Hacker News Reader

Comment by vlyan | Hacker News Reader

>After the events of the summer

After the blatant marketing campaigns of the summer, you mean. do you need a reminder that those very same people had touted GPT-2 as a dangerous model?

worrying about sci-fi doomsday scenarios with the current AI tech is absurd. LLMs predict the next token, that's literally all they do. they aren't going to escape into the cyberspace, self-replicate, self-improve, jump over air gaps and launch the nukes at John Connor's grandma. they can't. people pretend to believe the dumbest shit.

View on HN

> those very same people had touted GPT-2 as a dangerous model

Where did they say this at? AFAIK this is the original GPT-2 announcement: https://openai.com/index/better-language-models/. Here are some direct quotes:

“We can also imagine the application of these models for malicious purposes , including the following (or other applications we can’t yet anticipate):

* Generate misleading news articles

* Impersonate others online

* Automate the production of abusive or faked content to post on social media

* Automate the production of spam/phishing content”

“Due to concerns about large language models being used to generate deceptive, biased, or abusive language at scale, we are only releasing a much smaller version of GPT‑2 along with sampling code (opens in a new window). ”

yes, exactly, that's what they claimed that incoherent gibberish generator to be capable of.

So you aren't claiming that they said GPT-2 was dangerous in the sense that it could disempower humanity, kill all humans, etc.

You are just claiming that OpenAI execs said that GPT-2 might "generate misleading news articles, impersonate others online, automate the production of abusive or faked content to post on social media, automate the production of spam/phishing content." Then, what is unreasonable or bad about the OpenAI execs saying this in 2019?

that it was bullshit and they knew it. GPT-2 wasn't capable of anything other than imitating a stroke victim.

How did they know that people wouldn't find a way to use "the dataset, training code, or GPT‑2 model weights" to "generate misleading news articles, impersonate others online, automate the production of abusive or faked content to post on social media, automate the production of spam/phishing content."?

If I remember correctly, it seemed like a plausible outcome to me (especially spam and junk social media content). Was there some conclusive evidence that I was missing?

yes, the conclusive evidence you're missing is that GPT-2 could do those things about as convincingly as a Markov chain.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com