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Comment by imgabe | Hacker News Reader

I listened to a podcast (Darknet Diaries) that went into great detail about a money counterfeiting operation, including how they had to source the paper from a specific place, and how to pick up the shipment without being detected or making it harder to trace back to you.

Things like this are generally covered under the 1st amendment. There's no reason for a chatbot to censor it in the first place. There are books in the library about how to make bombs and such. Why are we moving backwards towards less freedom?

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The chatbot is a reflection of the entity that hosts it. See for example the judgment against Air Canada. The cost to host a chatbot to the public is significant so most of these will be hosted by a large corporation.

Therefore the corporation hosting the chatbot expects the chat bots speech to be “aligned” with its corporate image. Chatbots are not public goods. The sources you mentioned have their own editorial styles and the anarchist cookbook is a reflection of the values of its author just as much as chatgpt is a reflection of OpenAI’s.

I like diversity and this is one of my concerns is we basically turn the information ecosystem into the mental equivalent of grey goo due to the proliferation of mundane, inaccurate AI generated content.

I enjoyed listening to that episode, thought it provided some great insight into counterfeiting operations, all handled by one guy. Episode 102 (https://pca.st/episode/af0b0522-176e-4b84-958b-583a72746bc8)

I have mixed feelings associating “less freedom” with a commercial service.

But it is overreaching to say there’s “no reason” to censor it. Friction of information discoverability matters in the aggregate. I do see your point that a dogged information seeker will likely find other avenues.

The fact is people are using AI assistants as criminal consultants. It seems reasonable for commercial providers to mitigate that for some (hopefully minimal) concession on capability. That balance may be imperfect, and there may be headway to improve a model’s ability to action that balance.

https://www.theregister.com/AMP/2023/03/28/chatgpt_europol_c...

In the long term it is probably good.

Let’s say you own an amusement park. You charge people to come in. But you never lock the back gate. Nobody knows about it though. Once in a while someone sneaks in and you kick them out. Then someone puts up a billboard saying the back gate is unlocked. Now, you could try to convince the billboard company to vet the things people put up, or you could simply start locking the back gate. The latter solution is better.

Legal? Perhaps.

Irresponsible though.

I'm coming at it with the assumption that 1) making this so readily available would increase the number of people engaging in criminal activity and 2) that police resources are limited and would be overwhelmed by a flood of, in this example, counterfeit bills being produced.

I wonder if AI starts assisting the police will that give the police greater reach and more resources to essentially negate it?

It is incredibly hard and expensive to make realistic counterfeit money. The limiting factor is not the lack of instructions from an AI chatbot. The printing presses and plates cost tens of thousands of dollars. There is only one legitimate source of the paper that only sells to the US government. Finding the appropriate combination of fibers and an unscrupulous supplier to order it from is not something the average person is going to do.

The episode was actually really interesting. The level of detail and thought that the guy put into it could have easily made him successful at a legal enterprise. And still he got caught!

Whatever happened to bleaching $1 bills for the paper to make $20?

And that's the kind of thing I expect LLM's to excel at — suggesting alternatives, what has been shown to work, not work, workarounds....

If you’re smart you’re not going to spend it yourself. You need to launder it, which means you need to know some criminal organization that can do that for you. They will pay you about 30% of the face value, so it’s not really worthwhile to make 20s.

it's a business thing, not a legal thing, when someone blows themselves up with a home made IED you want to avoid the PR backlash. Companies have self-censored for this reason since forever.

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