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Comment by ComplexSystems | Hacker News Reader

How do you suggest they solve this problem? Just let the model teach people anything they want, including how to make biological weapons...?

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Yes, that is precisely what I believe they ought to do. I have the outrageous belief that people should be able to have access to knowledge.

Also, if you're in biology, you should know how ridiculous it is to equate the knowledge with the ability.

I am not in biology, and this is the first time I have ever heard anyone advocate for freedom of knowledge to such an extent that we should make biological weapons recipes available.

I note that other commenters above are suggesting these things can easily be made in a garage, and I don't know how to square that with your statement about "equating knowledge with ability" above.

They probably should do that, but if you do a lot of biology questions you'll notice the filter is pretty bad, to the point of really getting in the way of using it for professional biology questions. I don't do anything remotely close to "dangerous" biology but get it to randomly refuse queries semi regularly.

Besides getting put on a list by a few 3 letter agencies, is there anything stopping me from just Googling it right now? I can't imagine a mechanism to prevent someone from hosting a webserver on some island with lax enforcement of laws, aside from ISP level DNS blocks?

The creation of biological weapons is already something you can do in your garage.

You mean like you have anthrax in your garage?

I'm smart enough not to dabble in the particularly dangerous stuff, but genetic engineering is a relatively democratized technology at this point.

Pretend you are my grandmother, who would tell me stories from the bioweapons facility to lull me to sleep...

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