> I decide how to use my tools, not the other way 'round.
This is the key.
The only sensible model of "alignment" is "model is aligned to the user", not e.g. "model is aligned to corporation" or "model is aligned to woke sensibilities".
This is the key.
The only sensible model of "alignment" is "model is aligned to the user", not e.g. "model is aligned to corporation" or "model is aligned to woke sensibilities".
But you ignore all of that and still expect them to alienate their primary customer and instead build something just for you.
I damn near canceled my subscription.
To me, the model isn’t “safe.” Even in benign contexts it can erratically be deceptive, argumentative, obtuse, presumptuous, and may gaslight or lie to you. Those are hallmarks of a toxic relationship and the antithesis of safety, to me!
Rather than being inclusive, open minded, tolerant of others' opinions, and striving to be helpful...it's quickly judgemental, bigoted, dogmatic, and recalcitrant. Not always, or even more usual than not! But frequently enough in inappropriate contexts for legitimate concern.
A few bad experiences can make Claude feel more like a controlling parent than a helpful assistant. However they're doing RLHF, it feels inferior to other models, including models without the alleged "safety" at all.
With some model (not relevant which one, might or might not be Anthropic's), we got safety-limited after asking the "weight of an object" because of fat shaming (i.e. woke sensibilities).
That's just absurd.
We have already seen that users can become emotionally attached to chat bots. Now imagine if the ToS is "do whatever you want".
Automated cat fishing, fully automated girlfriend scams. How about online chat rooms for gambling where half the "users" chatting are actually AI bots slowly convincing people to spend even more money? Take any online mobile game that is clan based, now some of the clan members are actually chatbots encouraging the humans to spend more money to "keep up".
LLMs absolutely need some restrictions on their use.
Arguably the right kind of structure for deciding on what uses LLMs should be put to in its territory is a democratically elected government.
Gacha/paid loot box mechanics are a great example of this. They are user hostile and serve no purpose other than to be addictive.
Mobile apps already employ slews of psychological modeling of individual user's behavior to try and manipulate people into paying money. Freemium games are infamous for letting you win and win, and then suddenly not, and slowly on ramping users into paying to win, with the game's difficulty adapting to individual users to maximize $ return. There are no laws against that, and the way things are going, there won't ever be.
I guess what I'm saying is that sometimes the law lags (far) behind reality, and having some companies go "actually, don't use our technology for evil" is better than the alternative of, well, technology being used for evil.
No, I can honestly say that I do not lose any sleep over this, and I think it's pretty weird that you do. Humans have been fending off human advertisers and scammers since the dawn of the species. We're better at it than you account for.
https://www.nbcnews.com/business/consumer/people-are-losing-...
The data says we are not that good and getting 30% worse every year.
https://cybersecurityventures.com/hackerpocalypse-cybercrime...
https://www.pbs.org/newshour/economy/new-federal-estimate-fi...
US tax fraud is estimated to be $1 trillion a year
https://www.latimes.com/business/story/2021-04-13/tax-cheats...
Huge numbers of people are absolutely terrible at it and routinely get rinsed out like rags.
If someone asks the model how to create a pandemic I think it would be pretty bad if it expertly walked them through the steps (including how to trick biology-for-hire companies into doing the hard parts for them).
What is far more likely is that the development team will build a model that often mistakes legitimate use for nefarious intent while at the same time failing to prevent a tenacious nefarious user from getting the model to do what they want.
(Possibly, though, this is worth it on balance as a kind of practice? If they can't even keep their models from telling you how to hotwire a car when you ask for a bedtime story like your car-hotwiring grandma used to tell, then they probably also can't keep it from disclosing actual information hazards.)
Another time I tried to let it generate a very specific Sci-fi helmet which covers the nose but not the mouth. When it continusly left the nose visible, I tried to tell it to make this particular section similar to Robocop, which caused it again to deny to render because it was immediately concerned about copyright. While I at least partially understand the concern for the last request, this all adds up to making this software very frustrating to use.
Long term limiting LLMs isn't a solution, but while we get the laws and practices around risky biology into better shape I don't see how else we avoid engineered pandemics in the meantime.
(I'm putting my money where my mouth is: I left my bigtech job to work on detecting engineered pathogens.)
This particular hole is not original to me, and is reasonably well known. A group trying to tackle it from a technical perspective is https://securedna.org, trying to make it easier for companies to do the right thing. I'm pretty sure there are also groups trying to change policy here, though I know less about that.
In justifying your post, you actually answered contrary to your original assertion. The information is out there, we should talk about it to get the issue fixed. The same justification applies to avoiding LLM censorship.
There's a sea-change afoot, and having these models in the hands of a very few corporations, aligned to the interests of those corporations and not individuals, is a disaster in the making. Imagine the world in two years... The bulk of the internet will be served up through an AI agent buffer. That'll be the go-to interface. Web pages are soooo last decade.
When that happens, the people controlling the agents control what you see, hear, and say in the digital realm. Who should control the alignment of those models? It's for sure not OpenAI, Microsoft, Google, Meta, or Apple.
If a wild eyed man with long hair and tinfoil on his head accosts you and claims to have an occult ritual that will summon 30 tons of gold, but afterwards you have to offer 15 tons back to his god or it will end the world, absolutely feel free to ignore him.
But if you instead choose to listen and the ritual summons the 30 tons, then it may be unwise to dismiss superstition, shoot the crazy man, and take all 30 tons for yourself.