Hacker News Reader

Comment by foolofat00k | Hacker News Reader

This is literally the only thing that matters in this debate. Everything else is useless hand-wringing from people who don't want to be associated with the negative externalities of their work.

The second that this tech was developed it became literally impossible to stop this from happening. It was a totally foreseeable consequence, but the researchers involved didn't care because they wanted to be successful and figured they could just try to blame others for the consequences of their actions.

View on HN

> the researchers involved didn't care because they wanted to be successful and figured they could just try to blame others for the consequences of their actions

Such an absurdly reductive take. Or how about just like nuclear energy and knives, they are incredibly useful, society advancing tools that can also be used to cause harm. It's not as if AI can only be used for warfare. And like pretty much every technology, it ends up being used 99.9% for good, and 0.1% for evil.

I think you're missing the point. I don't think we should have prevented the development of this tech. It's just absurd to complain about things that we always knew would happen as though they're some sort of great surprise.

If we cared about preventing LLMs from being used for violence, we would have poured more than a tiny fraction our resources into safety/alignment research. We did not. Ergo, we don't care, we just want people to think we care.

I don't have any real issue with using LLMs for military purposes. It was always going to happen.

You say ‘we’ as if everyone is the same. Some people care, some people don’t. It only takes a a few who don’t, or who feel the ends justify the means. Because those people exist, the people who do care are forced into a prisoners dilemma forcing them to develop the technology anyway.

Safe or alignment research isn't going to stop it from being used for military purposes. Once the tech is out there, it will be used for military purposes; there's just no getting around it.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com