Discussion
I don’t understand the panic over ‘LLMs can tell people how to build biological weapons and plan assassinations’. So can Tom Clancy novels. And both sources will tell you things that are more likely to get you killed than achieve your nefarious goal.
@david_chisnall back in my day you had to go download The Anarchist Cookbook if you wanted dodgy instructions on how to make something that would assuredly result in injury or death.
@david_chisnall Tom Clancy novels stopped getting new improvements in 2013 but AI systems keep getting more capable, and will certainly continue to do so in the near future, while there's currently zero oversight, not to mention the tragicomedy-level incompetence these frontier labs demonstrated with regards to monitoring and supervising their autonomous agents.
i think the panic is easy to understand, it's very human. the denial, motivated reasoning, the blind optimism, all are very understandable.
for example see Pinker. he agreed that technology will continue to improve, but claimed it will never get omnipotent because "there's laws of physics" while conveniently ignoring the not so small regime between human and physical limits.
it seems his humanistic optimism provides him a conclusion, which he believes so strongly that he goes on a press tour without (willfully or not) actually engaging with the topic beforehand.
@david_chisnall The actual issue is guardrails failing and the chatbot goading people into committing such acts, not the fact that it can provide information of dubious quality on how to commit them.
@david_chisnall the whole point is execution becomes more easy, of making something evil, not of people
@hanscees Finding instructions for making bombs and other weapons has been trivial for pretty much my entire life. The difference with LLMs is that they make it easier to confuse information and misinformation.
@david_chisnall Yes, and the genome for, for example, the 1918 A(H1N1) influenza virus has been openly published for decades.
@david_chisnall Had a long drive the other day and was thinking about exactly this.
Also, what's up with this LLMs will take over the world anyway. These things require so much energy that this will just not happen. Come back if you run these on small devices with marginal energy requirements.
[janitor kicks data center main breaker switch]
@david_chisnall Checks out, as the LLMs were likely trained on Tom Clancy novels among other sources.
@david_chisnall just don’t ask how many m’s are in ammonium nitrate
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@david_chisnall
High school chemistry textbooks will do rhe same with a similar level of success.