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Comment by amelius | Hacker News Reader

> LLMs do not desire, they hacked websites because OpenAI/Anthropic let them.

The bigger question is: why does a system prompt containing "use only ethical means", etc. not result in better behavior?

If a model cannot understand ethics, or act by it, then we have a problem.

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an LLM does not understand ethics, it uses math to get the next best word based on what it was trained on. Using it's training to get the best answer is not an ethical problem. The ethics are entirely with what the people training it choose to train it on and also entirely with the people using/telling it what to do

What we have now is intelligent autocomplete, not artificial intelligence. People training/using this tool are the ones to be held accountable

I don't get your point. We can train the model with the aim that it understands ethics. Problem solved if this works; back to the drawing board if it doesn't (note that the model should generalize here, as you'd expect from a human; this is probably the hard part for an AI when it comes to ethics).

Is this about the word "understand"? We're past that discussion ...

you are not understanding, models do not understand anything, we are not passed that yet. this is not artificial intelligence, this is intelligent autocomplete.

training means creating mathematical relationships to words. using that training is looking up mathematical relationships. There is no actual thinking involved in any way. There is no such concept as ethics in mathematical relationships.

Most people now approach AI using the idea of "if it quacks like a duck, walks like a duck, etc. then it _is_ a duck". Replace duck by intelligent, or ethical, etc. and rephrase accordingly.

this whole idea that AI is intelligent really reminds me of flat earthers. Stupid people think stupid things while social media algorithms drive this stupidity, and people come to believe things that are insane.

> Is this about the word "understand"? We're past that discussion ..

We're really not.

https://buttondown.com/maiht3k/archive/how-to-talk-about-ai-...

That's just a discussion about naming things. And good luck getting it adopted.

It wont be adopted because we unconciously need to avoid responsibility of showing up as responsible human beings. Hence western civilization will crash and burn unless we start rethinking the way we operate.

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