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Comment by estearum | Hacker News Reader

Uhh right, but describing that as "dystopian" is frankly hysterical.

It's an obvious corollary of good things (like product liability). Virtually everyone I've heard complain about these safety rails was up to antisocial (at best) stuff. I've never heard a sympathetic use-case. It's objectively good that companies can be held responsible for misuse of their products and that they are therefore incentivized to mitigate misuse.

"My inability continuously attack product guardrails to enable my super esoteric (and probably antisocial) use-case is dystopian" is just... not a compelling argument.

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Yes, my safety cap policy is definitely anti-social.

"These safety rails" was referring to LLMs, which have far more nuanced and capable safety rails than chemical caps do, and accordingly also have much more assertive ways to enforce them.

It's the same underlying principle. If I want to ask a software tool what the suicide rate is for my county, I do not expect it to come back with: "Naughty boy! You said an unsafe word! You're getting a strike, and if you get two more, you're banned." This is totally out of the ordinary for a software product, and is absolutely a modern invention. Replace "suicide" with whatever the "AI Safety" obsession word is today.

> If I want to ask a software tool what the suicide rate is for my county, I do not expect it to come back with: "Naughty boy! You said an unsafe word! You're getting a strike, and if you get two more, you're banned."

Did this happen?

I just tested this query in Grok, Gemini, Claude, and ChatGPT and 0% of them admonished me or refused to return an answer.

Just like every single conversation I've ever had on this topic, you have to make up examples that aren't even true. Why don't you just share what you were doing that you feel you were unfairly prevented from?

(I have an inkling why you won't do that...)

That's why I said:

> Replace "suicide" with whatever the "AI Safety" obsession word is today

I don't know what those queries are, but original-OP made one and got a "strike", which is what spawned this thread.

Which would be more than 0% concerning if I've ever heard (even once) an example of this happening with a query that shouldn't actually trigger something like that, or is so close to such a query, that the false positive is understandable and of incredibly niche value anyway.

OP gave an example of reverse engineering, something that to the LLM looks identical to just hacking. I am totally fine if the incredibly tiny little fraction of people who want to reverse engineer their own systems can't use LLMs to do it, and in exchange top LLMs aren't helpful for the hordes of actual malicious actors who would love a superintelligence to aid their crimes.

No-brainer tradeoff, just like 100% of examples I've ever heard.

I don't think that "dystopian" necessarily goes far enough, this would be one of the rare times where I would call it a fascist mentality - the idea that everything's primary allegiance is to the state and the goals of the state rather than those of the customer or the user.

I want a default that has people empowered, rather than something where it's just another performative smokescreen caused by overzealous product liability. I'll thank you and your kind for needing to distractedly tap the "Agree" button on my car's infotainment every time I start it to confirm that I will pay attention to the road.

"the state" is just shorthand we use for "other people in my community"

> I'll thank you and your kind for needing to distractedly tap the "Agree" button on my car's infotainment every time I start it to confirm that I will pay attention to the road.

Does that actually mitigate antisocial usecases? No? Then it's not what I'm talking about :)

Of course if you wanted to you could just share specifically what totally-reasonable LLM use-case you have in mind that's neutered by this "fascist mentality" instead of dreaming up unrelated instances.

> "the state" is just shorthand we use for "other people in my community"

It's a very different abstraction layer, in the same way as individual cells vs the entity that is you. The entity that comes together from all those "other people in my community" and its priorities are different to the individual desires.

> Does that actually mitigate antisocial usecases? No? Then it's not what I'm talking about :)

Maybe it does? Maybe someone is alive on the road today because they read the message and changed their behaviour. I'm giving an example of something where this liability mindset has created a world where manufacturers are no longer prioritising the desires of their users in order to appease a sense of harm-reduction. And you weren't limiting it to LLMs you were applying it to all sorts of tools.

I think that "reverse engineering" as the OP was talking about is one of those things where maybe 1/10000 uses could actually be harmful. This is not even a high-risk request such as to produce a weapon of some kind where maybe your "antisocial usecases" could be applied.

Yes if you apply some logic to such extremity that it produces bad outcomes then you should stop applying that logic to those extreme cases.

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