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Comment by ACCount39 | Hacker News Reader

And a human is perfectly controllable if you keep him in a sealed metal box with no access to food or air.

It's only by allowing a human out of the box that you make a human dangerous. So: don't do that? Duh. So simple.

The obvious problem is: the same exact things that make a human dangerous make a human useful! You can't reduce human risks to zero without reducing human utility to zero.

An AI given the same exact instructions and tools can go and complete a task you wanted it to. Or it can get sidetracked into breaking out of your sandbox and hacking Pentagon. No way to know in advance.

Today's AIs are still not capable enough to be high risk, even if they go off the rails. But AIs get more capable over time. Potentially to a vastly superhuman degree.

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An LLM, in my opinion, is not comparable to a person.

On the risk management angle, for sure it’s a spectrum. I don’t agree that the far end of the safe side of that spectrum for AI models is “entirely safe and entirely useless”, there is a lot of work you can do with a model that has zero risk of hurting anyone (aside from your wallet). If someone chooses a more dangerous spot on that spectrum, I believe they should be held responsible.

> An AI given the same exact instructions and tools can go and complete a task you wanted it to. Or it can get sidetracked into breaking out of your sandbox and hacking Pentagon. No way to know in advance.

This has not been my experience. I’ve been getting a lot of good work done and, as of today, have been involved in zero Pentagon hacking incidents. ;-)

Clearly, you're not using enough AI.

Check back once you're running hundreds of thousands of frontier-level AI agents at the time, like OpenAI does!

Depending on the risks, we put a lot of controls, processes, locks, vetting around who is allowed to handle certain things, what humans can do or instruct others to do. Don't see why that wouldn't be applicable.

Are you implying an LLM should have the same basic rights to freedom as human beings?

No, I'm saying that stopping LLMs from doing bad things might be as hard as stopping humans from doing bad things.

Which we can't do with any kind of reliability.

Running an LLM is a choice. Stopping it from doing bad things is as easy as not running it.

Sure, that way you don't get utility from it, so the next best thing is to actually restrict what it can do. If you don't, especially when you know it can do bad things, it's on you for having run it.

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