This is sophistry.

Of course it's just an algorithm. But it's placed in the context of serving humans, which have their own rules and expectations.

What's more, they're run by a company which is also made by humans and may carry over implicit interests.

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bitwize 39 minutes ago | parent [-]

No, it's not really. Presenting them as person-like, with the implied expectation that they understand morality and rules the same way a person does, is the sophistry. It's marketing on the model vendors' part. "Here's a cheap person that can do mundane tasks for you spelled out in plain language. Well, it's actually a machine but it's cheaper than a person yet you can engage with it like a person." GP is trying to shift people's expectations back to the realm of what these things are actually capable of. You can speak to them in English but you must bear in mind that they are not people and lack critical cognitive abilities people have.

This, really, was the point of the HAL story in 2001: HAL didn't murder anyone because it was incapable of malice. It just reasoned its way to a solution that could satisfy the contradictory goals it had been given.

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afthonos 31 minutes ago | parent [-]

The dead astronauts were relieved to have been killed by something incapable of malice. As I’m sure will we.

	▲	simonh a minute ago \| parent [-]
		What matters is that we accurately understand what these things are doing and why, otherwise we will keep on making mistakes both in how we build and train them, and in how we use them. In a sense you are right, it doesn't matter whether it has malice or not, the astronauts are just as dead. However in Space Odyssey 2010 one of the computer scientists that built HAL gets to see the instructions HAL was given by the military commanders, and is appalled because if they'd asked he could have told them what would happen. The users did not understand the tool they were using or how it functioned, they imagined it was like a person and it was not. That is happening now with LLMs.