4 ms·
Given X can quite simply control what Grok can and can't output, wouldn't you consider it a duty upon X to build those guardrails in for a situation like CSAM?
by ebbi 9mo ago
Given X can quite simply control what Grok can and can't output, wouldn't you consider it a duty upon X to build those guardrails in for a situation like CSAM? I don't think there's any grey area here to argue against it.
- alex_suzuki 9mo agoCan they, though…?
- jasonlotito 9mo agoYes, they can. But... more importantly, they aren't even trying.
- ebbi 9mo agoWhat makes you think they can't? From my knowledge (albeit limited) about the way LLMs are set up, they most definitely have abilities to include guardrails of what can't be produced. ChatGPT has some responses to prompts which stops users from proceeding. And X specifically: there have many cases of X adjusting Grok where Grok was not following a particular narrative on political issues (won't get into specifics here). But it was very clear and visible. Grok had certain outputs. Outcry from certain segments. Grok posts deleted. Trying the same prompts resulted in a different result. So yeah, it's possible.
- Groxx 9mo agoGiven how spectacular the failure of EVERY attempt to put guardrails on LLMs has been, across every single company selling LLM access, I'm not sure that's a reasonable belief. The guardrails have mostly worked. They have never ever been reliable.
- alex_suzuki 9mo agoFrom my (admittedly also limited) understanding, there’s no bulletproof way to say “do NOT generate X” as it’s not non-deterministic and you can’t reverse engineer and excise the CSAM-generating parts of a model. “AI jailbreak prompts” are a thing.
- johnisgood 9mo agoSo people just want to make it more difficult to achieve <insert bad thing>?
- alex_suzuki 9mo agoWell it’s certainly horrible that they’re not even trying, but not surprising (I deleted my X account a long time ago). I’m just wondering if from a technical perspective it’s even possible to do it in a way that would 100% solve the problem, and not turn it into an arms race to find jailbreaks. To truly remove the capability from the model, or in its absence, have a perfect oracle judge the output and block it. The answer is currently no, I presume.
- ebbi 9mo agoAgain, I'm not the most technical, but I think we need to step back and look at this holistically. Given Grok's integration with X, there could be other methods of limiting the production and dissemination of CSAM. For arguments sake, let's assume Grok can't reliably have guardrails in place to stop CSAM. There could be second and third order review points where before an image is posted by Grok, another system could scan the image to verify whether it's CSAM or not, and if the confidence is low, then human intervention could come into play. I think the end goal here is prevention of CSAM production and dissemination, not just guardrails in an LLM and calling it a day.
- ux266478 9mo ago> they most definitely have abilities to include guardrails of what can't be produced. The problem is that these guardrails are trivially bypassed. At best you end up playing a losing treadmill game against adversarial prompting.
- queenkjuul 9mo agoYes. One, they could just turn it off. Two, they got it to parrot all musk's politics, they clearly have a good grip on the thing.
- MPSimmons 9mo agoI am, in general, pretty anti-Elon, so I don't want to be seen as taking _his_ side here, and I am definitely anti-CSAM, so let's shift slightly to derivative IP generation. Where does the line fall between provider responsibility when providing a tool that can produce protected work, and personal responsibility for causing it to generate that work? It feels somewhat more clearcut when you say to AI, "Draw me an image of Mickey Mouse", but why is that different than photocopying a picture of Mickey Mouse, and using Photoshop to draw a picture of Mickey Mouse? Photo copiers will block copying a dollar bill in many cases - should they also block photos of Mickey Mouse? Should they have received firmware updates whenever Steamboat Willy fell into public domain, such that they can now be allowed to photocopy that specific instance of Mickey Mouse, but none other? This is a slippery slope, the idea that a person using the tool should hold the tool responsible for creating "bad" things, rather than the person themselves being held responsible. Maybe CSAM is so heinous as to be a special case here. I wouldn't argue against it specifically. But I do worry that it shifts the burden of responsibility onto the AI or the model or the service or whatever, rather than the person. Another thing to think about is whether it would be materially different if the person didn't use Grok, but instead used a model on their own machine. Would the model still be responsible, or would the person be responsible?
- piva00 9mo agoIt's simpler to regulate the source of it than the users. The scale that genAI can do stuff is much, much different than photocopying + Photoshop, scale and degree matter.
- MPSimmons 9mo ago> scale and degree matter I agree, but I don't know where that line is. So, back in the 90s and 2000s, you could get The Gimp image editor, and you could use the equivalent of Word Art to take a word or phase and make it look cool, with effects like lava or glowing stone, or whatever. The Gimp used ImageMagick to do this, and it legit looked cool at the time. If you weren't good at The Gimp, which required a lot of knowledge, you could generate a cool website logo by going to a web server that someone built, giving them a word or phrase, and then selecting the pre-built options that did the same thing - you were somewhat limited in customization, but on the backend, it was using ImageMagick just like The Gimp was. If someone used The Gimp or ImageMagick to make copyrighted material, nobody would blame the authors of The Gimp, right? The software were very nonspecific tools created for broad purposes, that of making images. Just because some bozo used them to create a protected image of Mickey Mouse doesn't mean that the software authors should be held accountable. But if someone made the equivalent of one of those websites, and the website said, "click here to generate a random picture of Mickey Mouse", then it feels like the person running the website should at least be held partially responsible, right? Here is a thing that was created for the specific purpose of breaking the law upon request. But what is the culpability of the person initiating the request? Anyway, the scale of AI is staggering, and I agree with you, and I think that common decency dictates that the actions of the product should be limited when possible to fall within the ethics of the organization providing the service, but the responsibility for making this tool do heinous things should be borne by the person giving the order.
- johnisgood 9mo agoHow true is this, and what kind of guardrails do people want besides CSAM? I am sure the list is long, but wonder how agreed upon that is.
- ryandrake 9mo agoI think the question might come down to whether Grok is a "tool" like a paintbrush or Photoshop, or if Grok is some kind of agent of creation, like an intern. If I ask an art intern to make a picture of CSAM and he does it, who did wrong? If Photoshop had a "Create CSAM" button and the user clicked it, who did wrong? I think a court is going to step in and help answer these questions sooner rather than later.
- johnisgood 9mo agoWhy do we compare an AI to a human? Legit question.
- wmf 9mo agoSo the person who presses the button can say "the AI did it not me".
- krapp 9mo agoNormalizing AI as being human equivalent means the AI is legally culpable for its own actions rather than its creators or the people using it, and not guilty of copyright infringement for having been trained on proprietary data without consent. At least I think that's the plan.
- QuercusMax 9mo agoYou were wrong for asking, and he was wrong for creating it. Blame isn't zero-sum.
- ryandrake 9mo agoI happen to agree with you that the blame should be shared, but we have a lot of people in this thread saying "You can't blame X or Grok at all because it's a mere tool."
- QuercusMax 9mo agoYou can 100% blame the company X and its leadership.
- laaman02 9mo agoEven if you can’t reliably control it, if you make a tool that generates CSAM you’ve made a CSAM generator. You have a moral responsibility to either make your tool unavailable, or figure out how to control it.
- ux266478 9mo agoI'm not sure I agree with this specific reasoning. Consider this, any given image viewer can display CSAM. Is it a CSAM viewer? Do you have a moral responsibility to make it refuse to display CSAM? We can extend it to anything from graphics APIs, to data storage, etc. There's a line we have to define that I don't think really exists yet, nor is it supported by our current mental frameworks. To that end, I think it's just more sensible to simply forbid it in this context without attempting to ground it. I don't think there's any reason to rationalize it at all.
- theLegionWithin 9mo agonope. anyone who wants to can create CSAM in MS Paint (or any quality of image editor). it's in no way difficult to do. you going to ban all artsy software ever because a bad actor has or can use it to do bad actor things?