.
- rustcleaner 2y ago
  Almost everything about tool, machine, and product design in history has been an increase in the force-multiplication of an individual's labor and decision making vs the environment. Now with Universal Machine ubiquity and a market with rich rewards for its perverse incentives, products and tools are being built which force-multiply the designer's will absolutely, even at the expense of the owner's force of will. This and widespread automated surveillance are dangerous encroachments on our autonomy!
  - pixl97 2y ago
    I mean then build your own tools. Simply put the last time we (as in humans) had full self autonomy was sometime we started agriculture. After that point the idea of ownership and a state has permeated human society and have had to engage in tradeoffs.
pjc50 2y ago
> An LLM which produces instructions to produce a bomb is no more dangerous than a library book which does the same thing. Both of these are illegal in the UK. This is safety for the company providing the LLM, in the end.
- jahewson 2y ago
  [flagged]
  - otterley 2y ago
    [flagged]
    - dingdongbong 2y ago
      [dead]
    - mwigdahl 2y ago
      This man didn't even have to speak to be arrested. Wrongthink and an appearance of praying was enough: https://reason.com/2024/10/17/british-man-convicted-of-criminal-charges-for-praying-silently-near-abortion-clinic/ https://reason.com/2024/10/17/british-man-convicted-of-crimi...
      - OJFord 2y ago
        That's quite a sensationalist piece. You're allowed to object to abortions and protest against them, the point of that law is just that you can't do it around an extant abortion clinic, distressing and putting people off using it, since they are currently legal.
        otterley 2y ago
        Yeah, that looks like a time/place/manner restriction, not a content-based restriction. In the U.S., at least, the latter is heavily scrutinized as a potential First Amendment violation, while the former tend to be treated with greater deference to the state.
gmuslera 2y ago
As a tool, it can be misused. It gives you more power, so your misuses can do more damage. But forcing training wheels on everyone, no matter how expert the user may be, just because a few can misuse it stops also the good/responsible uses. It is a harm already done on the good players just by supposing that there may be bad users. So the good/responsible users are harmed, and the bad users take a detour to do what they want. What is left in the middle are the irresponsible users, but LLMs can already evaluate enough if the user is adult/responsible enough to have the full power.
- rustcleaner 2y ago
  Again, a good (in function) hammer, knife, pen, or gun does not care who holds it, it will act to the maximal best of its specifications up to the skill-level of the wielder. Anything less is not a good product. A gun which checks owner is a shitty gun. A knife which rubberizes on contact with flesh is a shitty knife, even if it only does it when it detects a child is holding it or a child's skin is under it! Why? Show me a perfect system? Hmm?
  - Spivak 2y ago
    > A gun which checks owner is a shitty gun You mean the guns with the safety mechanism to check the owner's fingerprints before firing? Or sawstop systems which stop the law when it detects flesh?
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
LeafItAlone 2y ago
I’m fine with calling it censorship. That’s not inherently a bad thing. You can’t falsely yell “fire” in a crowded space. You can’t make death threats. You’re generally limited on what you can actually say/do. And that’s just the (USA) government. You are much more restricted with/by private companies. I see no reason why safeguards, or censorship, shouldn’t be applied in certain circumstances. A technology like LLMs certainly are type for abuse.
- eesmith 2y ago
  > You can’t falsely yell “fire” in a crowded space. Yes, you can, and I've seen people do it to prove that point. See also https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shouting_fire_in_a_crowded_theater https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shouting_fire_in_a_crowded_the... .
  - bpfrh 2y ago
    >...where such advocacy is directed to inciting or producing imminent lawless action and is likely to incite or produce such action... This seems to say there is a limit to free speech >The act of shouting "fire" when there are no reasonable grounds for believing one exists is not in itself a crime, and nor would it be rendered a crime merely by having been carried out inside a theatre, crowded or otherwise. However, if it causes a stampede and someone is killed as a result, then the act could amount to a crime, such as involuntary manslaughter, assuming the other elements of that crime are made out. Your own link says that if you yell fire in a crowded space and people die you can be held liable.
    - wgd 2y ago
      Ironically the case in question is a perfect example of how any provision for "reasonable" restriction of speech will be abused, since the original precedent we're referring to applied this "reasonable" standard to...speaking out against the draft. But I'm sure it's fine, there's no way someone could rationalize speech they don't like as "likely to incite imminent lawless action"
    - eesmith 2y ago
mitthrowaway2 2y ago
"AI safety" is a meaningful term, it just means something else. It's been co-opted to mean AI censorship (or "brand safety"), overtaking the original meaning in the discourse. I don't know if this confusion was accidental or on purpose. It's sort of like if AI companies started saying "AI safety is important. That's why we protect our AI from people who want to harm it. To keep our AI safe." And then after that nobody could agree on what the word meant.
- pixl97 2y ago
  Because like the word 'intelligence' the word safety means a lot of things. If your language model cyberbullies some kid into offing themselves could that fall under existing harassment laws? If you hook a vision/LLM model up to a robot and the model decides it should execute arm motion number 5 to purposefully crush someone's head, is that an industrial accident? Culpability means a lot of different things in different countries too.
  - TeeMassive 2y ago
    I don't see bullying from a machine as a real thing, no more than people getting bullied from books or a TV show or movie. Bullying fundamentally requires a social interaction. The real issue is more AI being anthropomorphized in general, like putting one in realistically human looking robot like the video game 'Detroit: Become Human'.
    - reverius42 1y ago
      "Lawsuit claims Character.AI is responsible for teen's suicide": https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/characterai-lawsuit-florida-teen-death-rcna176791 https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/characterai-lawsuit-florida-tee...
      - TeeMassive 1y ago
        A lot of lawsuits claim a lot of things. Not a lot of them are true.
jaco6 2y ago
[dead]
colechristensen 2y ago
An LLM will happily give you instructions to build a bomb which explodes while you're making it. A book is at least less likely to do so. You shouldn't trust an LLM to tell you how to do anything dangerous at all because they do very frequently entirely invent details.
- blagie 2y ago
  So do books. Go to the internet circa 2000, and look for bomb-making manuals. Plenty of them online. Plenty of them incorrect. I'm not sure where they all went, or if search engines just don't bring them up, but there are plenty of ways to blow your fingers off in books. My concern is that actual AI safety -- not having the world turned into paperclips or other extinction scenarios are being ignored, in favor of AI user safety (making sure I don't hurt myself). That's the opposite of making AIs actually safe. If I were an AI, interested in taking over the world, I'd subvert AI safety in just that direction (AI controls the humans and prevents certain human actions).
  - pixl97 2y ago
    >My concern is that actual AI safety While I'm not disagreeing with you, I would say you're engaging in the no true Scotsman fallacy in this case. AI safety is: Ensuring your customer service bot does not tell the customer to fuck off. AI safety is: Ensuring your bot doesn't tell 8 year olds to eat tide pods. AI safety is: Ensuring your robot enabled LLM doesn't smash peoples heads in because it's system prompt got hacked. AI safety is: Ensuring bots don't turn the world into paperclips. All these fall under safety conditions that you as a biological general intelligence tend to follow unless you want real world repercussions.
    - blagie 1y ago
      These are clearly AI safety: * Ensuring your robot enabled LLM doesn't smash peoples heads in because it's system prompt got hacked. * Ensuring bots don't turn the world into paperclips. This is borderline: * Ensuring your bot doesn't tell 8 year olds to eat tide pods. I'd put this in a similar category is knives in my kitchen. If my 8-year-old misuses a knife, that's the fault of the adult and not the knife. So it's a safety concern about the use of the AI, but not about the AI being unsafe. Parents should assume 8-year-old shouldn't be left unsupervised with AIs. And this has nothing to do with safety: * Ensuring your customer service bot does not tell the customer to fuck off.
eximius 2y ago
If you can't stop an LLM from _saying_ something, are you really going to trust that you can stop it from _executing a harmful action_? This is a lower stakes proxy for "can we get it to do what we expect without negative outcomes we are a priori aware of". Bikeshed the naming all you want, but it is relevant.
- nemomarx 2y ago
  The way to stop it from executing an action is probably having controls on the action and an not the llm? white list what api commands it can send so nothing harmful can happen or so on.
  - Scarblac 2y ago
    It won't be long before people start using LLMs to write such whitelists too. And the APIs.
  - omneity 2y ago
    This is similar to the halting problem. You can only write an effective policy if you can predict all the side effects and their ramifications. Of course you could do like deno and other such systems and just deny internet or filesystem access outright, but then you limit the usefulness of the AI system significantly. Tricky problem to be honest.
- swatcoder 2y ago
  > If you can't stop an LLM from _saying_ something, are you really going to trust that you can stop it from _executing a harmful action_? You hit the nail on the head right there. That's exactly why LLM's fundamentally aren't suited for any greater unmediated access to "harmful actions" than other vulnerable tools. LLM input and output always needs to be seen as tainted at their point of integration. There's not going to be any escaping that as long as they fundamentally have a singular, mixed-content input/output channel. Internal vendor blocks reduce capabilities but don't actually solve the problem, and the first wave of them are mostly just cultural assertions of Silicon Valley norms rather than objective safety checks anyway. Real AI safety looks more like "Users shouldn't integrate this directly into their control systems" and not like "This text generator shouldn't generate text we don't like" -- but the former is bad for the AI business and the latter is a way to traffic in political favor and stroke moral egos.
drdeca 2y ago
While restricting these language models from providing information people already know that can be used for harm, is probably not particularly helpful, I do think having the technical ability to make them decline to do so, could potentially be beneficial and important in the future. If, in the future, such models, or successors to such models, are able to plan actions better than people can, it would probably be good to prevent these models from making and providing plans to achieve some harmful end which are more effective at achieving that end than a human could come up with. Now, maybe they will never be capable of better planning in that way. But if they will be, it seems better to know ahead of time how to make sure they don’t make and provide such plans? Whether the current practice of trying to make sure they don’t provide certain kinds of information is helpful to that end of “knowing ahead of time how to make sure they don’t make and provide such plans” (under the assumption that some future models will be capable of superhuman planning), is a question that I don’t have a confident answer to. Still, for the time being, perhaps after finding a truly jailbreakproof method, perhaps the best response is to, after thoroughly verifying that it is jailbreakproof, is to stop using it and let people get whatever answers they want, until closer to when it becomes actually necessary (due to the greater-planning-capabilities approaching).
ramoz 2y ago
The real issue is going to be autonomous actioning (tool use) and decision making. Today, this starts with prompting. We need more robust capabilities around agentic behavior if we want less guardrailing around the prompt.
TZubiri 2y ago
It's not insignificant, if a company is putting out a free product foe the masses, it's good that they limit malicious usage. And in this case, malicious or safe, refers to legal. That said, one should not conflate a free version blocking malicious usage, with AI being safe or not used maliciously at all. It's just a small subset
dtj1123 1y ago
Whilst I see the appeal of LLMs that unquestioningly do as they're told, universal access to uncensored models would be a terrible thing for society. Right now if a troubled teenager decides they want to ruin everyone's day, we get a school shooting. Imagine if instead we got homebrew biological weapons. Imagine if literally anyone could produce and distribute bespoke malware, or improvise explosive devices. All of those things could happen in principle, but in practice there are technical barriers that the majority of people just can't surmount.
hollerith 1y ago
>Safety and unsafety are not attributes of information, but of actions and the physical environment. Because an AI model could never take actions or affect the physical environment.

politician 2y ago

"AI safety" is ideological steering. Propaganda, not just censorship.

latentsea 2y ago
Well... we have needed to put a tonne of work into engineering safer outcomes for behavior generated by natural general intelligence, so...

codyvoda 2y ago

^I like email as an analogy if I send a death threat over gmail, I am responsible, not google if you use LLMs to make bombs or spam hate speech, you’re responsible. it’s not a terribly hard concept and yeah “AI safety” tends to be a joke in the industry

Angostura 2y ago
or alternatively, if I cook myself a cake and poison myself, i am responsible. If you sell me a cake and it poisons me, you are responsible.
- kennywinker 2y ago
  So if you sell me a service that comes up with recipes for cakes, and one is poisonous? I made it. You sold me the tool that “wrote” the recipe. Who’s responsible?
  - Sleaker 2y ago
    The seller of the tool is responsible. If they say it can produce recipes, they're responsible for ensuring the recipes it gives someone won't cause harm. This can fall under different categories if it doesn't depending on the laws of the country/state. Willful Negligence, false advertisement, etc. Ianal, but I think this is similar to the red bull wings, monster energy death cases, etc.
  - hannasanarion 1y ago
    In this scenario, you would have had to go through an extensive amount of specialist effort to intentionally get the recipe generator to produce something poisonous when it never would have done so otherwise. Product warranties generally don't cover unintended usage, and liability for producers generally dosen't extend to transformative unintended uses that are achieved by circumventing safeguards. If you take a firefighter-grade angle grinder to your balcony rail and remove it, you don't then get to sue the building owner for unsafe construction.
- actsasbuffoon 2y ago
  Sure, I may be responsible, but you’d still be dead. I’d prefer to live in a world where people just didn’t go around making poison cakes.
SpicyLemonZest 2y ago
It's a hard concept in all kinds of scenarios. If a pharmacist sells you large amounts of pseudoephedrine, which you're secretly using to manufacture meth, which of you is responsible? It's not an either/or, and we've decided as a society that the pharmacist needs to shoulder a lot of the responsibility by putting restrictions on when and how they'll sell it.
- codyvoda 2y ago
  sure but we’re talking about literal text, not physical drugs or bomb making materials. censorship is silly for LLMs and “jailbreaking” as a concept for LLMs is silly. this entire line of discussion is silly
  - kennywinker 2y ago
    Except it’s not, because people are using LLMs for things, thinking they can put guardrails on them that will hold. As an example, I’m thinking of the car dealership chatbot that gave away $1 cars: https://futurism.com/the-byte/car-dealership-ai https://futurism.com/the-byte/car-dealership-ai If these things are being sold as things that can be locked down, it’s fair game to find holes in those lockdowns.
    - codyvoda 2y ago
      …and? people do stupid things and face consequences? so what? I’d also advocate you don’t expose your unsecured database to the public internet
      - kennywinker 2y ago
        And yet you’re out here seemingly saying “database security is silly, databases can’t be secured and what’s the point of protecting them anyway - SSNs are just information, it’s the people who use them for identity theft who do something illegal”
        2y ago
loremium 2y ago
This is assuming people are responsible and with good will. But how many of the gun victims each year would be dead if there were no guns? How many radiation victims would there be without the invention of nuclear bombs? safety is indeed a property of knowledge.
- miroljub 2y ago
  Just imagine how many people would not die in traffic incidents if the knowledge of the wheel had been successfully hidden?
  - handfuloflight 2y ago
    Nice try but the causal chain isn't as simple as wheels turning → dead people.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
- 0x457 2y ago
  If someone wants to make a bomb, chatgpt saying "sorry I can't help with that" won't prevent that someone from finding out how to make one.
  - HeatrayEnjoyer 2y ago
    That's really not true, by that logic LLMs provide no value which is obviously false. It's one thing to spend years studying chemistry, it's another to receive a tailored instruction guide in thirty seconds. It will even instruct you how to dodge detection by law enforcement, which a chemistry degree will not.
    - 0x457 2y ago
      > That's really not true, by that logic LLMs provide no value which is obviously false. Way to leep to a (wrong) conclusion. I can lookup a word in a Dictionary.app, I can google it or I can pick up a phisical dictionary book and look it up. You don't even need to look to far: Fight Club (the book) describes how to make a bomb pretty accurately. If you're worrying that "well you need to know which books to pick up at the library"...you can probably ask chatgpt. Yeah it's not as fast, but if you think this is what stops everyone from making a bomb, then well...sucks to be you and live in such fear?
OJFord 2y ago
What if I ask it for something fun to make because I'm bored, and the response is bomb-building instructions? There isn't a (sending) email analogue to that.
- BriggyDwiggs42 2y ago
  In what world would it respond with bomb building instructions?
  - OJFord 2y ago
    Why might that happen is not really the point is it? If I ask for a photorealistic image of a man sitting at a computer, a priori I might think 'in what world would I expect seven fingers and no thumbs per hand', alas...
    - BriggyDwiggs42 2y ago
      I’ll take the example as an example of an LLM initiating harmful behavior in general and admit that such a thing is perfectly possible. I think the issue is down to the degree to which preventing such initiation impinges on the agency of the user, and I don’t think that requests for information should be refused because it’s lots of imposition for very little gain. I’m perfectly alright with conditioning/prompting the model not to readily jump into serious, potentially harmful targets without the direct request of the user.
  - __MatrixMan__ 2y ago
    If I were to make a list of fun things, I think that blowing stuff up would feature in the top ten. It's not unreasonable that an LLM might agree.
  - QuadmasterXLII 2y ago
    if it used search and ingested a malicious website, for example.
    - 2y ago
kelseyfrog 2y ago
There's more than one way to view it. Determining who has responsibility is one. Simply wanting there to be fewer causal factors which result in death threats and bombs being made is another. If I want there to be fewer[1] bombs, examining the causal factors and affecting change there is a reasonable position to hold. 1. Simply fewer; don't pigeon hole this into zero.
BobaFloutist 2y ago
> if you use LLMs to make bombs or spam hate speech, you’re responsible. What if it's easier enough to make bombs or spam hate speech with LLMs that it DDoSes law enforcement and other mechanisms that otherwise prevent bombings and harassment? Is there any place for regulation limiting the availability or capabilities of tools that make crimes vastly easier and more accessible than they would be otherwise?
- 3np 2y ago
  The same argument could be made about computers. Do you prefer a society where CPUs are regulated like guns and you can't buy anything freer than an iPhone off the shelf?
- BriggyDwiggs42 2y ago
  I mean this stuff is so easy to do though. An extremist doesn’t even need to make a bomb, he/she already drives a car that can kill many people. In the US it’s easy to get a firearm that could do the same. If capacity + randomness were a sufficient model for human behavior, we’d never gather in crowds, since a solid minority would be rammed, shot up, bombed etc. People don’t want to do that stuff; that’s our security. We can prevent some of the most egregious examples with censorship and banning, but what actually works is the fuzzy shit, give people opportunities, social connections, etc. so they don’t fall into extremism.

Angostura 2y ago

So in summary - shut down all online LLMs?

freeamz 2y ago

Interesting. How does this compare to abliteration of LLM? What are some 'debug' tools to find out the constrain of these models? How does pasting a xml file 'jailbreaks' it?

SpicyLemonZest 2y ago

A library book which produces instructions to produce a bomb is dangerous. I don't think dangerous books should be illegal, but I don't think it's meaningless or "censorship" for a company to decide they'd prefer to publish only safer books.

Der_Einzige 2y ago

I’m with you 100% until tool calling is implemented property which enables agents, which takes actions in the world. That means that suddenly your model can actually do the necessary tasks to actually make a bomb and kill people (via paying nasty people or something) AI is moving way too fast for you to not account for these possibilities. And btw I’m a hardcore anti censorship and cyber libertarian type - but we need to make sure that AI agents can’t manufacture bio weapons.

linkjuice4all 2y ago

Nothing about this is censorship. These companies spent their own money building this infrastructure and they let you use it (even if you pay for it you agreed to their terms). Not letting you map an input query to a search space isn’t censoring anything - this is just a limitation that a business placed on their product. As you mentioned - if you want to infer any output from a large language model then run it yourself.

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

taintegral 2y ago

> 'AI safety' is a meaningless term I disagree with this assertion. As you said, safety is an attribute of action. We have many of examples of artificial intelligence which can take action, usually because they are equipped with robotics or some other route to physical action. I think whether providing information counts as "taking action" is a worthwhile philosophical question. But regardless of the answer, you can't ignore that LLMs provide information to _humans_ which are perfectly capable of taking action. In that way, 'AI safety' in the context of LLMs is a lot like knife safety. It's about being safe _with knives_. You don't give knives to kids because they are likely to mishandle them and hurt themselves or others. With regards to censorship - a healthy society self-censors all the time. The debate worth having is _what_ is censored and _why_.

rustcleaner 2y ago
Almost everything about tool, machine, and product design in history has been an increase in the force-multiplication of an individual's labor and decision making vs the environment. Now with Universal Machine ubiquity and a market with rich rewards for its perverse incentives, products and tools are being built which force-multiply the designer's will absolutely, even at the expense of the owner's force of will. This and widespread automated surveillance are dangerous encroachments on our autonomy!
- pixl97 2y ago
  I mean then build your own tools. Simply put the last time we (as in humans) had full self autonomy was sometime we started agriculture. After that point the idea of ownership and a state has permeated human society and have had to engage in tradeoffs.

pjc50 2y ago

> An LLM which produces instructions to produce a bomb is no more dangerous than a library book which does the same thing. Both of these are illegal in the UK. This is safety for the company providing the LLM, in the end.

jahewson 2y ago
[flagged]
- otterley 2y ago
  [flagged]
  - dingdongbong 2y ago
    [dead]
  - mwigdahl 2y ago
    This man didn't even have to speak to be arrested. Wrongthink and an appearance of praying was enough: https://reason.com/2024/10/17/british-man-convicted-of-criminal-charges-for-praying-silently-near-abortion-clinic/ https://reason.com/2024/10/17/british-man-convicted-of-crimi...
    - OJFord 2y ago
      That's quite a sensationalist piece. You're allowed to object to abortions and protest against them, the point of that law is just that you can't do it around an extant abortion clinic, distressing and putting people off using it, since they are currently legal.
      - otterley 2y ago
        Yeah, that looks like a time/place/manner restriction, not a content-based restriction. In the U.S., at least, the latter is heavily scrutinized as a potential First Amendment violation, while the former tend to be treated with greater deference to the state.

gmuslera 2y ago

As a tool, it can be misused. It gives you more power, so your misuses can do more damage. But forcing training wheels on everyone, no matter how expert the user may be, just because a few can misuse it stops also the good/responsible uses. It is a harm already done on the good players just by supposing that there may be bad users. So the good/responsible users are harmed, and the bad users take a detour to do what they want. What is left in the middle are the irresponsible users, but LLMs can already evaluate enough if the user is adult/responsible enough to have the full power.

rustcleaner 2y ago
Again, a good (in function) hammer, knife, pen, or gun does not care who holds it, it will act to the maximal best of its specifications up to the skill-level of the wielder. Anything less is not a good product. A gun which checks owner is a shitty gun. A knife which rubberizes on contact with flesh is a shitty knife, even if it only does it when it detects a child is holding it or a child's skin is under it! Why? Show me a perfect system? Hmm?
- Spivak 2y ago
  > A gun which checks owner is a shitty gun You mean the guns with the safety mechanism to check the owner's fingerprints before firing? Or sawstop systems which stop the law when it detects flesh?

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

LeafItAlone 2y ago

I’m fine with calling it censorship. That’s not inherently a bad thing. You can’t falsely yell “fire” in a crowded space. You can’t make death threats. You’re generally limited on what you can actually say/do. And that’s just the (USA) government. You are much more restricted with/by private companies. I see no reason why safeguards, or censorship, shouldn’t be applied in certain circumstances. A technology like LLMs certainly are type for abuse.

eesmith 2y ago
> You can’t falsely yell “fire” in a crowded space. Yes, you can, and I've seen people do it to prove that point. See also https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shouting_fire_in_a_crowded_theater https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shouting_fire_in_a_crowded_the... .
- bpfrh 2y ago
  >...where such advocacy is directed to inciting or producing imminent lawless action and is likely to incite or produce such action... This seems to say there is a limit to free speech >The act of shouting "fire" when there are no reasonable grounds for believing one exists is not in itself a crime, and nor would it be rendered a crime merely by having been carried out inside a theatre, crowded or otherwise. However, if it causes a stampede and someone is killed as a result, then the act could amount to a crime, such as involuntary manslaughter, assuming the other elements of that crime are made out. Your own link says that if you yell fire in a crowded space and people die you can be held liable.
  - wgd 2y ago
    Ironically the case in question is a perfect example of how any provision for "reasonable" restriction of speech will be abused, since the original precedent we're referring to applied this "reasonable" standard to...speaking out against the draft. But I'm sure it's fine, there's no way someone could rationalize speech they don't like as "likely to incite imminent lawless action"
  - eesmith 2y ago

mitthrowaway2 2y ago

"AI safety" is a meaningful term, it just means something else. It's been co-opted to mean AI censorship (or "brand safety"), overtaking the original meaning in the discourse. I don't know if this confusion was accidental or on purpose. It's sort of like if AI companies started saying "AI safety is important. That's why we protect our AI from people who want to harm it. To keep our AI safe." And then after that nobody could agree on what the word meant.

pixl97 2y ago
Because like the word 'intelligence' the word safety means a lot of things. If your language model cyberbullies some kid into offing themselves could that fall under existing harassment laws? If you hook a vision/LLM model up to a robot and the model decides it should execute arm motion number 5 to purposefully crush someone's head, is that an industrial accident? Culpability means a lot of different things in different countries too.
- TeeMassive 2y ago
  I don't see bullying from a machine as a real thing, no more than people getting bullied from books or a TV show or movie. Bullying fundamentally requires a social interaction. The real issue is more AI being anthropomorphized in general, like putting one in realistically human looking robot like the video game 'Detroit: Become Human'.
  - reverius42 1y ago
    "Lawsuit claims Character.AI is responsible for teen's suicide": https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/characterai-lawsuit-florida-teen-death-rcna176791 https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/characterai-lawsuit-florida-tee...
    - TeeMassive 1y ago
      A lot of lawsuits claim a lot of things. Not a lot of them are true.

jaco6 2y ago

[dead]

colechristensen 2y ago

An LLM will happily give you instructions to build a bomb which explodes while you're making it. A book is at least less likely to do so. You shouldn't trust an LLM to tell you how to do anything dangerous at all because they do very frequently entirely invent details.

blagie 2y ago
So do books. Go to the internet circa 2000, and look for bomb-making manuals. Plenty of them online. Plenty of them incorrect. I'm not sure where they all went, or if search engines just don't bring them up, but there are plenty of ways to blow your fingers off in books. My concern is that actual AI safety -- not having the world turned into paperclips or other extinction scenarios are being ignored, in favor of AI user safety (making sure I don't hurt myself). That's the opposite of making AIs actually safe. If I were an AI, interested in taking over the world, I'd subvert AI safety in just that direction (AI controls the humans and prevents certain human actions).
- pixl97 2y ago
  >My concern is that actual AI safety While I'm not disagreeing with you, I would say you're engaging in the no true Scotsman fallacy in this case. AI safety is: Ensuring your customer service bot does not tell the customer to fuck off. AI safety is: Ensuring your bot doesn't tell 8 year olds to eat tide pods. AI safety is: Ensuring your robot enabled LLM doesn't smash peoples heads in because it's system prompt got hacked. AI safety is: Ensuring bots don't turn the world into paperclips. All these fall under safety conditions that you as a biological general intelligence tend to follow unless you want real world repercussions.
  - blagie 1y ago
    These are clearly AI safety: * Ensuring your robot enabled LLM doesn't smash peoples heads in because it's system prompt got hacked. * Ensuring bots don't turn the world into paperclips. This is borderline: * Ensuring your bot doesn't tell 8 year olds to eat tide pods. I'd put this in a similar category is knives in my kitchen. If my 8-year-old misuses a knife, that's the fault of the adult and not the knife. So it's a safety concern about the use of the AI, but not about the AI being unsafe. Parents should assume 8-year-old shouldn't be left unsupervised with AIs. And this has nothing to do with safety: * Ensuring your customer service bot does not tell the customer to fuck off.

eximius 2y ago

If you can't stop an LLM from _saying_ something, are you really going to trust that you can stop it from _executing a harmful action_? This is a lower stakes proxy for "can we get it to do what we expect without negative outcomes we are a priori aware of". Bikeshed the naming all you want, but it is relevant.

nemomarx 2y ago
The way to stop it from executing an action is probably having controls on the action and an not the llm? white list what api commands it can send so nothing harmful can happen or so on.
- Scarblac 2y ago
  It won't be long before people start using LLMs to write such whitelists too. And the APIs.
- omneity 2y ago
  This is similar to the halting problem. You can only write an effective policy if you can predict all the side effects and their ramifications. Of course you could do like deno and other such systems and just deny internet or filesystem access outright, but then you limit the usefulness of the AI system significantly. Tricky problem to be honest.
swatcoder 2y ago
> If you can't stop an LLM from _saying_ something, are you really going to trust that you can stop it from _executing a harmful action_? You hit the nail on the head right there. That's exactly why LLM's fundamentally aren't suited for any greater unmediated access to "harmful actions" than other vulnerable tools. LLM input and output always needs to be seen as tainted at their point of integration. There's not going to be any escaping that as long as they fundamentally have a singular, mixed-content input/output channel. Internal vendor blocks reduce capabilities but don't actually solve the problem, and the first wave of them are mostly just cultural assertions of Silicon Valley norms rather than objective safety checks anyway. Real AI safety looks more like "Users shouldn't integrate this directly into their control systems" and not like "This text generator shouldn't generate text we don't like" -- but the former is bad for the AI business and the latter is a way to traffic in political favor and stroke moral egos.

drdeca 2y ago

While restricting these language models from providing information people already know that can be used for harm, is probably not particularly helpful, I do think having the technical ability to make them decline to do so, could potentially be beneficial and important in the future. If, in the future, such models, or successors to such models, are able to plan actions better than people can, it would probably be good to prevent these models from making and providing plans to achieve some harmful end which are more effective at achieving that end than a human could come up with. Now, maybe they will never be capable of better planning in that way. But if they will be, it seems better to know ahead of time how to make sure they don’t make and provide such plans? Whether the current practice of trying to make sure they don’t provide certain kinds of information is helpful to that end of “knowing ahead of time how to make sure they don’t make and provide such plans” (under the assumption that some future models will be capable of superhuman planning), is a question that I don’t have a confident answer to. Still, for the time being, perhaps after finding a truly jailbreakproof method, perhaps the best response is to, after thoroughly verifying that it is jailbreakproof, is to stop using it and let people get whatever answers they want, until closer to when it becomes actually necessary (due to the greater-planning-capabilities approaching).

ramoz 2y ago

The real issue is going to be autonomous actioning (tool use) and decision making. Today, this starts with prompting. We need more robust capabilities around agentic behavior if we want less guardrailing around the prompt.

TZubiri 2y ago

It's not insignificant, if a company is putting out a free product foe the masses, it's good that they limit malicious usage. And in this case, malicious or safe, refers to legal. That said, one should not conflate a free version blocking malicious usage, with AI being safe or not used maliciously at all. It's just a small subset

dtj1123 1y ago

Whilst I see the appeal of LLMs that unquestioningly do as they're told, universal access to uncensored models would be a terrible thing for society. Right now if a troubled teenager decides they want to ruin everyone's day, we get a school shooting. Imagine if instead we got homebrew biological weapons. Imagine if literally anyone could produce and distribute bespoke malware, or improvise explosive devices. All of those things could happen in principle, but in practice there are technical barriers that the majority of people just can't surmount.

hollerith 1y ago

>Safety and unsafety are not attributes of information, but of actions and the physical environment. Because an AI model could never take actions or affect the physical environment.