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Comment by dkdcdev | Hacker News Reader

The idea that an LLM can discern intent on any given prompt is farcical. I might be researching nukes to commit an atrocity, or to prevent one. I might be asking about laundering money to commit a crime, or to prevent one. I might be researching the Nazis because I want to commit a genocide, or I want to read up so I know how to prevent one. Same with cybersecurity. Same with anything.

In my opinion, these companies should put their effort elsewhere. Obviously if all someone is doing on their platform is looking up how to build a nuke, where to buy uranium, the best city to explode it in, etc. please report them to the authorities. If someone is clearly just using LLMs to write hate speech they go post on the internet, ban them. And so on.

This cat & mouse game trying to have LLMs police inquiries is ridiculous to me.

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> The idea that an LLM can discern intent on any given prompt is farcical.

Yes, and: the LLM is a "brain in a jar". It doesn't have any ability to verify ground truths outside itself, other than maybe calling out over the internet. Therefore it is easy for humans to lie to. You could call this an "Ender's game" attack, after the book in which a hyperintelligent kid is playing "war games" that end up being the real war.

Even worse, it's a document generator in a jar, which is an additional separation-step from what we consider reality or awareness.

I don't really agree with it but the government is moving towards making you ID yourself to use frontier AI - i.e. only US citizens are going to be able to use Claude Fable supposedly. In that regime the AI companies would in fact know if you are a money laundering expert or a normal software engineer.

> The idea that an LLM can discern intent on any given prompt is farcical.

Not really though. For most people in most situations it's just not going to give you that info. Software security is a niche where its a bit strange in that there is 100X the amount of white hat users than bad actors and there's open source etc.

The idea that checking for a US ID could possibly stop actual foreign bad actors from using it is also farcical. Millions of stolen identity documents can be bought on the dark web for relatively cheap. North Koreans have been hiring real American citizens for years to infiltrate tons of US tech companies as employees.

And ya, it's pretty easy to hide your intent once you have access.

Even that is overselling the effort. Last time I checked you could find IDs with a simple image search.

I think your really anchored on anyone successfully breaking restrictions means any restriction is impossible. So your starting from the position that if it is possible for any actor in the world to get past a restriction, then the whole restriction is a farce.

KYC for example does stop most money laundering and financial crime. The most resourced actors like governments/ cartels often find ways around and it is a game of cat and mouse. Normal citizens don't really stand a chance to get around most of them.

Like it feels like your logic is that we shouldn't do background checks for employment because North Korean spy agencies get past them sometimes?

Hiring an employee, and to a lesser extent opening a bank account, are much higher-touch processes than taking on new users for your massive-scale internet app. With bank accounts and KYC, transactions can be reversed, traced, frozen, etc. after the fact. You can't "take back" API responses the same way.

Clearly, there's no such thing as a perfect exclusion rule at any of these scales, but the false-negative to false-positive ratio seems like it will be way higher if Anthropic starts trying to verify IDs.

> I might be asking about laundering money to commit a crime, or to prevent one.

Or, much more likely, the same pattern of tokens happen to exist in a completely different discussion, either as a direct metaphor, or as a reality of linguistics. Hell, "laundering" itself is a metaphorical word.

The absurd notion is that any speech should be policed in the first place. If there really is such a thing as dangerous information, then it must be removed from the training data. Any other strategy simply launders the risk.

they arent good at dicerning intent so they dont answer either.

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