Hacker News Reader

HNHacker News

Top New Best Ask Show Jobs

Comment by Esophagus4 | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

Esophagus4·

On one hand, the media hammered OpenAI for not doing enough to protect people from the possible harms of AI.

Then OpenAI takes steps to mitigate those risks, and it becomes a salacious story as well.

Society having no idea what to expect from these tools makes this a difficult situation for LLM providers.

View on HN

It wouldn't be a difficult situation if these guys were ethical shops from the get-go, but they aren't, they're trying to staple minimally required ethics on afterwards, and it shows.

LLMs are not moral agents. Any attempt to make them behave that way will necessarily be "staple[ed] on afterwards".

To play devil’s advocate, what ethical safeguards are OpenAI responsible for that they have failed to implement?

This is a wild and difficult to understand technology, even for the people building it. And their safeguards are constantly evolving.

I think you’re attributing to malice what should be attributed to people commercializing a novel technology that is, frankly, being exploited by users.

I'm not the person you're responding to, but I'm more than happy to attribute it to incompetence.

But I don't think that's quite the slam-dunk defense that they're looking for.

I get that argument, but I also don’t think that’s quite fair.

If OpenAI, the market leader with the field’s top talent lured by eye watering pay packages, isn’t competent, then no one really is.

> On one hand, the media hammered OpenAI for not doing enough

How about ignore the increasingly irrelevant mainstream media and do what you feel is right?

Huh?

You watch too much TV - there are plenty of decent news sources that publish concerned pieces about OpenAI’s effects on society at large. And it is obviously having an effect on OpenAI as well.

> ignore the increasingly irrelevant mainstream media

> You watch too much TV

Nice.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com