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Am I the only one who thinks mention of “safety tests” for LLMs is a marketing scheme? Cars, planes and elevators have safety tests. LLMs don’t. Nobody is going
by ryao 1y ago
Am I the only one who thinks mention of “safety tests” for LLMs is a marketing scheme? Cars, planes and elevators have safety tests. LLMs don’t. Nobody is going to die if a LLM gives an output that its creators do not like, yet when they say “safety tests”, they mean that they are checking to what extent the LLM will say things they do not like.
- eviks 1y agoWhy is your definition of safety so limited? Death isn't the only type of harm...
- ryao 1y agoThere are other forms of safety, but whether a digital parrot says something that people do not like is not a form of safety. They are abusing the term safety for marketing purposes.
- eviks 1y agoYou're abusing the terms by picking either the overly limited ("death") or overly expansive ("not like") definitions to fit your conclusion. Unless you reject the fact that harm can come from words/images, a parrot can parrot harmful words/images, so be unsafe.
- ryao 1y agoThe maxim “sticks and stones can break my bones, but words can never hurt me” comes to mind here. That said, I think this misses the point that the LLM is not a gatekeeper to any of this.
- eviks 1y agoDon't let your mind potential be limited by such primitive slogans!
- jiggawatts 1y agoI find it particularly irritating that the models are so overly puritan that they refuse to translate subtitles because they mention violence.
- jazzyjackson 1y agoit's like complaining about bad words in the dictionary the bot has no agency, the bot isn't doing anything, people talk to themselves, augmenting their chain of thought with an automated process. If the automated process is acting in an undesirable manner, the human that started the process can close the tab. Which part of this is dangerous or harmful?
- ks2048 1y agoYou could be right about this being an excuse for some other reason, but lots of software has “safety tests” beyond life or death situations. Most companies, for better or worse (I say for better) don’t want their new chatbot to be a RoboHitler, for example.
- ryao 1y agoIt is possible to turn any open weight model into that with fine tuning. It is likely possible to do that with closed weight models, even when there is no creator provided sandbox for fine tuning them, through clever prompting and trying over and over again. It is unfortunate, but there really is no avoiding that. That said, I am happy to accept the term safety used in other places, but here it just seems like a marketing term. From my recollection, OpenAI had made a push to get regulation that would stifle competition by talking about these things as dangerous and needing safety. Then they backtracked somewhat when they found the proposed regulations would restrict themselves rather than just their competitors. However, they are still pushing this safety narrative that was never really appropriate. They have a term for this called alignment and what they are doing are tests to verify alignment in areas that they deem sensitive so that they have a rough idea to what extent the outputs might contain things that they do not like in those areas.
- natrius 1y agoAn LLM can trivially instruct someone to take medications with adverse interactions, steer a mental health crisis toward suicide, or make a compelling case that a particular ethnic group is the cause of your society's biggest problem so they should be eliminated. Words can't kill people, but words can definitely lead to deaths. That's not even considering tool use!
- ryao 1y agoThis is analogous to saying a computer can be used to do bad things if it is loaded with the right software. Coincidentally, people do load computers with the right software to do bad things, yet people are overwhelmingly opposed to measures that would stifle such things. If you hook up a chat bot to a chat interface, or add tool use, it is probable that it will eventually output something that it should not and that output will cause a problem. Preventing that is an unsolved problem, just as preventing people from abusing computers is an unsolved problem.
- ronsor 1y agoAs the runtime of any program approaches infinity, the probability of the program behaving in an undesired manner approaches 1.
- ryao 1y agoThat is not universally true. The yes program is a counter example: https://www.man7.org/linux/man-pages/man1/yes.1.html https://www.man7.org/linux/man-pages/man1/yes.1.html
- cgriswald 1y agoDevil's advocate: (1) Execute yes (with or without arguments, whatever you desire). (2) Let the program run as long as you desire. (3) When you stop desiring the program to spit out your argument, (4) Stop the program. Between (3) and (4) some time must pass. During this time the program is behaving in an undesired way. Ergo, yes is not a counter example of the GP's claim.
- recursive 1y agoI also think it's marketing but kind of for the opposite reason. Basically I don't think any of the current technology can be made safe.
- nomel 1y agoYes, perfection is difficult, but it's relative. It can definitely be made much safer. Looking at the analysis of pre vs post alignment makes this obvious, including when the raw unaligned models are compared to "uncensored" models.
- jrflowers 1y ago> Am I the only one who thinks mention of “safety tests” for LLMs is a marketing scheme? It is. It is also part of Sam Altman’s whole thing about being the guy capable of harnessing the theurgical magicks of his chat bot without shattering the earth. He periodically goes on Twitter or a podcast or whatever and reminds everybody that he will yet again single-handedly save mankind. Dude acts like he’s Buffy the Vampire Slayer
- olalonde 1y agoEspecially since "safety" in this context often just means making sure the model doesn't say things that might offend someone or create PR headaches.
- SV_BubbleTime 1y agoDon’t draw pictures of celebrities. Don’t discuss making drugs or bombs. Don’t call yourself MechaHitler… which I don’t care that while scenario was objectively funny on its sheer ridiculousness.
- jekwoooooe 1y agoSure it’s funny until some mentally unstable Nazi sympathizer goes and shoots up another synagogue. So funny.
- SV_BubbleTime 1y agoI get the over actions and hyperbole are part of the pact… it doesn’t make it any less ridiculous. As a Jew, I think we’re going to be OK and funny things can just be funny.
- olalonde 1y agoThey used to say that about video games.
- halfjoking 1y agoIt's overblown. Elon shipped Hitler grok straight to prod Nobody died
- pona-a 1y agoPlaying devil's advocate, what if it was more subtle? Prolonged use of conversational programs does reliably induce certain mental states in vulnerable populations. When ChatGPT got a bit too agreeable, that was enough for a man to kill himself in a psychotic episode [1]. I don't think this magnitude of delusion was possible with ELIZA, even if the fundamental effect remains the same. Could this psychosis be politically weaponized by biasing the model to include certain elements in its responses? We know this rhetoric works: cults have been using love-bombing, apocalypticism, us-vs-them dynamics, assigned special missions, and isolation from external support systems to great success. What we haven't seen is what happens when everyone has a cult recruiter in their pocket, waiting for a critical moment to offer support. ChatGPT has an estimated 800 million weekly active users [2]. How many of them would be vulnerable to indoctrination? About 3% of the general population has been involved in a cult [3], but that might be a reflection of conversion efficiency, not vulnerability. Even assuming 5% are vulnerable, that's still 40 million people ready to sacrifice their time, possessions, or even their lives in their delusion. [1] https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-features/chatgpt-obsession-mental-breaktown-alex-taylor-suicide-1235368941/ https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-features/chatgp... [2] https://www.forbes.com/sites/martineparis/2025/04/12/chatgpt-hits-1-billion-users-openai-ceo-says-doubled-in-weeks/ https://www.forbes.com/sites/martineparis/2025/04/12/chatgpt... [3] https://www.peopleleavecults.com/post/statistics-on-cults https://www.peopleleavecults.com/post/statistics-on-cults
- stogot 1y agoYou’re worried about indoctrination in an LLM but it starts much earlier than that. The school system is indoctrination of our youngest minds, both today in the West and its Prussian origins https://today.ucsd.edu/story/education-systems-were-first-designed-to-suppress-dissent https://today.ucsd.edu/story/education-systems-were-first-de... We should fix both systems. I don’t want Altman’s or Musk’s opinions indoctrinating
- simianwords 1y agoI hope the same people questioning ai safety (which is reasonable) don’t also hold concern on Grok due to the recent incident. You have to understand that a lot of people do care about these kind of things.
- ignoramous 1y ago> Nobody is going to die Callous. Software does have real impact on real people. Ex: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44531120 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44531120
- layer8 1y agoIt’s about safety for the LLM provider, not necessarily the user.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- stogot 1y agoAt my company (which produces models) almost all the responsible AI jazz is about DEI and banning naughty words. Little actions on preventing bad outcomes
- razodactyl 1y agoThere's a bias that smart people have in underestimating the stupidity of those on the left side of the intelligence curve. Not even that, children believe anything and more so that of a computer designed to be "harmless".
- Rastonbury 1y agoI think that's a bit uncharitable, the top companies have hired top talent who's explicit job is safety, which is obviously a hard problem ever since Microsoft's Tay. Anthropic publishes pretty extensive safety reviews of their models. Misalignment on incentives,prioritisation of speed and it being and almost an impossible task may make it seem like a marketing scheme. It's not like companies who slap on all the certifications AWS has just because they run on AWS