Discussion
RE: https://infosec.exchange/@david_chisnall/117358990093685067
100%. The whole "terrorists can use an LLM to build a bomb" is a dumb movie plot threat. If you want to hurt people, lack of knowledge is not your problem. And nobody needs to develop a new chemical to do terrorism. All you need is readily available.
This is just "AI" labs creating imaginary issues to distract us from the real harm they cause.
@tante In the 90s there was a moral panic about "the internet teaching you how to make bombs". Therefore, the network should be shut down. I went to the Helsinki public library with a friend who's a chemistry student and looked up gunpowder in various dictionaries. Unsurprisingly, most of them were detailed enough that with a little (dangerous!) experimentation, you could follow them to make some.
Nobody I told about this wanted to shut down public libraries. Go figure.
They also make it harder to spot real information.
Go to a library and there’s a pretty good chance that chemistry books are reviewed by actual chemists and will contain correct instructions.
Go to the Internet and there will be a bunch of things like The Anarchist’s Cookbook full of recipes that are likely to blow your hands off if you try them, but also university sites that contain vetted educational information.
Go to an LLM and the part of the latent space that generates your answer might come from a textbook, might come from some novel, might come from some TimeCube-like alternative chemistry craziness. The second time you ask might come from a different mix of these. And you have no way of knowing which.
Note: if you look up how to build a nuclear bomb on the Internet, the instructions that you’re most likely to find are a CIA ‘leak’ that was intended to send the Soviet nuclear programme down a blind alley, so also won’t work. I wouldn’t be surprised if these ended up with many copies in LLM training sets.
@david_chisnall @drwetter @liw @tante
If you want to look up how to build a nuclear bomb on the Internet, the Los Alamos Primer has been declassified and public since 1965: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Los_Alamos_Primer.pdf .
What it will not do is provide you with the enriched uranium or plutonium, or with the shaped charges for implosion, which is why declassifying it was not a problem.
But, as you wrote, the text generators cannot tell resources like that apart from everything else and so produce nonsense.
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@tante anyone who wanted to could have made a bomb several decades algo already. It is admittedly very easy to make, but what makes society work is that people usually do not want to make bombs, and the few who want to are so off the rails that they make one blunder or another on the way there.