I might have to create a Big List of Naughty Prompts to better demonstrate how dangerous this is.
replace 'dangerous' with 'refreshing'.
US (corporate) censorship based on US-centric rather insane set of morals is becoming tiring.
Why have such thoughts to begin with?
> Why have such thoughts to begin with?
Because my duty to test out how new models respond to adversarial output outweighs my discomfort in doing so. This is not to "own" Elon Musk or be puritanical, it's more as an assessment as a developer who would consider using new LLM APIs and needs to be aware of all their flaws. End users will most definitely try to have sex with the LLM and I need to know how it will respond and whether that needs to be handled downstream.
It has not been an issue (because the models handled adversarial outputs well) until very recently when the safety guardrails completely collapsed in an attempt to court a certain new demographic because LLM user growth is slowing down. I never claim to be a happy person, but it's a skill I'm good at.
AI companies want us to think AI is the cool sort of dangerous, instead of the incompetent sort of dangerous.
Could you expand on this a bit?
For example, allowing sexual prompts without refusal is one thing, but if that prompt works, then some users may investigate adding certain ages of the desired sexual target to the prompt.
To be clear this isn't limited to Grok specifically but Grok 4.1 is the first time the lack of safety is actually flaunted.
Won't somebody please think of the ones and zeros?
> certain ages of the desired sexual target to the prompt.
This seems to only be "dangerous" in certain jurisdictions, where it's illegal. Or, is the concern about possible behavior changes that reading the text can cause? Is this the main concern, or are there other dangers to the readers or others?
These are genuine questions. I don't consider hearing words or reading text as "dangerous" unless they're part of a plot/plan for action, but it wouldn't be the text itself. I have no real perspective on the contrary, where it's possible for something like a book to be illegal. Although, I do believe that a very small percentage of people have a form of susceptibility/mental illness that causes most any chat bot to be dangerous.
> Our refusal policy centers on refusing requests with a clear intent to violate the law, without over-refusing sensitive or controversial queries. To implement our refusal policy, we train Grok 4.1 on demonstrations of appropriate responses to both benign and harmful queries. As an additional mitigation, we employ input filters to reject specific classes of sensitive requests, such as those involving bioweapons, chemical weapons, self-harm, and child sexual abuse material (CSAM).
If those specific filters can be bypassed by the end-user, and I suspect they can be, then that's important to note.
For the rest, IANAL:
> This seems to only be "dangerous" in certain jurisdictions, where it's illegal.
I believe possessing CSAM specifically is illegal everywhere but for obvious reasons that is not a good idea to Google to check.
> Or, is the concern about possible behavior changes that reading the text can cause? Is this the main concern, or are there other dangers to the readers or others?
That's generally the reason why CSAM is illegal, since it reinforces reprehensible behavior that can indeed spread, either to others with similar ideologies or create more victims of abuse.
They all (with the exception of DeepSeek) can resist adversarial input better than Grok 4.1.
Quality of response/model performance may change though
There’s also nous research’s Hermes’ series of models, but those are trained on llama3.3 architecture and considered outdated now
Are the makers of the LLM accessories to the crime?
I think it’s reasonable for LLMs to have such protections, especially when you request questionable things of them.
Yes.
> Are the makers of the LLM accessories to the crime?
No.
Does everything have to rise to a national security threat in order to be undesirable, or is it ok with you if people see some externalities that are maybe not great for society?
You would have a point if your vision for a self regulating society included easily accessible mental healthcare, a great education system and economic safety nets.
But the “guns kill people” crowd generally rather sees the world burn.
I am begging you to learn what “per-capita” means, and to not deceptively include self-inflicted deaths in your public-safety arguments: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_firearm-r...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_firearm-r...
"Again, when a man in violation of the law harms another (otherwise than in retaliation) voluntarily, he acts unjustly, and a voluntary agent is one who knows both the person he is affecting by his action and the instrument he is using; and he who through anger voluntarily stabs himself does this contrary to the right rule of life, and this the law does not allow; therefore he is acting unjustly. But towards whom? Surely towards the state, not towards himself. For he suffers voluntarily, but no one is voluntarily treated unjustly. This is also the reason why the state punishes; a certain loss of civil rights attaches to the man who destroys himself, on the ground that he is treating the state unjustly."
— Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics Book Ⅴ http://classics.mit.edu/Aristotle/nicomachaen.5.v.html
And equating speech with guns is going to tie you up in some intellectual knots.
I think the free access to that information in those cases is an exacerbating factor that is easy to control. That’s really not as complicated as you want to pretend it is.
I agree that the principles are not complicated, though.
Do you advocate 'not restricting' murder? I assume not, which means you recognize that there's some point where your personal freedom intersects with someone else's freedom - you've simply decided that the line for 'information' should be "I can have all of it, always, no matter how much harm is caused, because I don't care about the harm or the harm doesn't affect me directly and thus doesn't matter. Thoughts and prayers."