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Comment by DiscourseFan | Hacker News Reader

>Nothing that is moving society forward.

OpenAI "moves society forward," Microsoft "moves society forward." I'm sincerely uninterested in progress, it always seems like progress just so happens to be very enriching for those who claim it.

>There are plenty of models out there without guard rails.

Not being used at a mass scale.

>Society is already plenty de-sensitised to violence, sex and whatever other horrors anyone has conceived of in the last century of content production. There is nothing an LLM can come up with that has or is going to shock anyone.

Oh, but it wouldn't really be very shocking if you could expect it, now would it?

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I am not arguing about the merits of LLMs.

Just that we had unleashed models for a while now and the only popular use case for them has been deep fakes. Otherwise it's just boring, generic content that is no different to what you find on X or 4chan. It's 2024 not 1924 - the world has already seen every horror imaginable many times over.

And not sure why you think if they were mass scale it would change anything. Most of the world prefers moderated products and services.

>Most of the world prefers moderated products and services.

Yes, the very same "moderated" products and services that have risen sea surface temperatures so high that at least 3 category 4+ hurricanes, 5 major wildfires, and at least one potential or actual pandemic spreads unabated every year. Oh, but don't worry, they won't let everyone die: then there would be no one to buy their "products and services."

I'm not sure if the analogy still works if you're trying to compare fossil fuels to LLM. A few decades ago, virtually all gasoline was full of lead, and the CFCs from refrigerators created a hole in the ozone layer. In that case it turned out that you actually do need a few guardrails as technology advances, to prevent an existential threat.

Although I do agree with you that in this particular situation, the LLM safety features have often felt unnecessary, especially because my primary use case for ChatGPT is asking critical questions about history. When it comes to history, every LLM seems to have an increasingly robust guardrail against making any sort of definitive statement, even after it presents a wealth of supporting evidence.

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