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Comment by TheCaptain4815 | Hacker News Reader

While I applaud how much OpenAi fears these negatives, given the current state of Ai trajectory, it won't be long until a future open source model gets "uncensored" and is easily usable for tons and tons of malicious intent.

There already exists a fantastic "uncensored" model with the newly released Dolphin Mistral 7b. I saw some results from others where the model could easily give explosives recipes from existing products at home, write racist poems, etc... and that's TODAY on a tiny 7b offline model. What happens when LLaama4 gets cracked/uncensored in 1-2 years and is 1T parameters?

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It's not about protecting society from negatives, it's about protecting the brand from being associated with controversy. OpenAI is still far too young and fragile a brand to survive news cycles that blame it for controversial happenings.

I'm sure there are some researchers and engineers who imagine themselves making heroic efforts to "protect society" (ugh), but the money behind them is just looking out for its own interests.

It's also about making the case for licensing requirements for creating/using such models, which is the only way openAI is going to build a moat.

Call me crazy but this actually sounds like giving out api credits to hire people to write scary things to show to legislators who might block all those open source efforts. A world where any gpt-4 level effort requires a license is one openai competes quite nicely in.

Throwaway because I don’t want to associate this view with where I work or might want to in the future.

> explosives recipes from existing products at home, write racist poems

So it's the internet in 2004? I imagine we'll survive although if history prevails society will be a lot goofier and have to find more imaginative ways to appear novel.

> write racist poems

That's way down toward the very bottom of my list of concerns about AI

If it wants to pit us against each other, it won't be via racist poetry.

Given both the history of racism and the cognitive bias that makes rhymes seem more true[0], I suspect that might be one of the easiest ways to do us in.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rhyme-as-reason_effect

> easily give explosives recipes from existing products at home, write racist poems

IEDs and stereotypes--two things that have existed before computers were even invented--are what you chose for examples of worst possible uses for an uncensored AI?

> What happens when LLaama4 gets cracked/uncensored in 1-2 years and is 1T parameters?

After racist poetry? 1 trillion parameters will give people the idea to use their bouillon (or even worse-- melon) spoons to scoop sugar in their tea. I hope I die before having to witness such atrocities.

God help us all when having any sort of subversive opinion is treated as queer and equated to terrorism.

Come on. Racist poems and hallucinated bomb recipes aren't the risk.

The big risks are that AI can automate harmful things that are possible today but require a human.

For example

* Surveillance of social media (e.g. like the Department of Education in the UK recently did)

* Social engineering fraud. Especially via phone calls. Imagine if scammers could literally call all the grannies and talk to them using their children's voices, automatically.

So basically things you could find on the internet already?

Probably, but with trackability risk from govt, spending time finding those sites, etc.

I was referring to offline untraceable anonymous models. You could go download that dolphin model right now, have a desktop not connected to the web, and generate god knows what type of information. More importantly, you can iterate on each question. If you're unsure on how to assemble a specific part to make a banned substance, the model could teach you in 10 different ways.

The same thing that happens with DAN jailbreaks of GPT-4.

Nothing.

The barrier between bad actors and bad acts was never a shopping list.

Information should be free, uncensored and unconstrained by relentless and relentlessly varied political puritanism. I have no problem with an internet that contains "racist poems" (in quotes because of some of the absolutely idiotic, absurd modern definitions of racism) explosives recipes and so forth. If anything, it reminds me of the internet we all had much more freely just a couple decades ago.

As long as the fundamental tenet of free expression is somehow preserved in the world going forward, i'm content to let ostensibly free individuals share information without thinking that everything they feel like sharing for whatever reasons needs to be put before a censoriously anxious eye towards how some random authoritarian tendency is going to view it. This by itself is fundamentally a good thing. It's opposite is a grotesque deformity of a powerful ideal that perhaps used to mean more in the past than it does in today's tacitly paranoid world of needing to conform.

> write racist poems

"catastrophic misuse of the model"

Best case: by being given some time to war-game the scenario, societies can come up with mitigations ahead of time.

The default is everyone being thrust headfirst into this future of fully-automated-chaotic-evil with all the fun of waking up to an un-patchable RCE zero-day in every CPU.

Racist poems and bomb recipes? If those things are real concerns that AI safety crowd are fearful about, it's a good reason to pay them less attention.

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