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I'm confused why the worry about LLMs that will answer "how do I build a pipe bomb". That information is easily available other places. The anarchist cookbook h
by kennywinker 1mo ago
I'm confused why the worry about LLMs that will answer "how do I build a pipe bomb". That information is easily available other places. The anarchist cookbook has been around and available for 55 years, and yet pipe bombs are not going off all around us.
- matherial 1mo agoBecause it's a risk most people intuitively understand, but most of them also don't know how difficult it is to "build a bomb" or "make a bioweapon". In reality, the skills needed are pretty basic, but they overlap pretty strongly with being sane and well-adjusted. And if you are, you're probably not daydreaming about mass murder. Exceptions happen, Unabomber and so on, but they're pretty rare. In any case, Unabomber probably didn't need a tutorial. We don't want ChatGPT to become an enabler and a co-conspirator for an unhinged person, but I think the concern is overdone.
- XorNot 1mo agoWell that, and the average amount of easily obtainable explosives is substantially less dangerous then renting a box truck and crashing it into a crowd of people. People go for conventional "exciting" threats rather then boring ones.
- lrvick 1mo agoI think this was just intended as universally obvious proof the filters were disabled, while not actually giving an example not commonly known.
- 0xDEAFBEAD 1mo agoThere used to be a thing called "Moore's Law of Mad Science": "Every eighteen months, the minimum IQ necessary to destroy the world drops by one point." Nowadays it is dropping much faster. At a certain point, the de-facto IQ needed to destroy the world will be low enough that someone can do it while they're having a psychotic break. There are millions of schizophrenics worldwide. Are you sure you want to roll those dice?
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- mark_something 1mo agoThat law is not based on thorough data. Even a person with a sky high IQ can't destroy the world easily. You need access to stuff that is not easy to get. My guess is that developing a new lethal virus or bacteria that is very infectious, is the easiest way, but even that requires a lot of high tech out of reach of most people. Or hacking into systems that control nuclear missiles, but I think these have "air gaps".
- XorNot 1mo agoYou can't design an infectious pathogen without testing it. It's got all the same problems as the concept of a dirty bomb did, only worse (dirty bombs aren't practical because handling highly radioactive materials en masse is both highly visible and will kill anyone trying to do it without the money and facilities).
- MaxMatti 1mo agoIf the goal is just destruction then letting it free in random public places is not that hard. Especially in countries where wearing a mask is not frowned upon.
- joshuahedlund 1mo agoIt (hopefully) might not be that easy. The world of bacteria and viruses is a complicated war zone with an arms race of defenses and billions of deaths every single day. It might take thousands of attempts to seed something that doesn’t just instantly die off.
- 0xDEAFBEAD 1mo ago[flagged]
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- Dlemlo 1mo agoIt might be an acessability issue. If you already have a magic interface, which helps you pro activly in responding to everything uncensored because you feel like 'observered' or whatever and then you spiral in a whole and that one partner encourages you and gives you helpful steps to do anything. But i'm more worried that the internet gets a lot less save with uncensored frontier LLMs.
- littlecranky67 1mo agopipe bombs attached to consumer drones will be a big issue. I predict drones will become illegal for the private sector within the following years.
- grim_io 1mo agoWhat? If someone wanted to bomb something, they wouldn't be waiting for drones to arrive. RC cars and planes existed for many decades already.
- littlecranky67 1mo agoRC cars can't even beat a basic stair or fence, and RC planes are difficult to maneuver as they can't stand still/hover. Try to drop a payload from a flying plane at an exact point on the ground - basically impossible. Even when you do the math, the wind+drag will have a major influence. With a drone you can hit precisely within inches.
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- saidnooneever 1mo agothis is because of perception Bias. people working in fields where crime or violence is the day to day think everyone is a violent criminal, so if things like this become available thing the world will end and everyone will kill eachother. Reality however will be different, because in reality most people do not want to harm another. This has been proven by many studies, that is not a common thing for people to be evil or harmful, but this is hard to recognise is every day is filled with crime and violence. LLMs will not kill security, it will change. just like handheld high explosives likely changed a deal too somewhere somehow.
- olmo23 1mo agoThis is because to build a pipe bomb you need difficult to source materials. This is not the case for other types of threats (cyber / bio). I personally have no need for an LLM which will readily explain how to cut up the genotype of smallpox into small chunks which can pass the screening at the bio-labs, and can be readily assembled into the real thing by a second year lab-student.
- wolvoleo 1mo agoAnyone who knows how to operate a biolab properly will already know how to do such things. This is not really an in your basement thing. Dangerous chemistry is much more of a risk.
- bamboozled 1mo agoIgnorant question but won’t there be much smarter teams if people using LLMs to workout how to mitigate these threats. It seems like more of a problem if only a few people have access.
- FeepingCreature 1mo agoIt seems like there would be a massive attacker bias in multiple ways. Defenders need consent, attacker does not. Defenders have to work with the human body, attackers only have to break it. Defenders have to stick to the law, which may prevent them from releasing anything at all, attackers do not. And so on. I would not surprised if the attacker's task is a hundred times easier here.
- bamboozled 1mo agoI guess any virus that is super destructive is probably not something that can spread very far as it kills its hosts beforehand ?
- FeepingCreature 1mo agoYep, you'd want to put it on a timer. Optimally trigger it off some natural event, maybe temperature, so it can achieve universal penetration before activating.
- helsinkiandrew 1mo ago> That information is easily available other places Often ease of access in the moment is all that matters. If there's a gun nearby you might shoot someone or yourself in a heated argument, but are less likely to go and find/buy one to use. Someone who's stopped from attempting a suicide will likely not try again (70%) A bored/depressed/angry/curious person might try to build a pipe bomb if they can find out how easily, but are less likely to put in effort.
- jasonvorhe 1mo agoMost adults in Switzerland have guns at home from military duty and none of this is happening. If this claim had any truth to it you'd see significant gun involvement in neighbour disputes and that simply doesn't happen. Depressed people usually don't have the energy to get out of bed so they're even less likely to think of hunting down instructions on how to build pipe bombs. Mass media really has people being scared all the time.
- helsinkiandrew 1mo ago> If this claim had any truth to it you'd see significant gun involvement in neighbour disputes That’s not what I’m saying, I’m saying there’s more likely to be gun involvement in disputes when people have easy access to guns than when they don’t. For example, when the number of men with service arms fell by 20% the number of men killing themselves dropped by 8% https://www.researchgate.net/publication/328554995_Suicide_by_firearm_in_Switzerland_who_uses_the_army_weapon_Results_from_the_national_survey_between_2000_and_2010 https://www.researchgate.net/publication/328554995_Suicide_b...
- selimthegrim 1mo agoAmmunition is sealed and accounted for when issued to them.
- not_a_bot_4sho 1mo ago> from military duty I think this part is important distinction. Military duty comes with training and rules and so on. Compared to untrained persons having access. Similar but apples and oranges
- designerarvid 1mo agoNot entirely unlike XKCD 1958 [0]. "I guess it's just that most people aren't murderers" [0]: https://xkcd.com/1958/ https://xkcd.com/1958/
- gnfargbl 1mo agoOne argument for LLMs is that although all information on topics X, Y and Z was already available somewhere, LLMs make that information more exploitable through collation, filtering and dynamic tailoring. For a relatively narrow subject area (e.g. construction of pipe bombs) the collation is minimal, and so the filtering and tailoring probably isn't that important; a novice doesn't learn a lot more from the LLM than they would have done from a few Google searches. For a broad subject (practical creation and exploitation of software vulnerabilities), the collation is very significant and the filtering means that LLMs can empower a novice to act at a similar level as an expert.
- wolvoleo 1mo ago[flagged]
- Jasp3r 1mo agoThose makeshift bombs are just fireworks bought in belgium
- wolvoleo 1mo agoYes that's what I said. But very heavy fireworks, and combined to do a lot of damage. Certainly comparable to a 'pipe bomb' that was being discussed.
- esperent 1mo ago> blows up the others' house. Sometimes half the block along with it Can you provide a source for this? I had a look but all I could find were a couple of scaremongering style media reports from ~2022 saying it's getting worse but no information about if any of the bombs actually went off or if anyone was injured. Certainly nothing like "half a block" getting blown up "sometimes".
- wolvoleo 1mo agoHere a whole building evacuated: https://nos.nl/artikel/2605174-vier-woningen-onbewoonbaar-na-explosie-amsterdam-mogelijk-opzet https://nos.nl/artikel/2605174-vier-woningen-onbewoonbaar-na... Some inhabitants of neighbouring flats are still banned from their flat. And it was three weeks ago. Five houses unhabitable: https://nos.nl/artikel/2605174-vier-woningen-onbewoonbaar-na-explosie-amsterdam-mogelijk-opzet https://nos.nl/artikel/2605174-vier-woningen-onbewoonbaar-na... It's also very common with robbing ATMs, usually known as "plofkraak" but that phenomenon seems to have subsided a bit.
- esperent 1mo ago> Five houses unhabitable: https://nos.nl/artikel/2605174-vier-woningen-onbewoonbaar-na https://nos.nl/artikel/2605174-vier-woningen-onbewoonbaar-na... This doesn't say anything about homemade bombs. It just says some boys were seen running away and police assume it was a crime. It could literally have been teenagers and a firework that started a fire.
- pjc50 1mo agoI think people overstate the tech and understate the role of radicalization in providing motive, for attacks which are carried out with the ubiquitous technology of cars, knives, and (in America) guns. Consider America's most recent high profile shootings of Charlie Kirk, and the health insurance exec by Luigi Mangione. In neither case is there any LLM involvement, but a very weird ideological environment which created the conditions in which the shooters felt justified.
- vbezhenar 1mo agoAny sufficiently determined individual can buy mac mini, put it under their bed, configure outside proxy via some random internet address and prompt "iterate on websites in the CT logs, one by one, try to find vulnerabilities, if you did - encrypt their data and blackmail them for this bitcoin address". And it'll work, day and night. Abliterated GLM 5.3 is much smarter than average software developer, they know a lot about information security, they can use any available exploits, they can find novel vulnerabilities and they won't say "no". This is dangerous for an average IT system which never encountered nothing worse than some wordpress GET requests. It's not the end of the world. But future will be rough.
- wallst07 1mo agoWouldn't it just as easy to do this on the defense side as well then?
- ygjb 1mo agoYes, but the defenders need to make money to fund their work and be right every time to be effective, and have a high degree of accountability if they fail to secure stuff while attackers can be less considerate of how they spend their resources and have less accountability for the havoc they wreak while attempting to extract value.
- saagarjha 1mo agoNot every defender is determined.
- kswagage 1mo agoNo because on the defense side you need multiple layers of approvals to change anything. If not you have an LLM making production changes that can make the posture worse, or take down services, which is also bad. Once a vulnerability is discovered however if it's in your own software a patch has to be written (without reducing functionality in most cases), tested, and deployed. At every step there will be others arguing about whether this line could do better, my service requires this thing that isn't included. So at every step the patch can be delayed. And if it is someone else's software you will be lucky if it's open source and you can write a patch yourself. If it's closed source or a vendor you have to completely rely on them and use whatever your account rep can pull. Attackers have a massive advantage with AI, partially because the defensive side doesn't want to make their side worse by giving a ln LLM admin access to all their data
- andai 1mo agoWell, folks who do such things are rare, but the next one might have a lot more impact.
- matthewdgreen 1mo agoI'm still waiting for someone to build a fine-tuned local "Anarchist Cookbook" LLM. We haven't seen LLMs tuned for bad purposes yet, I have to imagine someone somewhere is thinking about it.
- snackbroken 1mo agoHeretic[1] is not that far off, though I suppose it's more along the lines of undoing the "for your own safety" lobotomy than explicitly specializing in unsafe things. [1]https://github.com/p-e-w/heretic https://github.com/p-e-w/heretic
- chrisjj 1mo ago> I'm confused why the worry about LLMs that will answer "how do I build a pipe bomb". The author too is confused, asserting that telling people how to build pipe bombs is malicious.
- goalieca 1mo agoHow many hacking incidents are police involved in. Any authorities really? Basically none. Hacking is already extremely prolific.
- Tangurena2 1mo agoSome of the recipes in the Anarchist Cookbook are incorrect. I know, I had a copy from Paladin Press.
- forshaper 1mo agoIn our town, a single homeless man has caused millions in infrastructure damage (and 24-48 hr hold ups of utilities) every year. I imagine what one determined, clear-headed individual might do and...it certainly wouldn't take a single LLM interaction.
- kennywinker 1mo agoJesus. Seems like your town should house that man.
- forshaper 1mo agoIt is his God-given duty. I'm not sure housing will get in the way of his duty, but there are two options for that. He used to stick to water (God, you see, needs to flood our town to cleanse it), but once he did a lot of damage to communications from going after water, and so he's added that to his portfolio.