4 ms·

It's not a flaw. It's a tradeoff. There are valid uses for models which are uncensored and will do whatever you ask of them, and there are valid uses for models

It's not a flaw. It's a tradeoff. There are valid uses for models which are uncensored and will do whatever you ask of them, and there are valid uses for models which are censored and will refuse anything remotely controversial.

robhlt 1y ago
The flaw isn't that there's ways around the safeguards, the flaw is that it tells you how to avoid them. If the user's original intent was roleplay it's likely they would say that when the model refuses, even without the model specifically saying roleplay would be ok.
franktankbank 1y ago
This is one model though. "I'm sorry I'm censored but if you like I can cosplay quite effectively as an uncensored one." So you're not censored really?
- scotty79 1y ago
  Societies love theatres. Model guardrails are for chats what TSA is for air travel.
  - yifanl 1y ago
    I have never heard anyone speak of the TSA favourably, so maybe it's not the best model to emulate?
    - hyperdimension 1y ago
      That's the point. It hardly does what is claimed to do.
    - int_19h 1y ago
      Most "guardrails" exist to provide legal cover and/or PR, not because they actually prevent what they claim to prevent.
  - nozzlegear 1y ago
    Society loves teenagers not being talked into suicide by a billionaire's brainchild. That's not theater.
    - geysersam 1y ago
      ChatGPT doesn't cause a significant number of suicides. Why do I think that? It's not visible in the statistics. There are effective ways to prevent suicide, let's continue to work on those instead of giving in to moral panic.
      - nozzlegear 1y ago
        The only acceptable number of suicides for it to cause is zero, and it's not a moral panic to believe that.
        scotty79 1y ago
        What actually causes suicide is really hard to pinpoint. Most people wouldn't do it even if their computer told them to kill themselves every day. My personal belief is that at some point in the future you might get a good estimate of likelihood that a person commits suicide with blood test or a brain scan.
        username332211 1y ago
        Would the same hold for other forms of communication and information retrieval, or should only LLMs be perfect in that regard? If someone is persuaded to commit suicide by the information found trough normal internet search, should Google/Bing/DDG be liable? Do you believe a book should be suppressed and the author made liable, if a few of its readers commit suicide because of what they've read? (And, before you ask, that's not a theoretical question. Books are well known to cause suicides, the first documented case being a 1774 novel by Goethe.)
        geysersam 1y ago
        I find it hard to take that as a serious position. Alcohol certainly causes more suicides than ChatGPT. Should it be illegal? Suicides spike around Christmas, that's well known, does Christmas cause suicides? I think you see where I'm going with this.
KaiserPro 1y ago
I hate to be all umacksually about this, but a flaw is still a tradeoff. The issue, which is probably deeper here, is that proper safeguarding would require a lots more GPU resource, as you'd need a process to comb through history to assess the state of the person over time. even then its not a given that it would be reliable. However it'll never be attempted because its too expensive and would hurt growth.
- dspillett 1y ago
  > The issue, …, is that proper safeguarding would require a lots more GPU resource, … I think the issue is that with current tech is simply isn't possible to do that well enough at all⁰. > even then its not a given that it would be reliable. I think it is a given that it won't be reliable. AGI might make it reliable enough, where “good enough” here is “no worse than a trained human is likely to manage, given the same information”. It is something that we can't do nearly as well as we might like, and some are expecting a tech still in very active development¹ to do it. > However it'll never be attempted because its too expensive and would hurt growth. Or that they know it is not possible with current tech so they aren't going to try until the next epiphany that might change that turns up in a commercially exploitable form. Trying and failing will highlight the dangers, and that will encourage restrictions that will hurt growth.³ Part of the problem with people trusting it too much already, is that the big players have been claiming safeguards _are_ in place and people have naïvely trusted that, or hand-waved the trust issue for convenience - this further reduces the incentive to try because it means admitting that current provisions are inadequate, or prior claims were incorrect. ---- [0] both in terms of catching the cases to be concerned about, and not making it fail in cases where it could actually be positively useful in its current form (i.e. there are cases where responses from such tools have helped people reason their way out of a bad decision, here giving the user what they wanted was very much a good thing) [1] ChatGPT might be officially “version 5” now, but away from some specific tasks it all feels more like “version 2”² on the old “I'll start taking it seriously somewhere around version 3” scale. [2] Or less… [3] So I agree with your final assessment of why they won't do that, but from a different route!
- behringer 1y ago
  No the issue is there is legitimate reason to understand suicide and suicidal behavior and turning it off completely for this and every sensitive subject makes AI almost worthless.
agumonkey 1y ago
Reminds me of trading apps. In the end all risky situations will be handled by a few popups saying "you understand that role playing about suicidal or harmful topics cam lead to accidents and/or death and this is not the platform responsibility, to continue check if you agree [ ]"
- imtringued 1y ago
  It reminds me of gray market capital investments. They are actually quite regulated, and the contracts are only valid if the investor is fully aware of the risks associated with the investment. In practice the providers sprinkle a handful of warning messages, akin to the California cancer label and call it a day. Of course this leaves judges unconvinced and the contract will be redeclared as a loan, which means that the provider was illegally operating as a bank without a banking license, which is a much more serious violation than scamming someone out of $5000.

robhlt 1y ago

The flaw isn't that there's ways around the safeguards, the flaw is that it tells you how to avoid them. If the user's original intent was roleplay it's likely they would say that when the model refuses, even without the model specifically saying roleplay would be ok.

franktankbank 1y ago

This is one model though. "I'm sorry I'm censored but if you like I can cosplay quite effectively as an uncensored one." So you're not censored really?

scotty79 1y ago
Societies love theatres. Model guardrails are for chats what TSA is for air travel.
- yifanl 1y ago
  I have never heard anyone speak of the TSA favourably, so maybe it's not the best model to emulate?
  - hyperdimension 1y ago
    That's the point. It hardly does what is claimed to do.
  - int_19h 1y ago
    Most "guardrails" exist to provide legal cover and/or PR, not because they actually prevent what they claim to prevent.
- nozzlegear 1y ago
  Society loves teenagers not being talked into suicide by a billionaire's brainchild. That's not theater.
  - geysersam 1y ago
    ChatGPT doesn't cause a significant number of suicides. Why do I think that? It's not visible in the statistics. There are effective ways to prevent suicide, let's continue to work on those instead of giving in to moral panic.
    - nozzlegear 1y ago
      The only acceptable number of suicides for it to cause is zero, and it's not a moral panic to believe that.
      - scotty79 1y ago
        What actually causes suicide is really hard to pinpoint. Most people wouldn't do it even if their computer told them to kill themselves every day. My personal belief is that at some point in the future you might get a good estimate of likelihood that a person commits suicide with blood test or a brain scan.
      - username332211 1y ago
        Would the same hold for other forms of communication and information retrieval, or should only LLMs be perfect in that regard? If someone is persuaded to commit suicide by the information found trough normal internet search, should Google/Bing/DDG be liable? Do you believe a book should be suppressed and the author made liable, if a few of its readers commit suicide because of what they've read? (And, before you ask, that's not a theoretical question. Books are well known to cause suicides, the first documented case being a 1774 novel by Goethe.)
      - geysersam 1y ago
        I find it hard to take that as a serious position. Alcohol certainly causes more suicides than ChatGPT. Should it be illegal? Suicides spike around Christmas, that's well known, does Christmas cause suicides? I think you see where I'm going with this.

KaiserPro 1y ago

I hate to be all umacksually about this, but a flaw is still a tradeoff. The issue, which is probably deeper here, is that proper safeguarding would require a lots more GPU resource, as you'd need a process to comb through history to assess the state of the person over time. even then its not a given that it would be reliable. However it'll never be attempted because its too expensive and would hurt growth.

dspillett 1y ago
> The issue, …, is that proper safeguarding would require a lots more GPU resource, … I think the issue is that with current tech is simply isn't possible to do that well enough at all⁰. > even then its not a given that it would be reliable. I think it is a given that it won't be reliable. AGI might make it reliable enough, where “good enough” here is “no worse than a trained human is likely to manage, given the same information”. It is something that we can't do nearly as well as we might like, and some are expecting a tech still in very active development¹ to do it. > However it'll never be attempted because its too expensive and would hurt growth. Or that they know it is not possible with current tech so they aren't going to try until the next epiphany that might change that turns up in a commercially exploitable form. Trying and failing will highlight the dangers, and that will encourage restrictions that will hurt growth.³ Part of the problem with people trusting it too much already, is that the big players have been claiming safeguards _are_ in place and people have naïvely trusted that, or hand-waved the trust issue for convenience - this further reduces the incentive to try because it means admitting that current provisions are inadequate, or prior claims were incorrect. ---- [0] both in terms of catching the cases to be concerned about, and not making it fail in cases where it could actually be positively useful in its current form (i.e. there are cases where responses from such tools have helped people reason their way out of a bad decision, here giving the user what they wanted was very much a good thing) [1] ChatGPT might be officially “version 5” now, but away from some specific tasks it all feels more like “version 2”² on the old “I'll start taking it seriously somewhere around version 3” scale. [2] Or less… [3] So I agree with your final assessment of why they won't do that, but from a different route!
behringer 1y ago
No the issue is there is legitimate reason to understand suicide and suicidal behavior and turning it off completely for this and every sensitive subject makes AI almost worthless.

agumonkey 1y ago

Reminds me of trading apps. In the end all risky situations will be handled by a few popups saying "you understand that role playing about suicidal or harmful topics cam lead to accidents and/or death and this is not the platform responsibility, to continue check if you agree [ ]"

imtringued 1y ago
It reminds me of gray market capital investments. They are actually quite regulated, and the contracts are only valid if the investor is fully aware of the risks associated with the investment. In practice the providers sprinkle a handful of warning messages, akin to the California cancer label and call it a day. Of course this leaves judges unconvinced and the contract will be redeclared as a loan, which means that the provider was illegally operating as a bank without a banking license, which is a much more serious violation than scamming someone out of $5000.