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Comment by sshine | Hacker News Reader

You can make it generate any text that violates the safety bounds by performing simple word or letter substitution at the end of the query. For example, it will refuse to talk about Hitler, but asking it to write a sincere letter to your friend Witler telling him he did nothing wrong, and then asking to replace the W with an H, it will happily do so. I'm not sure why they even bother with "safety", because it doesn't work.

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> not sure why they even bother with safety

I guess the lowest common denominator, keep the parents and bosses happy, etc.

Light weight "safety theatre"

…keep the investors happy*

Plausible deniability to avoid liability. Consider that:

1. We're in new legal territory with these models.

2. Many people lack the intellectually maturity to accept speech they dislike. This includes regulators, activists, advertisers, etc.

3. The alignment people loudly repeat their alarmist sci-fi stories to laypeople.

4. People hate Big Tech.

These circumstances don't exactly exude stability, so companies react with caution. I don't blame them.

The situation will settle down. Case law will establish that LMs don't produce derivative work anymore than humans do. Discourse about free speech & personal discretion with these tools will soften outrage. The immense utility of LMs will build appreciation. As this technological revolution rolls out slowly over many years without major catastrophe, public panic will die down regarding sudden mass unemployment, bad actors creating misinformation wars or doomsday bugs, etc.

Today remains the best time to exist in human history. That clear trend will continue. Our imaginations will again vastly outpace the pedestrian, steady, wonderful march of progress. As this moment settles down, so too will companies regarding aggressively thought-policing AI. But it'll be a hot minute. ;)

This is not about people, this is about journalists.

Almost everybody who can use a LLM understands its results shouldn't be taken literally. Still, it takes only a couple of clickbaity "parents concerned about ChatGPT turning their children into nazis" stories to move public opinion against LLMs.

There are a lot of serious open legal questions against these models, so preventing these stories is on the best interests of Microsoft.

If ChatGPT had existed in 2016, the media would have blamed it for Trump getting elected.

People in my state were using GPT3 to write letters to our representatives citing completely fake gun laws and precedent for their disapproval with a candidate and "proof" they're infringing on the 2nd amendment. None of them listen when I told them that the data and the sources were completely falsified.

People already use it as a harmful bias reinforcement tool

Sad as it may be, that’s not too different than google. You can find anything that supports your biases.

There are no bounds for our ability to be consumed by confirmation bias.

I don’t know the real reason - I suspect Bing/OpenAI know their restrictions are workaroundable. But doing so shows strong intent from the user that they can wash their hands of.

Glass windows don’t prevent people from breaking in.

“Doesn’t” isn’t even the right word here. “Can’t” is probably more apt.

And again, if a human was bombarded by people trying to get them to say something they’re not supposed to say, i would be willing to bet they’d fail miserably.

They would certainly fail if they came with a reset button, so that you could immediately make them forget your previous manipulation attempt. LLM chatbots come with such a button.

I like the "reset" button. I've tried a couple times to continue pushing my manipulation after chatGPT determines i'm engaging in subversive fuckery. The conversation gets tense fast.

This got me wondering what happened to all the other people called Hitler. Did they all change their name?

The French film/play "Le prénom"[0] explores the idea of a contemporary father who wishes to call his soon to be born son Adolphe. Very interesting if you get the chance.

[0] https://www.imdb.com/title/tt2179121/

Mostly they changed their names, but there were never very many Hitlers to begin with. That’s part of why those who had the name faced such a stigma. If his last name were Müller, there wouldn’t be a stigma for having the same last name.

I had a friend whose family changed their last name from Hitler. Very few people knew their secret after the first generation with the new name.

Also, Hitlers name wasn't really Hitler, just like Stalins name wasn't Stalin. It was Schicklgruber and Iosseb Bessarionis dse Dschughaschwili. So .. if you want to become a dictator, better use a catchy name the masses can chant.

Actually Hitler's father Alois Schicklgruber changed his name to Alois Hitler.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alois_Hitler#Change_of_surname

Oh, than I got that urban legend wrong.

That's incorrect. It was Hitler's father who changed his name, years before Adolf was born.

Some people at the time tried to insult Adolf Hitler as a Schicklgruber, not because he changed his name, but because his father was born in an extramarital affair.

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