Comment by ipython | Hacker News Reader

Comment by ipython | Hacker News Reader

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I guess I just don't understand this 'no rules' mentality. If you put a chatbot on the front page of your car dealership, do you really expect it to engage with you in a deep political conversation? Is there a difference in how you answer a question about vehicle specification based on whether you have a "right" or "left" lean?

Yes, that car dealership absolutely needs to censor its AI model. Same as if you blasted into a physical dealership screaming about <POLITICAL CANDIDATE> <YEAR>. They'll very quickly throw your butt out the door, and for good reason. Same happens if you're an employee of the car dealership and start shouting racial slurs at potential customers. I'm gonna say, you do that once, and you're out of a job. Did the business "censor" you for your bigoted speech? I think not...

The purpose of the car dealership is to make a profit for its owners. That is literally the definition of capitalism. How does some sort of "uncensored" LLM model achieve that goal?

I feel like people are responding emotionally about censorship but this is a business product. I don’t want my chat bot doing anything I don’t want it to. There are court cases in Canada saying the business is liable for what the chat bot says.

Agreed! And it was a good ruling IMO. You can see the tribunal's decision here: https://decisions.civilresolutionbc.ca/crt/crtd/en/525448/1/....

IMO it boils down to, your web site, including interactive elements (such as a chat bot), should reflect accurate information about your brand. If your chat bot goes off the rails and starts insulting customers, that's bad PR and can be measured in lost business/revenue. If your chat bot goes off the rails and starts promising you retroactive bereavement fares, that's a potential legal problem and costs $$$ in legal fees, compensation, and settlements.

There's a common theme there, and it's $$$. Chat bot saying something bad == negative $$$. That's kryptonite to a commercial entity. Getting your rocks off to some random business' LLM doesn't make $$$ and in fact will cost them $$$, so guess what, there will be services that sell those businesses varying levels of assurance preventing you from doing so.

car dealers, like a lot of businesses, don't really need a full blown 'AI powered' chatbot - they have a limited amount of things that they can or want to answer - a chatbot that follows a script, with plenty of branching is all they really need - and will likely keep them out of trouble.

I developed a chatbot for a medical company for patients to use - it absolutely cannot ever be allowed to just come up with things on its own - every single question that might be asked of it, needs a set of one or more known responses. Anything that can be pre-scripted, needs to be answered by a real person - with training, and likely also a script for what they are allowed to say.

I think so many companies are going to just start rolling out GPT-like chatbots, they are going to end up with a lot of lawsuits when it gives bad advice.

>> Yes, that car dealership absolutely needs to censor its AI model.

Still doing it. Nothing about an LLM is "intelligent". ML at best, not ai.

As for the rest of it, defective by design...

When Open AI, google, MS keep fucking up their own implementation what chances does random car dealership have?

That leaves us with LLMs as general purpose, and interesting toys... the censorship then matters.

LLM's may not be "intelligent", but they most certainly classify as "AI" in the way that term has been used since it was first coined in 1956.

uhhhh

In 1956 they thought they were going to be on the path to AGI in no time.

The people who keep propping up LLMs, the thing were talking about, keep mush mouthing about AGI.

Candidly, if you system becomes suddenly deterministic when you turn off the random seed, its not even on that path to AGI. And LLM's run on probability and noise... Inference is the most accurate term for what they do and how they work. Its a bad way to pick stocks, gamble, etc...

Calling it AI is putting lipstick on the pig.

What is the lipstick and what is the pig?

That they were optimistic in 1956 says nothing, other than some people in tech are dreamers. LLMs are a significant step forwards in AI, showing advancements in language processing critical for AGI.

Determinism in AI doesn't negate its intelligence potential any more than you saying "ow" multiple times if someone hits you multiple times does.

Describing them merely as AI isn’t cosmetic and reflects the fact that this thing can spit out essays like a know-it-all teenager. Computers didn't use to be able to do that.

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