Because there are good and bad people in the world, and if I ask Claude "how do I make cocaine" and it gives me a thorough recipe, it doesn't know if I'm being intellectually curious or trying to become the next Pablo Escobar. They're Anthropic, and because they made Claude, they get to say what we can do with it. Which, I agree, is total bullshit. If I buy a Ford car and I can do whatever I want with it. Drive to work, drive for Uber, set it on fire; plowing into a crowd of protestors is covered by existing laws against vehicular manslaughter. Ford doesn't get a say. But because cars are so ubiquitous and a known technology, there's no blowback to Ford if I commit crimes with my car that I bought from them. If I commit crimes and Claude helped, Anthropic is gonna get sued (there's already litigation against the labs for deaths), and they don't want that.

In a properly free market, we'd have regulations that prohibit labs from vertical integration so they have to release and sell a model and another company hosts it and sell access to it. Americanism, America's implementation of capitalism doesn't have such regulations though (and how would that even work?) so we're stuck with Anthropic having that power.

The fear, justified or not, is that a terrorist is going to use Claude to make sarin nerve gas and bomb subway stations, or the digital equivalent. Could you live with that on your conscience? I don't think I could, but fortunately for me, I don't work at Anthropic so don't have to answer that real life trolly problem.

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whatshisface 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

>if I ask Claude "how do I make cocaine"

I am amazed at how a technical gloss can obscure basic rights. That's legal! It's in chemistry / agronomy books, freely available in libraries. I have the right to tell you how that is done, and you have the right to read what I write.

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pixl97 an hour ago | parent [-]

Because this is how the world works

An LLM isn't a book. You can still go buy the books you want. An LLM, especially as they get more advanced, are agents. You can ask them do to things and they can interact with tools to do things.

You're free to print a cocaine book. You're not free to incorporate it into a cocaine making machine without violating numerous laws.

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SR2Z 43 minutes ago | parent | next [-]

You are entirely free to build a cocaine making machine in most countries. It is actually using it to produce cocaine that is a crime.

In reasonable countries, this is exactly how it works. You can own lockpicks, practice picking locks, and even publish detailed instructions on how to pick locks. It's only when you pick someone else's lock that a crime is committed.

Limiting access to tools and knowledge benefits the wealthy and privileged. Knowledge should proliferate, that is how the world has worked long before I was born and god willing that is how it will work long after I die.

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SR2Z an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-]

You are entirely free to build a cocaine making machine in most countries. It is actually using it to produce cocaine that is a crime.

Limiting access to tools and knowledge benefits the wealthy and privileged.

	▲	selimthegrim an hour ago \| parent [-]
		I have some bad news for you about what happens if the cops find you with lockpicking tools.

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hgoel an hour ago | parent | prev [-]

You can program a computer to do things and they can interact with tools to do things too. Doesn't justify restricting what you can do with them.

If you program a computer to make cocaine for you, you're the one violating the law. If you ask an LLM to do the same for you, you're the one violating the law. The LLM's capabilities are irrelevant.

	▲	pixl97 4 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		You sweet summer child. Cool, so I'll have you make an LLM that can make cosine, then I'll provide you paid access to the machine to can ask the right question to do it illegally. Then when you get caught and blame me we'll both be in court defending ourselves. You're argument is "doesn't justify". This is a private corporation, not a government. There is no freedom of speech law involved here if the corporation says no. Now, when the government tells LLM corporations that there are limits they will gladly agree. Next, the government will classify the LLMs as munitions and you'll be spending the next 50 years fighting on reversing that when a big chunk of the population is anti-AI enough to let them do it. After that will be bans and registration on hardware. There are two things that you are confusing. One is what you'd like to happen in an open data world like existed after the cold war. And then there is what is going to happen, and it's going to be messy, authoritarian, and closed. And you will lose the openness that had been occurring up to this point. There is no world in which the general public agrees to wide open access to info-hazards, and there are people that will ensure enough disasters happen to close that future.

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sailfast an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Ford actually will tell you now if you can or cannot do something with their vehicles. They’re also likely tracking you.

That said - there likely were the same issues with cars in early days and then we got a body of settled case law that let the car companies off the hook for this and put responsibility on the user unless a manufacturing defect was the cause.

In the case of models, knowledge has historically always been dangerous! Is the library liable if a kid figures out how to do chemistry and builds a device? What about YouTube? I find it hard to believe this would hold up in court over time. So far, the only cases I’ve seen are when AI has encouraged self-harm which does in fact seem like a legit defect.

Gatekeeping knowledge like this will only serve to enable those that break the law, not protect, in my judgment.

And just so this isn’t pure fodder for the machine - torch staple must of course infant music verb noun right? :)

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charcircuit an hour ago | parent | prev [-]

>use Claude to make sarin nerve gas and bomb subway stations, or the digital equivalent. Could you live with that on your conscience?

People have always been able to do this before Claude. The information is out there and if you use a VPN there's not much they can do. The existence of information isn't the blocker for why attacks don't happen.

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pixl97 an hour ago | parent [-]

This is so undershooting of what LLMs are capable of it's no wonder you're thinking they are just like books.

	▲	simonra 2 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		You sound highly optimistic about the capabilities of LLMs, which makes me curious about the path you see to furthering quality of life at scale. What do you see as the main obstacles to LLMs brewing me beer on demand at my home without involving me past the prompt, and when do you foresee we'll overcome them?