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Comment by jsrozner

2 days ago

And the whole blog is written in the style of "omg, and then the big bad misbehaving AI did XX." OpenAI writes like they're trying to recover from a hack that is being perpetrated against them, but it's just them, hacking themselves, because they can't just do reasonable things like actually block internet access. These guys are incompetent. And someone should get jail or massive penalties for the hacks they already perpetrated, the same as a single human hacker would have.

Also, it's worth noting that these AIs have basically zero alignment. OpenAI's approach to "alignment" seems now to be engineering constraints. "My son is really well-behaved; as long as I don't give him a gun or let him out in society, he doesn't hurt anyone."

> Also, it's worth noting that these AIs have basically zero alignment.

As we see over and over and over again, these tools will overwrite any and all of their instructions with whatever some random stranger on the Internet tells them to do. It's impossible to "align" the tools that the major LLM manufacturers are selling.

They could have chosen to write tools that have immutable core instructions, and that distinguish between untrusted instructions and trusted ones, [0] but they chose to do the much easier, quicker, and far more dangerous thing instead. From a profit-seeking-software-company standpoint, that's obviously the choice that makes them the most money... but when you take a careful look at what they actually sell, it's clear that neither of the major LLM manufacturers care about providing safe products. [1]

[0] ...which are things you might think to do for tools that contain -say- safety-critical instructions...

[1] I'm certain that they have people on staff who care very much about providing safe products. Those specific people clearly don't have the power to prevent unsafe products from shipping, so it doesn't matter how much those people care about safety.