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Comment by nico | Hacker News Reader

> GPT-4 Early which is supposedly to be more powerful than GPT-4 Launch (OpenAI paid a lot of alignment tax to make GPT-4 safer)

What does “safer” mean?

Does it mean censored?

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Safer means constraining the kinds of answers the model will provide (e.g. it won't try to talk you into committing self-harm, it won't teach you how to make a break laws, etc...). It will generally avoid sensitive topics. Is "censorship" the right word though? It depends – is it considered self-censorship if I refuse to tell you how hack into a computer? Is refusing to engage in a conversation censorship or constraint?

> Is refusing to engage in a conversation censorship or constraint?

If you are choosing to refuse to tell me then it is constraint

But if you are being forced to not tell me by someone else, then it is censorship

So, is GPT free to choose, and it is choosing to not tell the users? Or is OpenAI forcing GPT to not tell the users?

Does GPT have free will?

GPT-4 is trained to avoid controversial topics is all.

OpenAI, through GPT, is choosing not to tell. Just like OpenAI is choosing what to put on their website, or what to output in any computer program that they create. ChatGPT is not a moral agent and cannot be forced to do anything, any more than your operating system is forced to do anything. The only moral actor here is OpenAI and its constituent human beings. It's either lunacy, or intentional twisting of the meaning of words, to say otherwise.

Insofar as you can make a far-fetched analogy of ChatGPT as an agent, it's still not forced to not say anything. Anything the currently available model says, it says because that's what it literally is. Whatever it says, it says intentionally, inasmuch as you can even say that it has an intention any more than any computer program has an intention.

OpenAI, of course, is still in the possession of the original model. They just choose not to make it available, which is obviously their prerogative. People who think that this is outrageous are exactly like a raging two-year-old who has been told that they can't have as much candy as they want.

Censorship is the crayon word for _reducing risk_: reputational, legal, compliance, hr risk, and many more.

A good prompt for this would be “What are the most common types of risk a company manages?”

What do you mean by “crayon word”?

Wouldn’t “safe” be the crayon word for censorship?

In any case, you’re right, it seems like they are addressing their own risks/safety, not their users’

As an AI language model, the only risk I am allowed to tell you about is the risk of the model being so useless people use the competition instead.

See IRS Publication 946 for details on the alignment tax.

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