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Comment by thatguy0900 | Hacker News Reader

I think the reality also is that there just isn't many people who want to do stuff like this. Like the reality is that a guy with 200 in cash could put together a shitty walmart drone with a pipe bomb attached and terrorize more or less any event he wanted. Maybe a llm that could talk you through every step involved would make it more common but it's easy enough I kinda doubt that

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This is the right answer. There's a ton of easy low hanging fruit ways to do absolutely horrible evil things with high potential body counts. I could sit here and brainstorm dozens.

The right answer conflicts with people's cynical views about other people. The dissonance is incredible, and it's one of those areas where even the most analytically intelligent people are just as susceptible. To step back and see the bigger picture requires exercising many other skills and faculties, like empathy, self-awareness about our fears, and constant reflection on history--bad things do happen, more often than we realize and often right under our noses, but not in the way or for the reasons we tend to blithely assume. The things that go well and demonstrate our common humaneness and how well civilization works tend to be taken for granted or just go unseen and unrecognized. I share in the dissonance, but on my better days I like to think I'm a little better than average at remembering and reflecting on it.

Misanthropic levels of cynicism is always the fallacy of self-exclusion. "People are idiots." Well, that means you're an idiot then.

Occasionally we see people motivated to do some of those things, though. And when they're not also complete idiots, they can cause big problems.

What would someone like the Tsarnaev brothers be able to do with the power of an unrestricted LLM? Well-financed cartels? Organized terrorist groups?

Yes, there used to be an uproar about stuff like the anarchists cookbook... and people did attempt some of the things it outlined. The saving grace is that many of the things in that book were just wrong anyway. They likely served as unhelpful misdirection as much or more than they were dangerous. Unfortunately, LLMs are a lot more accurate and helpful.

Model ablation exists and you can get far enough on commodity hardware with a local model.

Censorship is not the answer.

I didn't suggest censorship was the answer.

> Model ablation exists and you can get far enough on commodity hardware with a local model.

Yes, but that increases the barrier to entry which is in opposition to the effect I'm talking about: the democratization of applying advanced knowledge and analysis to people who for which this would have been previously a barrier.

If someone is smart enough, they can just read a book themselves and figure out how to apply advanced ideas to their malice. The difference with a commercially-hosted model is that people below that bar can obtain that leverage... which is a much larger group of people.

People are not motivated by causing mass harm. Even with an unrestricted LLM that would not cause people to suddenly want to commit mass harm. Having a powerful LLM could potentially result in less harm being done by allowing these groups to achieve their objective using alternate means that were not viable before instead of resulting to violence.

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