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Comment by bwanab | Hacker News Reader

So, you ask it to write a song about <name your poison>. Let'd say it does and you write about on your blog. Some reporter from <name your bad corporate media here> with an ax to grind writes a story "AI tells kids to <your poison here>".

I suspect OpenAI is trying to mitigate scenarios like this.

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AI is not required for any of this, so it’s not a meaningful threat. All of these AI safety discussions seem to dismiss the fact that people can draw, use photoshop, and write, creating whatever they want, all by themselves, and have been doing it for somewhere between a few thousand years to a few decades.

You are misunderstanding the problem. This is not about harm caused to other parties. This is about reputational damage to the company making the AI system.

If you buy paper and write a deplorable manifesto that is your problem. Paper and pen is old technology therefore nobody is going to write an article about the deplorability of the paper manufacturers.

If you do the same with ChatGPT that is OpenAI’s problem. The concept of generative models is new enough that it would be news and their brand would be tarnished by it.

I am not going to build a murderbot, regardless of whether someone else could commit a murder.

A better comparison might be:

I am not going to build a chainsaw, regardless of whether someone else could commit a stabbing.

I totally understand the reasoning behind it, but that makes it no less irritating. I've used it to help with a variety of coding issues and had it generate various stories, songs, and poems. The frustration, I think, comes from the fact that I know ChatGPT is perfectly capable of generating Sleep lyrics. I want to see what the thing can do, I'm an adult. I don't need to be told that "drop out of life with bong in hand" is not good life advice.

It offends my "libertarian" sensibilities. I'm capable of making my own decisions about whether following the smoke to the riff-filled land is a worthy pursuit.

Your libertarian sensibilities include OpenAI giving you free stuff they don't want to give you?

> It offends my "libertarian" sensibilities.

Train your own model. :) It will do whatever you want it to do.

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