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I'm not sure I'd throw out all the alignment baby with the bathwater. But I wish we could draw a distinction between "Might offend someone" with "dangerous."

Even 'plotting terror attacks' is not something terrorists can do just fine without AI. And as for making sure the model wouldn't say ideas that are hurtful to <insert group>, it seems to me so silly when it's text we're talking about. If I want to say "<insert group> are lazy and stupid," I can type that myself (and it's even protected speech in some countries still!) How does preventing Claude from espousing that dumb opinion, keep <insert group> safe from anything?

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landl0rd a day ago | parent | next [-]

Let me put it this way: there are very few things I can think of that models should absolutely refuse, because there are very few pieces of information that are net harmful in all cases and at all times. I sort of run by blackstone's principle on this: it is better to grant 10 bad men access to information than to deny that access to 1 good one.

Easy example: Someone asks the robot for advice on stacking/shaping a bunch of tannerite to better focus a blast. The model says he's a terrorist. In fact, he's doing what any number of us have done and just having fun blowing some stuff up on his ranch.

Or I raised this one elsewhere but ochem is an easy example. I've had basically all the models claim that random amines are illegal, potentially psychoactive, verboten. I don't really feel like having my door getting kicked down by agents with guns, getting my dog shot, maybe getting shot myself because the robot tattled on me for something completely legal. For that matter if someone wants to synthesize some molly the robot shouldn't tattle to the feds about that either.

Basically it should just do what users tell it to do excepting the very minimal cases where something is basically always bad.

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gmd63 20 hours ago | parent [-]

> it is better to grant 10 bad men access to information than to deny that access to 1 good one.

I disagree when it comes to a tool as powerful as AI. Most good people are not even using AI. They are paying attention to their families and raising their children, living real life.

Bad people are extremely interested in AI. They are using it to deceive at scales humanity has never before seen or even comprehended. They are polluting the wellspring of humanity that used to be the internet and turning it into a dump of machine-regurgitated slop.

	▲	hombre_fatal 17 hours ago \| parent \| next [-]
		Yeah, it’s like saying you should be able to install anything on your phone with a url and one click. You enrich <0.1% of honest power users who might benefit from that feature… and 100% of bad actors… at the expense of everyone else. It’s just not a good deal.
	▲	landl0rd 16 hours ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		1. Those people don’t need frontier models. The slop is slop in part because it’s garbage usually generated by cheap models. 2. It doesn’t matter. Most people at some level have a deontological view of what is right and wrong. I believe it’s wrong to build mass-market systems that can be so hostile to their users interests. I also believe it’s wrong for some SV elite to determine what is “unsafe information”. Most “dangerous information” has been freely accessible for years.

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eru 17 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Yes.

I used to think that worrying about models offending someone was a bit silly.

But: what chance do we have of keeping ever bigger and better models from eventually turning the world into paper clips, if we can't even keep our small models from saying something naughty.

It's not that keeping the models from saying something naughty is valuable in itself. Who cares? It's that we need the practice, and enforcing arbitrary minor censorship is as good a task as any to practice on. Especially since with this task it's so easy to (implicitly) recruit volunteers who will spend a lot of their free time providing adversarial input.

	▲	landl0rd 16 hours ago \| parent [-]
		This doesn’t need to be so focused on the current set of verboten info though. Just make practice making it not say some set of random less important stuff.