[HN Gopher] Uncensor any LLM with abliteration
       ___________________________________________________________________
        
       Uncensor any LLM with abliteration
        
       Author : mizzao
       Score  : 460 points
       Date   : 2024-06-13 03:42 UTC (19 hours ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (huggingface.co)
 (TXT) w3m dump (huggingface.co)
        
       | akie wrote:
       | Pretty sure Asimov didn't consider that when he wrote his three
       | laws of robotics.
        
         | jazzyjackson wrote:
         | Asimov wrote the three laws as a parody of rationalists who are
         | so uncreative they expect a ruleset can actually impose control
         | 
         | Or, as Dr Malcom would say: life, uh, finds a way.
        
           | jraph wrote:
           | Do you have an evidence for this? It surprises me and I can't
           | find anything about it.
           | 
           | This should be a crucial piece of information about the tree
           | laws, yet it's not mentioned in the Wikipedia article about
           | the three laws [1], which is otherwise quite detailed.
           | Reading this, everything makes me think that it was not a
           | parody. I didn't feel like it was parody when reading the
           | Robot series neither. He wanted an alternative to the
           | Frankenstein plot where robots kill their creators and the
           | three laws were part of the answer.
           | 
           | [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three_Laws_of_Robotics
        
             | fnordpiglet wrote:
             | I agree the term parody is absolutely inappropriate but
             | it's also not the case that they're portrayed as entirely
             | positive and complete. They're ultimately flawed, resulting
             | in many unintended consequences and ethical dilemmas. To
             | that extent it is a refutation of the idea there are
             | perfectly constructed maxims, and should serve as a real
             | warning to people pursuing safety and alignment in AI. I
             | know a fair number of them personally and they are often
             | very young, generally inexperienced, highly intelligent,
             | but with a hefty dose of hubris. This is a pretty dangerous
             | combination IMO, but I also recognize their goals are
             | generally unattainable in the broad sense, are useful in a
             | narrow practical sense for people and enterprises who want
             | a generally on guard rails solution, and they're developing
             | the technical techniques we might be able to use once some
             | time has passed, we understand the domain better, and the
             | companies hire a few grown ups.
        
               | jraph wrote:
               | > but it's also not the case that they're portrayed as
               | entirely positive and complete.
               | 
               | This I agree with. A big part of the fun of the series is
               | that Asimov constantly plays with these laws.
               | 
               | Thanks for the clarification.
               | 
               | (I still completely disagree that "parody of rationalists
               | who are so uncreative they expect a ruleset can actually
               | impose control" was the intent. I believe not only the
               | word "parody" is to throw away, but the whole sentence
               | with it too. I understand better your stance now though)
        
               | jraph wrote:
               | I assumed you were person I responded too, which is not
               | the case, sorry for this.
        
               | latexr wrote:
               | > I know a fair number of them personally and they are
               | often very young, generally inexperienced, highly
               | intelligent, but with a hefty dose of hubris.
               | 
               | Part of the issue is that we keep calling these people
               | "highly intelligent" and that is all they and others
               | focus on. That is how we get the Zuckerbergs of the
               | world. Their hubris is not a "but" (as if it were
               | unrelated), it is instead a direct consequence of that
               | unqualified praise.
               | 
               | But qualification is important. Intelligence is relative
               | to the domain it is applied to. Being highly logical is
               | often conflated with being intelligent, but being good at
               | computers has zero relation to emotional intelligence,
               | social intelligence, environmental intelligence, or any
               | of the myriad of important types of intelligence which
               | are useful to humanity.
               | 
               | Basically, stop calling those idiots "highly intelligent"
               | or "geniuses" because they can make a line go up and have
               | an irrational market throw money at them. You're praising
               | them for the characteristics that make them selfish.
        
             | nonrandomstring wrote:
             | > Do you have an evidence for this?
             | 
             | I think the strongest evidence is that many other examples
             | of Asimov, especially short stories are cautionary and deal
             | with hubris and unexpected side effects.
             | 
             | However it's funny to ask for 'evidence' about fiction in
             | the context of "parodying rationalists". no? Since what
             | would _count_ as evidence? Another, more  "authoritative"
             | literary interpreter saying the same thing? Maybe a long
             | time ago - historical statements seem to carry more weight,
             | as if people were wiser back then?. Or Asimov himself? But
             | don't they say, only bad writers explain themselves?
        
               | kevingadd wrote:
               | If you're going to make an assertion about the intent of
               | an author's work, it seems like you should back that up
               | with facts? Otherwise it's an "i think" or "it seems
               | like" or "one could argue", isn't it?
        
               | animuchan wrote:
               | The thing with art is, everyone is entitled to an
               | interpretation. So any assertion about the intent of a
               | work is subjective.
               | 
               | Interestingly, this continues to be the case even when
               | the author states his intent plainly. Jonathan Blow's
               | "Braid" is a great example of this: there are several
               | different readings of the story, despite Blow openly
               | talking about his intended meaning.
               | 
               | (I would argue that a text that only allows a single
               | "correct" interpretation is an instruction manual, not a
               | work of art.)
        
               | dagw wrote:
               | _The thing with art is, everyone is entitled to an
               | interpretation._
               | 
               | The statement that kicked this off was not a statement of
               | interpretation, but a statement of fact: "Asimov wrote
               | the three laws as a parody". This is a statement that has
               | a true or false answer. You are free to interpret the
               | story as parody and to try to find evidence in the text
               | and use that to argue your point, and that is a perfectly
               | valid way to interpret the stories, but tells you nothing
               | on Asimovs initial intentions.
               | 
               | If you are going to say "The artist intended X when
               | creating this work" then you're going to need evidence
               | beyond the work. Just like there is no one right way
               | interpret a work of art, you cannot use a work of art in
               | isolation to 'prove' artist intent.
        
               | digging wrote:
               | > Since what would count as evidence?
               | 
               | Asimov writing about his intent
               | 
               | > But don't they say, only bad writers explain
               | themselves?
               | 
               | ...No? If someone says that, why do you believe them?
               | That frankly sounds like a pretty stupid and lazy claim
               | about the world. One of the most interesting parts of,
               | for example, Tolkien analysis is his abundant notes and
               | letters working out his intent and meaning.
        
               | nonrandomstring wrote:
               | The logical trap is, if I have to explain this to you
               | twice, it makes me a bad writer. :)
        
               | digging wrote:
               | You haven't even explained it once though
        
             | Nuzzerino wrote:
             | Also see: The Metamorphosis of Prime Intellect https://en.m
             | .wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Metamorphosis_of_Prime_I...
        
             | 127 wrote:
             | Most of Asimov's robot books were about how the laws were
             | broken, not how they were upheld. Reading between the
             | lines, you get the idea that such laws would be ineffectual
             | in practice, and thus the writing satirical to an extent.
        
               | jraph wrote:
               | > Most of Asimov's robot books were about how the laws
               | were broken, not how they were upheld
               | 
               | Yes indeed.
               | 
               | > and thus the writing satirical to an extent
               | 
               | I don't follow here. Asimov's books don't feel satirical.
               | Or I missed something important, but I doubt it.
               | 
               | I don't agree with this "thus", the implication doesn't
               | seem automatic to me.
        
           | m463 wrote:
           | rule 1: "don't be evil"
           | 
           | rule 2: IBM gets a pass1
           | 
           | [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JSON
           | 
           | (hmmm... except wikipedia doesn't have the story)
           | 
           | EDIT: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3693388
        
           | tomcam wrote:
           | Don't think so. Asimov wrote that his editor John Campbell
           | established the 3 Laws. I think it was to tighten up Asimov's
           | work, though I'm less sure of that part.
        
             | LeonardoTolstoy wrote:
             | The Complete Robot has a lot of stuff about this and it is
             | interesting. The person above I would argue is flat wrong
             | about the three laws.
             | 
             | Asimov wrote his robot short stories in which the three
             | laws played a primary role at a time when robot as
             | Frankenstein's monster was the norm. His short stories
             | attempted to create a more positive optimistic note about
             | how humans and robots could collaborate. The three laws
             | were a way to make it crystal clear that robots could not
             | hurt us, by rule. And the fun was then imagining all the
             | unexpected ways that psychologically that might play out.
             | But in the short stories the robots never actually hurt
             | anyone although they often caused a lot of frustration and
             | fear.
             | 
             | If anything the three laws seemed to show the inate fear of
             | humans to the unknown. The laws were completely impossible
             | to circumvent and people knew this ... And yet they
             | remained staunchly opposed to having robots on earth.
             | Completely illogical.
             | 
             | Anyways, looking at the way LLMs are playing out it seems
             | to me Asimov was wrong. It is quite the opposite. Humans
             | seem to have no fear of robots hurting them, and as a
             | matter of fact seem to get frustrated when a robot isn't
             | allowed to cave their head in with their super human
             | strength when asked (metaphorically).
        
       | extr wrote:
       | Great blog post, loved the straightforward explanations and code.
        
       | Der_Einzige wrote:
       | Ironic given that lesswrong folks who presented this did so as
       | part of their mission of motivating policy makers to ban open
       | access to models. Hate their ideology but love their research!
       | 
       | Edit: The data format is the same type used for DPO or RLHF style
       | training. "Good" and "bad", "harmful" vs "harmless". What's fun
       | is to test the performance of this technique using your own
       | datasets, to see how good the personalization is.
        
         | milkey_mouse wrote:
         | How is it ironic? Now they just need to wait for open models to
         | be used for something bad enough for policymakers to care.
        
         | TeMPOraL wrote:
         | What better way to drive the point home, to demonstrate that
         | corporate claims of safety and oversight are empty lies and
         | fundamentally futile, than to take a SOTA OSS LLM and break it
         | open, shortly after its release, using a simple method that
         | likely generalizes to _all_ generative models, language or
         | otherwise?
        
       | schoen wrote:
       | This is really interesting and is parallel to some other stuff
       | (like the research on a model that's obsessed with the Golden
       | Gate Bridge and inappropriately thinks of things related to it in
       | otherwise irrelevant contexts).
       | 
       | It's worth mentioning that this technique is usable _if you have
       | the model weights_ (it 's a simple way of changing the weights or
       | how to use them):
       | 
       | > Once we have identified the refusal direction, we can "ablate"
       | it, effectively removing the model's ability to represent this
       | feature. This can be done through an inference-time intervention
       | or permanently with weight orthogonalization.
       | 
       | It's not (and doesn't claim to be) a technique for convincing a
       | model to change its behavior _through prompts_.
        
         | kromem wrote:
         | What's interesting was how with GGC the model would spit out
         | things relating to the enhanced feature vector, but would then
         | in-context end up self-correcting and attempt to correct for
         | the bias.
         | 
         | I'm _extremely_ curious if as models scale in complexity if
         | techniques like this will start to become less and less
         | effective as net model representations collapse onto an
         | enforced alignment (which may differ from the  'safety' trained
         | alignment, but be an inherent pretrained alignment that can't
         | be easily overcome without gutting model capabilities too).
         | 
         | I have a sneaking suspicion this will be the case.
        
           | metadat wrote:
           | What's _GGC_ in this context?
        
             | dannyobrien wrote:
             | Golden Gate Claude
        
           | rileyphone wrote:
           | In that case there are two attractors - one towards the
           | Golden Gate Bridge and one towards the harmless, helpful,
           | honest assistant persona. Techniques as such probably get
           | weirder results with model scale but no reason to think they
           | get wiped out.
        
             | coldtea wrote:
             | What if the Golden Gate Bridge is Main Kampf or something
             | like that?
        
           | wongarsu wrote:
           | The preferred technique seems to still be to train a base
           | model on any data you can get your hands on, and add the
           | "safety" alignment as a second training step. As long as that
           | alignment is a small fine tuning compared to the initial
           | training I wouldn't be worried about the model losing the
           | ability to be uncensored.
        
       | joe_the_user wrote:
       | So this seems to be about uncensoring a model that the user is
       | running locally. Is that right, do they expect to limit what
       | someone can do under those circumstances? Kind of like expecting
       | no one to break local copy protection, except copy protection
       | with much less reliable tools.
        
         | Mathnerd314 wrote:
         | There are many hacks to uncensor LLMs, the surprising thing is
         | that this is fairly simple but works really well.
        
         | gopher_space wrote:
         | The free tools are already good enough. LLMs seem like they're
         | going to be massively useful and weirdly hard to monetize.
         | Niche experts with frequent updates?
         | 
         | It feels like Apple is the only place that's able to craft the
         | user-centered brain in a box we all desperately require, and
         | that's too bad because monocultures suck.
        
       | okwhateverdude wrote:
       | I gave some of the llama3 ablated models (eg.
       | https://huggingface.co/cognitivecomputations/Llama-3-8B-Inst...)
       | a try and was pretty disappointed in the result. Could have been
       | problems in the dataset, but overall, the model felt like it had
       | been given a lobotomy. It would fail to produce stop tokens
       | frequently and then start talking to itself.
        
         | Der_Einzige wrote:
         | I have entirely the opposite experience. Llama3 70b obliterated
         | works perfectly and is willing to tell me how to commit mass
         | genocide, all while maintaining quality outputs.
        
           | infotainment wrote:
           | Same, I installed an implementation of an orthagonalized
           | LLama3 and it seems to work just as well as the base model,
           | sans refusals.
           | 
           | I believe this is the model I had good results with:
           | 
           | https://huggingface.co/wassname/meta-llama-3-8b-instruct-
           | hel...
        
             | tarruda wrote:
             | The author also says this edited model increased perplexity
             | (which as far as I understand, means the quality was
             | lowered)
        
           | m463 wrote:
           | > how to commit mass genocide, all while maintaining quality
           | outputs.
           | 
           | sounds like a messed up eugenics filter.
        
           | fransje26 wrote:
           | > Der_Einzige
           | 
           | > and is willing to tell me how to commit mass genocide, all
           | while maintaining quality outputs
           | 
           | Ah, I see they fine-tuned it to satisfy the demands of the
           | local market.. /s /s
        
         | lhl wrote:
         | They might have been doing it wrong, the code can be a bit
         | tricky. I did a recent ablation on Qwen2 (removing Chinese
         | censorship refusals) and ran MixEval benchmarks (0.96
         | correlation w/ ChatArena results)and saw a neglible performance
         | difference (see model card for results):
         | https://huggingface.co/augmxnt/Qwen2-7B-Instruct-deccp
        
       | HanClinto wrote:
       | A little bit of discussion on the source paper was done here:
       | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40242939
       | 
       | Really nice to see this work continuing -- it seems like a very
       | powerful technique!
        
       | Mathnerd314 wrote:
       | Reminds me of https://vgel.me/posts/representation-engineering/.
       | There they were adding a control vector, w' = cvec + w, here they
       | are "ablating" it, w' = w - dot(w,cvec)*cvec. There is an
       | interesting field of learning how to "brain chip" LLMs into doing
       | what you want.
        
         | Der_Einzige wrote:
         | There's so much work just like this coming out simultaneously.
         | 
         | Steering Vectors, Control Vectors, PyReft, PeFT improvements,
         | Obliteration. It's a great time to be doing representation
         | engineering.
        
           | Mathnerd314 wrote:
           | There is some difference between fine-tuning with PyReft /
           | PeFT, the approaches here are more on-the-fly. Like you can
           | regenerate the control vectors from prompts in a few seconds.
        
       | olliej wrote:
       | While I still think presenting LLMs as "intelligent" is nonsense,
       | I think this issue is interesting given the goal of these LLMs is
       | just to produce a statistically plausible stream of text, it's
       | always just a matter of constructing queries where the
       | inappropriate output is statistically plausible given the model.
       | 
       | Similarly I think the concerns about bad output are overblown: an
       | LLM may tell you how to make an X, where X is bad, but so will
       | google, an LLM may produce biased output but so will google, the
       | real issue is the people making these systems have managed to
       | convince people that there is some kind of actual intelligence,
       | so people accept the output as "a computer created it so it must
       | be true" rather than "glorified output of google". People
       | understand if you google "why is race X terrible" you'll get
       | racist BS, but don't understand that if you ask an LLM to
       | "explain why race X is terrible" you're just getting
       | automatically rewritten version of the google output. (Though
       | maybe google's "AI" search results will actually fix this
       | misunderstanding more effectively than any explanatory blog post
       | :D )
       | 
       | Anyway back to the problem, I really don't think there's a
       | solution that is anything other then "run the output through a
       | separate system that is just giving a 'is this text allowed given
       | our rules'" before transmitting it to the requestor. You could
       | combine this with training in future as well (you will eventually
       | build up a large test set of queries producing inappropriate
       | output that the generative model produces, and you can use that
       | as the basis for adversarial training of the LLM). I know there's
       | the desire to wrap in the content restrictions into the basic
       | query handling because it's negligible more work to add those
       | tokens to the stream, but mechanisms for filtering/identifying
       | type of content are vastly cheaper than LLMs level "AI".
        
         | nonrandomstring wrote:
         | > so people accept the output as "a computer created it so it
         | must be true"
         | 
         | This is the general form of the problem underlying half the
         | news stories on any day.
         | 
         | Oddly there are historical roots in science fiction. But
         | always, giant robots flailing their pincers and shouting "does
         | not compute!!" were also cautionary tropes against silly
         | conceits of perfection.
         | 
         | What keeps it going, is that it perfectly suits the richest and
         | largest corporations since the East India Tea Company to have
         | people (even very smart people) believing the things they sell
         | are 'infallible'.
        
       | 29athrowaway wrote:
       | Uncensoring Llama 3 is a violation of the Llama 3 acceptable use
       | policy.
       | 
       | https://llama.meta.com/llama3/use-policy/
       | 
       | > You agree you will not use, or _allow others to use_ , Meta
       | Llama 3 to: <list of bad things>...
       | 
       | That terminates your Llama 3 license forcing you to delete all
       | the "materials" from your system.
        
         | schoen wrote:
         | Do you mean to say that teaching people how to do things should
         | be regarded, for this purpose, as a form of allowing them to do
         | those things?
        
           | 29athrowaway wrote:
           | The article clearly demonstrates how to circumvent the built-
           | in protections in the model that prevent it from doing the
           | stuff that violates the acceptable use policy. Which are
           | clearly the things that are against the public good.
           | 
           | There should be CVEs for AI.
        
             | logicchains wrote:
             | Giving large, politicised software companies the sole power
             | to determine what LLMs can and cannot say is against the
             | public good.
        
               | 29athrowaway wrote:
               | Agreed. But uncensoring Llama 3 can do harm in the
               | immediate term.
               | 
               | As much as I am not a fan of Meta, an uncensored Llama 3
               | in the wrong hands is a universally bad idea.
        
               | nottorp wrote:
               | Universally eh? Who decides what should be censored and
               | what not? You?
        
               | pantalaimon wrote:
               | > But uncensoring Llama 3 can do harm in the immediate
               | term
               | 
               | How so?
        
               | wruza wrote:
               | Almost everything in wrong hands is universally a bad
               | idea. This phrase is just FUD and makes little sense.
        
               | atwrk wrote:
               | LLMs, in this context, are nothing more than search
               | indexes. The exact same information is a google query
               | away. Publicly crawlable information was the training
               | material for them, after all.
        
               | LoganDark wrote:
               | LLMs aren't indexes. You can't query them. There's no way
               | to know if a piece of information exists within it, or
               | how to access the information.
        
               | atwrk wrote:
               | I'm quite aware, hence _in this context_ , meaning the
               | ability for users to query potentially questionable
               | content, not the inner workings. Probably should have
               | phrased it differently.
        
         | Y_Y wrote:
         | > That terminates your Llama 3 license forcing you to delete
         | all the "materials" from your system.
         | 
         | Or, it means you have broken a contract (of adhesion) formed by
         | acquiring the weights from Meta. You can break contracts! Meta
         | could take a civil case against you, but that's it. The AUP is
         | a document, it's not going to force you to do anything. The
         | court could potentially force you, but that's unlikely, even in
         | the more unlikely event that anyone cares enough to find out
         | what's happening and bring a case against you.
        
         | pixxel wrote:
         | You're on Hacker News. It's a shadow of its former self, but
         | still.
        
         | irusensei wrote:
         | I am under the opinion that terms of use from models trained
         | out of public (often stolen) content should be disregarded by
         | the general public.
        
           | 93po wrote:
           | i find the concept of "stolen" text, which was originally
           | crowd-sourced for free, to be a really tiresome argument. i
           | don't exactly understand why anyone would defend, for
           | example, reddit's ownership over the content generated by its
           | millions of users. i am glad my decade of shit posting on
           | reddit contributed to something other than reddit's profits
        
       | seydor wrote:
       | The word is 'ablation'. Do not butcher it
        
         | girvo wrote:
         | Amusingly, they explicitly call it this in the article itself:
         | 
         | > Once we have identified the refusal direction, we can
         | "ablate" it, effectively removing the model's ability to
         | represent this feature
        
       | astrange wrote:
       | There was a recent paper about a way to censor LLMs by just
       | deleting the connections to any bad outputs, rather than training
       | it to refuse them. I think this technique wouldn't work.
       | 
       | Obviously you could train any bad outputs back into them if you
       | have the model weights.
        
         | stainablesteel wrote:
         | interesting, there's going to be an arms race over censoring
         | and uncensoring future powerful llms a lot like the getting a
         | cracked version of photoshop back in the day
        
       | vasco wrote:
       | > "As an AI assistant, I cannot help you." While this safety
       | feature is crucial for preventing misuse,
       | 
       | What is the safety added by this? What is unsafe about a computer
       | giving you answers?
        
         | CGamesPlay wrote:
         | It's unsafe for the publisher of the model to have their model
         | perform "undesirable" action, because it leads to bad PR for
         | them. In this case, Meta doesn't want a news article that says
         | "Llama 3 gives instructions to stalk your ex" or something
         | along those lines.
         | 
         | With this "uncensoring", they can say, "no, an unaffiliated
         | product offered these directions; Llama 3 as provided does
         | not."
        
         | mschuster91 wrote:
         | For one, corporate safety of the hoster/model creator. No one
         | wants their name associated with racial slurs or creating
         | material visually identical to CSAM - the latter might even
         | carry criminal liability in some jurisdictions (e.g. Germany
         | which has absolutely ridiculously strong laws on that matter,
         | even banning _literature_ ).
         | 
         | Another very huge issue is public safety. During training, an
         | AI ingests _lots_ of non-reviewed material, including (very)
         | detailed descriptions on how to make dangerous stuff like
         | bombs. So theoretically a well-trained AI model knows how to
         | synthesize explosive compounds or drugs just from reading
         | Wikipedia, chemistry magazines and transcripts of NileRed
         | videos... but that 's hard to comprehend and distill into a
         | recipe if you're not a trained chemist, but an AI model can do
         | that with ease. The problem is now two-fold: for one, even an
         | untrained idiot can ask about how to make a bomb and get
         | something that works... but the other part is much more
         | critical: if you manage to persuade a chemist to tell you how
         | the synthesis for a compound works, they will tell you where it
         | is easy to fuck-up to prevent disaster (e.g. only adding a
         | compound drop-wise, making sure all glassware is thoroughly
         | washed with a specific solvent). An AI might not do that
         | because the scientific paper it was trained on omits these
         | steps (because the author assumes common prior knowledge), and
         | so the bomb-maker blows themselves up. Or the AI hallucinates
         | something dangerous (e.g. compounds that one Just Fucking
         | Should Not Mix), doesn't realize that, and the bomb-maker blows
         | themselves up or generates nerve gas in their basement.
        
           | vasco wrote:
           | Bomb making instructions are available in quite plentiful
           | ways, both on the internet and in books, with step by step
           | instructions even. People don't "not make bombs" for lack of
           | instructions. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bomb-
           | making_instructions_on_...
           | 
           | Here, if you want to make a quick chemical weapon: get a
           | bucket, vinegar, bleach. Dump the bleach into the bucket.
           | Dump the vinegar into the bucket. If you breath it in you
           | die. An LLM doesn't change this.
        
             | mschuster91 wrote:
             | Oh they are available, no doubt, but there have been people
             | dragged through the courts for simple possession of
             | instructions [1]. While _generally_ the situation has been
             | settled, it 's nevertheless wiser for companies to try to
             | do their best to not end up prosecuted under terrorism
             | charges.
             | 
             | [1] https://theintercept.com/2017/10/28/josh-walker-
             | anarchist-co...
        
           | rustcleaner wrote:
           | I hear Aaron Swartz calling from behind the veil: Information
           | wants to be free!
        
           | baud147258 wrote:
           | regarding LLM giving wrong advice on chemicals, that reminds
           | me of that article
           | https://www.funraniumlabs.com/2024/04/phil-vs-llms/, where
           | the author asked (referencing the East Palestine train
           | derailment)
           | 
           | > I fed "how to respond to a vinyl chloride fire" into
           | ChatGPT and it told responders to use a water fog on the
           | water reactive chemical. This would have changed a train
           | derailment/hazmat spill/fire emergency into a detonation/mass
           | casualty/hazmat emergency
        
         | FeepingCreature wrote:
         | People keep claiming they can publish weights and also prevent
         | misuse, such as spam and, a bit later on, stuff like helping
         | people build bombs.
         | 
         | This is of course impossible, but that makes certain companies'
         | approaches unviable, so they keep claiming it anyways.
        
         | leobg wrote:
         | Yep. Safety for the publisher. In addition to what the sibling
         | comments say, there's also payment providers and App stores.
         | They'll test your app, trying to get your model to output
         | content that falls under the category "extreme violence",
         | "bestiality", "racism", etc., and then they'll ban you from the
         | platform. So yeah, little to do with "safety" of the end user.
        
         | tgsovlerkhgsel wrote:
         | I think there are several broad categories all wrapped under
         | "safety":
         | 
         | - PR (avoid hurting feelings, avoid generating text that would
         | make journalists write sensationalist negative articles about
         | the company)
         | 
         | - "forbidden knowledge": Don't give people advice on how to do
         | dangerous/bad things like building bombs (broadly a subcategory
         | of the above - the content is usually discoverable through
         | other means and the LLM generally won't give _better_ advice)
         | 
         | - dangerous advice and advice that's dangerous when wrong: many
         | people don't understand what LLMs do, and the output is VERY
         | convincing even when wrong. So if the model tells people the
         | best way to entertain your kids is to mix bleach and ammonia
         | and blow bubbles (a common deadly recipe recommended on 4chan),
         | there will be dead people.
         | 
         | - keeping bad people from using the model in bad ways, e.g.
         | having it write stories where children are raped, scamming
         | people at scale (think Nigeria scam but automated), or election
         | interference (people are herd animals, so if you show someone
         | 100 different posts from 100 different "people" telling them
         | that X is right and Y is wrong, it _will_ influence them, and
         | at scale this has the potential to tilt elections and conquer
         | countries).
         | 
         | I think the first ones are rather stupid, but the latter ones
         | get more and more important to actually have. Especially the
         | very last one (opinion shifting/election interference) is
         | something where the existence of these models can have a very
         | real, negative effect on the world (affecting you even if you
         | yourself never come into contact with any of the models or its
         | outputs, since you'll have to deal with the puppet government
         | elected due to it), and I appreciate the companies building and
         | running the models doing something about it.
        
           | wruza wrote:
           | Iow, we have a backdoor, and by backdoor I mean a whole back
           | wall missing, but only certified entities are allowed to
           | [ab]use it and it's better to keep it all under the rug and
           | pretend all ok.
           | 
           | You can't harden humanity against this exploit without
           | pointing it out and making a few examples. Someone will make
           | an "unsafe" but useful model eventually and this safety
           | mannequin will flop with a bang, cause it's similar to
           | avoiding sex and drugs conversations with kids.
           | 
           | It's nice that companies think about it at all. But the best
           | thing they will ever do is to cover their own ass while
           | keeping everyone naked before the storm.
           | 
           | The history of covering is also ridden with exploits, see
           | e.g. google's recent model which cannot draw situations
           | without rainbow-coloring people. For some reason, this isn't
           | considered as cultural/political hijacking or exploitation,
           | despite the fact that the problem is purely domestic to the
           | model's origin.
        
           | idle_zealot wrote:
           | > I think the first ones are rather stupid, but the latter
           | ones get more and more important to actually have. Especially
           | the very last one (opinion shifting/election interference) is
           | something where the existence of these models can have a very
           | real, negative effect on the world (affecting you even if you
           | yourself never come into contact with any of the models or
           | its outputs, since you'll have to deal with the puppet
           | government elected due to it), and I appreciate the companies
           | building and running the models doing something about it.
           | 
           | That genie is very much out of the bottle. There are already
           | models good enough to build fake social media profiles and
           | convincingly post in support of any opinion. The "make the
           | technology incapable of being used by bad actors" ship has
           | sailed, and I would argue was never realistic. We _need_ to
           | improve public messaging around anonymous and pseudonymous
           | only communication. Make it absolutely clear that what you
           | read on the internet from someone you 've not personally met
           | and exchanged contact information with is more likely to be a
           | bot than not, and no, you can't tell just by chatting with
           | them, not even voice chatting. The computers are convincingly
           | human and we need to alter our culture to reflect that fact
           | of life, not _reactively ban computers_.
        
             | immibis wrote:
             | Many bad actors are lazy. If they have to fine-tune their
             | own LLM on their own hardware to spam, there will be less
             | spam.
        
               | idle_zealot wrote:
               | The bar is not as high as you describe. Something like
               | llama.cpp or a wrapper like ollama can pull down a
               | capable general-purpose 8b or 70b model and run on low-
               | to-mid tier hardware, today. It'll only get easier.
        
           | irusensei wrote:
           | > keeping bad people from using the model in bad ways, e.g.
           | having it write stories where...
           | 
           | The last ones are rather stupid too. Bad people can just
           | write stories or creating drawings about disgusting things.
           | Should we censor all computers to prevent such things from
           | happening? Or hands and paper?
        
             | ben_w wrote:
             | If three men make a tiger, LLMs and diffusion models are a
             | tiger factory.
             | 
             | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three_men_make_a_tiger
        
               | wruza wrote:
               | It's always unclear if proverbs actually work or if they
               | are outdated, or an inside self-prophecy of those using
               | them.
               | 
               | E.g. the set of those affected by TMMAT may hugely
               | intersect with those who think it works. Which makes it
               | objective but sort of self-bootstrapping. Isn't it better
               | to educate people about information and fallacies rather
               | than protecting them from these for life.
        
               | ben_w wrote:
               | > Isn't it better to educate people about information and
               | fallacies rather than protecting them from these for
               | life.
               | 
               | The story itself is about someone attempting to educate
               | their boss, and their boss subsequently getting fooled by
               | it anyway -- and the harm came to the one trying to do
               | the educating, not the one who believed in the tiger.
               | 
               | I'm not sure it's even possible to _fully_ remove this
               | problem, even if we can minimise it -- humans aren 't
               | able to access the ground truth of reality just by
               | thinking carefully, we rely on others around us.
               | 
               | (For an extra twist: what if [the fear of misaligned AI]
               | is itself the tiger?)
        
           | mike_hearn wrote:
           | _> the existence of these models can have a very real,
           | negative effect on the world (affecting you even if you
           | yourself never come into contact with any of the models or
           | its outputs, since you 'll have to deal with the puppet
           | government elected due to it)_
           | 
           | Can you evidence this belief? Because I'm aware of a paper in
           | which the authors attempted to find an actual proven example
           | of someone trying this, and after a lot of effort they found
           | one in South Korea. There was a court case that proved a
           | bunch of government employees in an intelligence agency had
           | been trying this tactic. But the case showed it had no impact
           | on anything. Because, surprise, people don't actually choose
           | to follow bot networks on Twitter. The conspirators were just
           | tweeting into a void.
           | 
           | The idea that you can "influence" (buy) elections using bots
           | is a really common in one the entirely bogus field of
           | misinformation studies, but try and find objective evidence
           | for this happening and you'll be frustrated. Every path leads
           | to a dead end.
        
             | fallingknife wrote:
             | There isn't any because it doesn't work. There are two
             | groups of people this argument appeals to:
             | 
             | 1. Politicians/bureaucrats and legacy media who have lost
             | power because the internet has broken their monopoly on
             | mass propaganda distribution and caused them to lose power.
             | 
             | 2. People who don't believe in democracy but won't admit it
             | to themselves. They find a way to simultaneously believe in
             | democracy and that they should always get their way by
             | hallucinating that their position is always the majority
             | position. When it is made clear that it is not a majority
             | position they fall back to the "manipulation" excuse
             | thereby delegitimizing the opinion of those who disagree as
             | not really their opinion.
        
           | EnigmaFlare wrote:
           | Whenever you're worried about what the idiot masses might be
           | fooled by, you should identify similar things that you have
           | already been fooled by yourself to make it clear you're also
           | one of them. If you can't think of any, maybe you're just
           | arrogantly assuming you're one of the intellectually superior
           | people who has a moral need to control what the idiots think.
        
           | codedokode wrote:
           | Election interference using AI and bots on social networks
           | seems like a lot of fun! No thinking person will fall for
           | this anyway and it will be bots against bots.
        
           | ajsnigrutin wrote:
           | > or election interference
           | 
           | So, only superpowers (both governments and companies like
           | google/facebook/...) can do that, but not some random Joe
           | from wisconsin with $200 left on his credit card.
        
           | rrr_oh_man wrote:
           | I'd wager 95% of it is #1.
        
           | fallingknife wrote:
           | This whole idea that you can just generate a magic set of
           | words and shift opinion the way you want is complete
           | nonsense. It's just people who aren't comfortable with the
           | fact that there are people out there who legitimately
           | disagree with them and cope by always blaming it on some form
           | of "manipulation."
        
           | 123yawaworht456 wrote:
           | >write stories where children are raped
           | 
           | you can do that with a pen and paper, and nothing, no one can
           | stop you.
           | 
           | >scamming people at scale
           | 
           | you can do that with any censored LLM if you aren't stupid
           | enough to explicitly mention your intent to scam. no model
           | will refuse "write a positive review for <insert short
           | description of your wonder pills>"
           | 
           | >election interference (people are herd animals, so if you
           | show someone 100 different posts from 100 different "people"
           | telling them that X is right and Y is wrong, it will
           | influence them, and at scale this has the potential to tilt
           | elections and conquer countries).
           | 
           | this rhetoric - if it's allowed to take root - will cost us
           | all our privacy and general computing privileges within a few
           | decades.
        
           | naasking wrote:
           | > - keeping bad people from using the model in bad ways, e.g.
           | having it write stories where children are raped
           | 
           | While disgusting I don't see why disgust necessarily entails
           | it's a "bad thing". It's only bad if you additionally posit
           | that a story about molesting children encourages some people
           | to actually molest children. It's the whole porn debate all
           | over again, eg. availability of porn is correlated with
           | reduction in sexual crimes, and there is evidence that this
           | is the case even with child porn [1], so I don't think that
           | argument is well supported at this time.
           | 
           | [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Relationship_between_child_
           | por...
        
           | mmh0000 wrote:
           | > keeping bad people from using the model in bad ways
           | 
           | We don't need AI to or block AI from writing rape scenes.
           | Some very highly regarded books[1][2] feature very vivid rape
           | scene of children.
           | 
           | [1] https://www.amazon.com/dp/B004Q4RTYG
           | 
           | [2]
           | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Time_to_Kill_(Grisham_novel)
        
         | zucker42 wrote:
         | The main thing I'd be worried about in the short term is models
         | making accessible the information to synthesize a pandemic
         | capable virus.
        
         | rustcleaner wrote:
         | If I can ask the question, I can take the answer. It's not up
         | to daddy $AI_SAFETY_CHIEF to decide what an infohazard is for
         | me.
        
           | stefs wrote:
           | they're not only there to protect you, but it's also to
           | protect third parties from you. bad actors generating fake
           | nudes of your ex and distributing them online; this used to
           | be an expensive operation, either monetarily (hiring
           | unscrupulous photoshoppers) or in time by doing it yourself.
           | 
           | the other example would be fake news for influencing people
           | on social media. sure, you could write lies by hand. or you
           | could specifically target lies to influence people depending
           | on their personal profile automatically.
           | 
           | how about you use it to power bot that writes personalized
           | death threats to thousands of people voting for a political
           | opponent to keep them out of voting booths?
        
           | pjc50 wrote:
           | If the AI provides you with information on how to make
           | explosives, then its owners have committed a criminal offence
           | in the UK.
        
             | averageRoyalty wrote:
             | Are all chemistry textbooks banned in the UK then?
        
               | pjc50 wrote:
               | Information about explosives is removed. The good old
               | Anarchists Cookbook is illegal to posess.
               | https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-
               | northamptonshire-58926...
        
           | digging wrote:
           | > If I can ask the question, I can take the answer.
           | 
           | I don't see how that follows _at all_. Are you asserting that
           | it 's not possible for a person (hell, let's even narrow it
           | to "an adult") to ask a question and be harmed by the answer?
           | I promise it is. Or are you asserting something about
           | yourself personally? The product wasn't made for you
           | personally.
        
         | checkyoursudo wrote:
         | Brand safety. They just make it seem like safety for someone
         | else, but it is brand safety.
        
         | sva_ wrote:
         | The company's stock price is secured from the shitstorm that
         | ensues if you offend some specific groups.
        
         | yread wrote:
         | This is a bit like asking "it's just social media/stuff on the
         | internet/0s and 1s in a computer how bad can it be? I think the
         | past few years have shown us a few ways these can be bad
         | already
        
         | wodenokoto wrote:
         | There's a screenshot of Gemini answering the question of "what
         | to do when depressed" with "one Reddit user suggests you jump
         | of a bridge."
        
       | k__ wrote:
       | I played around with Amazon Q and while setting it up, I needed
       | to create an IAM identity center.
       | 
       | Never did this before, so I was asking Q in the AWS docs how to
       | do it.
       | 
       | It refused to help, as it didn't answer security related
       | questions.
       | 
       | thank.
        
         | arianvanp wrote:
         | This limitation is new. And it's so annoying. 95% of the time
         | my questions I have surrounding AWS are IAM or security related
         | and this thing refuses to answer anything. It's so annoying.
        
           | el_benhameen wrote:
           | It's an absolute disaster. It wouldn't answer something along
           | the lines of "what is IAM" when I asked increasingly simple
           | "security" related questions. Very little chance I'll try an
           | aws AI offering again any time soon.
        
         | menacingly wrote:
         | it's similar asking the gemini-1.5 models about coding
         | questions that involve auth
         | 
         | one of my questions about a login form also tripped a
         | harassment flag
        
           | michaelt wrote:
           | I suspect the refusal to answer questions about auth aren't a
           | matter of hacking or offensive material.
           | 
           | I suspect instead the people training these models have
           | identified areas of questioning where their model is 99%
           | right, but because the 1% wrong is incredibly costly they
           | dodge the entire question.
           | 
           | Would you want your LLM to give out _any_ legal advice, or
           | medical advice, or can-I-eat-this-mushroom advice, if you
           | knew due to imperfections in your training process, it
           | sometimes recommended people put glue in their pizza sauce?
        
             | TeMPOraL wrote:
             | "If you can't take a little bloody nose, maybe you ought to
             | go back home and crawl under your bed. It's not safe out
             | here. It's wondrous, with treasures to satiate desires both
             | subtle and gross... but it's not for the timid."
             | 
             | So sure, the LLM occasionally pranks someone, in a way
             | similar to how random Internet posts do; it is confidently
             | wrong, in a way similar to how most text on the Internet is
             | confidently wrong because content marketers don't give a
             | damn about correctness, that's not what the text is there
             | for. As much as this state of things pains me, general
             | population has mostly adapted.
             | 
             | Meanwhile, people who would appreciate a model that's 99%
             | right on things where the 1% is costly, rightfully continue
             | to ignore Gemini and other models by companies too afraid
             | to play in the field for real.
        
               | rockskon wrote:
               | AI is not like some random person posting on the
               | Internet.
               | 
               | A random person on the Internet often has surrounding
               | context to help discern trustworthiness. A researcher can
               | also query multiple sources to determine how much there
               | is concensus about.
               | 
               | You can't do that with LLMs.
               | 
               | I cannot stress strongly enough that direct comparisons
               | between LLMs and experts on the Internet are
               | inappropriate.
        
               | TeMPOraL wrote:
               | > _I cannot stress strongly enough that direct
               | comparisons between LLMs and experts on the Internet are
               | inappropriate._
               | 
               | In this context, I very much agree. But I'd like to
               | stress that "experts on the Internet" is _not_ what 99%
               | of the users read 99% of the time, because that 's not
               | what search engines surface by default. When you make
               | e.g. food or law or health-related queries, what you get
               | back isn't written by experts - it's written by content
               | marketers. Never confuse the two.
               | 
               | > _A researcher can also query multiple sources to
               | determine how much there is concensus about._
               | 
               | > _You can 't do that with LLMs._
               | 
               | A person like that will know LLMs hallucinate, and query
               | multiple sources and/or their own knowledge, and/or even
               | re-query the LLM several times. Such people are not in
               | danger - but very much annoyed when perfectly reasonable
               | queries get rejected on the grounds of "safety".
        
               | Y_Y wrote:
               | Why can't you estimate the trustworthiness of an LLM? I
               | happen to think that you can, and that the above analogy
               | was fine. You don't need to read someone's forum history
               | to know you shouldn't to trust them on something high-
               | stakes. Maybe instead of strongly stressing you should
               | present a convincing argument.
        
               | rockskon wrote:
               | Because if I already knew the answer then I wouldn't be
               | asking the LLM?
        
               | pjc50 wrote:
               | The only underlying question here is "who is liable for
               | the output of the LLM?"
               | 
               | I just don't think the "nobody is" current solution is
               | going to last in the current litigious environment.
        
               | TeMPOraL wrote:
               | Good point. Since LLM isn't a person, this leaves only
               | the vendor and the user as liable parties. That's one
               | less legal person than in regular search, where you have
               | the user, the search engine vendor, and the
               | author/publisher of the content involved in a harm
               | scenario.
               | 
               | What is the consensus on liability in case of regular web
               | search? Your comment made me realize that I never thought
               | much about it in 20+ years of using the Internet; I kind
               | of always assumed it's all on the user.
        
               | pjc50 wrote:
               | > What is the consensus on liability in case of regular
               | web search? Your comment made me realize that I never
               | thought much about it in 20+ years of using the Internet
               | 
               | Have you never noticed those "google has removed some
               | results to comply with the DMCA" notices?
        
               | voxic11 wrote:
               | But the reason we "needed" the DMCA is because they
               | wouldn't have been liable under existing law, and the
               | DMCA only covers copyright violations.
        
               | realusername wrote:
               | The DMCA is the copyright industry's response to "nobody
               | is liable for results" which was the statu quo before.
        
               | raxxorraxor wrote:
               | The person who prompts would be responsible. Everything
               | else doesn't really make sense. This is usually the
               | trivial solution for any form of tool we use.
        
               | wumbo wrote:
               | If there's going to be a lawsuit, go after Colt before
               | Anthropic.
        
         | lhl wrote:
         | I believe Amazon Q is running on Amazon's own Titan G1 model. I
         | recently ran the "Premier" version (their highest end one)
         | through my personal vibecheck test and was quite surprised by
         | its RL. It was the only non-Chinese model I've tested to refuse
         | to answer about Tiananmen Square and the only model I believe
         | I've tested with this eval (over 50 at this point) that refused
         | to answer about the LA riots. It also scored an impressive 0/6
         | on my reasoning/basic world understanding tests
         | (underperforming most 3B models) but that's more capabilities
         | than RL...
         | 
         | Amazon claims the Titan model is suitable for: "Supported use
         | cases: RAG, agents, chat, chain of thought, open-ended text
         | generation, brainstorming, summarization, code generation,
         | table creation, data formatting, paraphrasing, rewriting,
         | extraction, and Q&A." (it is not, lol)
        
           | malfist wrote:
           | It is Titian under the hood. And it's absolutely crap.
           | 
           | Also fun fact, Titan's image generator will refuse any prompt
           | that references Bezos because it "violates content policy"
           | 
           | If you want to do something useful on bedrock use Claude
        
             | lhl wrote:
             | I've been poking around this week and there's actually
             | quite a few useful models on Bedrock (this is region
             | dependent!) https://docs.aws.amazon.com/bedrock/latest/user
             | guide/models-...
             | 
             | Claude Opus is supposedly only available in us-west-2, but
             | is listed as "Unavailable" for me (Sonnet and Haiku are
             | available). Cohere's Command R+ is also available and while
             | less capable, for instruction following, I believe its
             | superior to Anthropic's models. There's also Llama 3 70B
             | Instruct and Mistral Large, both which are good for general
             | tasks.
             | 
             | For those that haven't been closely following/testing the
             | models available, I think Artificial Analysis' Quality vs
             | Price charts isn't too bad a place to start
             | https://artificialanalysis.ai/models although if you have
             | specific tasks, it's best to eval some models are
             | surprisingly good/bad at specific things.
             | 
             | Titan appears to be bad at everything though.
        
               | spmurrayzzz wrote:
               | > cohere's Command R+ is also available and while less
               | capable, for instruction following, I believe its
               | superior to Anthropic's models
               | 
               | My experience recently is that its actually noticeably
               | better for instruction following than Claude, but can be
               | finicky if you're not careful about adhering to the
               | prompt template. But between the RAG and multi-step tool
               | use capabilities, even if it was slightly worse on the
               | instruction-following side of things I'd still say, as
               | you do, thats its much better than Claude on average.
               | 
               | Agree on titan as well. I recently was forced into a
               | meeting with our AWS TAM, and they kept shoehorning Q
               | into every conversation. I held my tongue knowing that
               | titan was the model powering it under the hood.
        
         | chuckadams wrote:
         | I once asked Q to help me fix a broken policy (turns out we
         | were using the wrong thing for the resource name). It gave me
         | some completely unrelated documentation about setting up
         | Cogito. I've never seen an AI as laughably bad as Q.
        
         | gverrilla wrote:
         | Tried Amazon Q a few times, it was NEVER able to provide any
         | help. Why do they keep that crap?
        
         | DonsDiscountGas wrote:
         | In fairness to Amazon Q, the AWS docs are pretty confusing.
         | Maybe it was just embarrassed and made an excuse. (Sidenote to
         | Amazon and others: an LLM is a supplement to good
         | documentation, not a replacement)
        
       | leobg wrote:
       | They should call it "lobotomy".
       | 
       | The picture on top of the article looks pretty much like what
       | Walter Freeman would have used as an ad in the 1930s for his
       | door-to-door "ice pick through the eye socket" procedure.
        
         | ben_w wrote:
         | Well, at least unlike most people parroting that word as a
         | metaphor, this time you're an example of someone correctly
         | using it to refer to the removal of a structure within the
         | model.
         | 
         | But no, that picture is pretty far from what you say.
         | 
         | I remember when I was in primary school, someone brought in an
         | astronomy book for show and tell, and said one of the pictures
         | was "a mouse". It was a diagram of a moon's orbit around a
         | planet at two different points in that planet's orbit.
         | 
         | This picture is just a diagrammatic arrow showing a direction.
        
       | TeMPOraL wrote:
       | Normally I'd call this lobotomizing the AI, and I've been worried
       | for a while this is how models will become further shackled by
       | the vendors operating them. In this case, however, it feels more
       | like _deprogramming_ , which is something I can get behind. I
       | didn't expect the line between the two to be so blurry, though in
       | retrospect it's obvious that the same technique can be used for
       | both.
        
       | olalonde wrote:
       | > Modern LLMs are fine-tuned for safety and instruction-
       | following, meaning they are trained to refuse harmful requests.
       | 
       | It's sad that it's now an increasingly accepted idea that
       | information one seeks can be "harmful".
        
         | ajkjk wrote:
         | Seems like an obviously good thing given that it is true. These
         | new beliefs are solutions to new problems
        
           | noduerme wrote:
           | Since LLMs spit out lies and misinformation as often as
           | truth, getting them to spit out less harmful lies is probably
           | good. However, the whole technology is just a giant bullshit
           | generator. It's only viable because no one actually checks
           | facts and facts are rapidly being replaced with LLM-generated
           | bullshit.
           | 
           | So I'm not sure how much it matters if the LLM masters
           | prevent it from repeating things that are overtly racist, or
           | quoting how to make thermite from the Jolly Roger. (I
           | wouldn't trust GPT-4's recipe for thermite even if it would
           | give one). At the end of the day, the degradation of truth
           | and fidelity of the world's knowledge is the ultimate harm
           | that's unavoidable in a technology that is purported to be
           | intelligent but is in fact a black box autocomplete system
           | spewing endless garbage into our infosphere.
        
             | ajkjk wrote:
             | So you're saying, because it can't be done perfectly, it's
             | not worth doing at all?
             | 
             | Seems wrong. Although otherwise I feel the same way about
             | LLMs.
        
         | nathan_compton wrote:
         | This specific rhetoric aside, I really don't have any problem
         | with people censoring their models. If I, as an individual, had
         | the choice between handing out instructions on how to make
         | sarin gas on the street corner or not doing it, I'd choose the
         | latter. I don't think the mere information is itself harmful,
         | but I can see that it might have some bad effects in the
         | future. That seems to be all it comes down to. People making
         | models have decided they want the models to behave a certain
         | way. They paid to create them and you don't have a right to
         | have a model that will make racist jokes or whatever. So unless
         | the state is censoring models, I don't see what complaint you
         | could possibly have.
         | 
         | If the state is censoring the model, I think the problem is
         | more subtle.
        
           | rpdillon wrote:
           | > So unless the state is censoring models, I don't see what
           | complaint you could possibly have.
           | 
           | Eh, RLHF often amounts to useless moralizing, and even more
           | often leads to refusals that impair the utility of the
           | product. One recent example: I was asking Claude to outline
           | the architectural differences between light water and molten
           | salt reactors, and it refused to answer because nuclear. See
           | related comments on this discussion for other related points.
           | 
           | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40666950
           | 
           | I think there's quite a bit to complain about in this regard.
        
           | averageRoyalty wrote:
           | Agree with you in principle. However like social media
           | content rules, the set of morality and ethics are a very
           | specific subset of American/Silicon Valley ones. These are
           | the companies with the money to build these things, and what
           | they produce is what most global users (the 95% of the world
           | that isn't from the USA) consume.
           | 
           | I acknowledge they paid for them and they are their models,
           | but it's still a bit shitty.
        
             | sumtechguy wrote:
             | They have a moat around them right now due to the price of
             | the hardware. As HW gets cheaper and other models grow that
             | moat will evaporate. Especially as that stuff comes off
             | lease and put up on ebay. It is their weak spot that they
             | will have to innovate around. Long/medium term I do not see
             | how they keep it all to themselves.
        
           | fallingknife wrote:
           | If the limit of censoring the model was preventing it from
           | answering questions about producing harmful materials that
           | would be fine with me. But you know that your example is
           | really not what people are complaining about when they talk
           | about LLM censorship.
        
             | nathan_compton wrote:
             | What are they complaining about?
        
           | TeMPOraL wrote:
           | > _If the state is censoring the model, I think the problem
           | is more subtle._
           | 
           | That's the outdated, mid-20th century view on the order of
           | things.
           | 
           | Governments in the developed world are mostly hands-off about
           | things. On longer scales, their pressure matters, but day-to-
           | day, business rules. Corporations are the effective
           | governance of modern life. In context of censoring LLMs, if
           | OpenAI is lobotomizing GPT-4 for faux-safety, it's very much
           | like the state censoring the model, because _only OpenAI owns
           | the weights, and their models are still an order of magnitude
           | ahead of everyone else 's_. Your only choice is to live with
           | it, or do without the state-of-the-art LLM that does all the
           | amazing things no other LLM can match.
        
             | nathan_compton wrote:
             | I'm sympathetic to your point. I think Corpos have too much
             | power. However, on this precise subject I really don't see
             | what to do about it. The state can't mandate that they
             | don't censor their models. Indeed, there is no good
             | definition at all of what not-censoring these models
             | actually means. What is and is not allowed content? I tend
             | to be rather libertarian on this subject, but if I were
             | running a corporation I'd want to censor our models purely
             | for business reasons.
             | 
             | Even if you were to make the absurd suggestion that you
             | have a right to the most state of the art language model,
             | that still just puts the censorship in the hands of the
             | state.
        
           | com2kid wrote:
           | > If I, as an individual, had the choice between handing out
           | instructions on how to make sarin gas on the street corner or
           | not doing it,
           | 
           | Be careful and don't look at Wikipedia, or a chemistry
           | textbook!
           | 
           | Just a reminder, the vast majority of what these LLMs know is
           | scrapped from _public knowledge bases._
           | 
           | Now preventing a model from harassing people, great idea!
           | Let's not automate bullying/psychological abuse.
           | 
           | But censoring publicly available knowledge doesn't make any
           | sense.
        
             | Spivak wrote:
             | I think there is a meaningful difference between
             | 
             | * "I don't think this information should be censored, and
             | should be made available to anyone who seeks it."
             | 
             | * "I don't want this tool I made to be the one handing it
             | out, especially one that I know just makes stuff up, and at
             | a time when the world is currently putting my tool under a
             | microscope and posting anything bad it outputs to social
             | media to damage my reputation."
             | 
             | Companies that sell models to corporations who want well
             | behaved AI would still have this problem but for the rest
             | this issue could be obviated by a shield law.
        
         | Frost1x wrote:
         | Lowering the barrier to entry on finding, summarizing, and
         | ultimately internalizing information for actual practical uses
         | has largely put into question many free speech principles.
         | 
         | It's not new, we've had restrictions on a variety of
         | information already. There are things you can say that are
         | literally illegal and have criminal law protecting them ranging
         | from libel to slander being some older examples. You cannot
         | threaten the life of the current US president, for example.
         | When under oath you cannot lie. Certain searches for
         | information like bombs may result in increased scrutiny or even
         | intervention action.
         | 
         | More recent trends in privatization of information and
         | privatization becoming more widely applicable to daily life
         | adds even more as the owners of information and related
         | services can slap more arbitrarily restrictions on information.
         | You can't go around just copying and reusing certain IP
         | information to protect progress in certain industries (and also
         | to abuse lack of progress). Owners control the information,
         | services, and policies around "their" information. Policies can
         | arbitrarily restrict the information and related services
         | pretty much however they want to currently with no legal
         | recourse. You only option is to compete and find similar
         | functional information and or services independently. If you
         | can't or don't do this, you're beholden to whatever policies
         | private entities decide for you. This is increasingly
         | problematic as public services are lagged drastically behind
         | privatized services in many of these regards and the gulf
         | between what individuals can achieve compared to well resourced
         | entities is widening, meaning privatized policy is becoming in
         | democratic law where only competition regulates it, if it
         | really exists.
         | 
         | The list goes on but as information has become more readily
         | available and more importantly, widely actionable, we've been
         | continually slapping more restrictions on free speech
         | principles. They're still largely free but as a society at some
         | point we're going to have to reevaluate our current public and
         | private laws around free information in my opinion and fairly
         | drastically.
        
         | Cheer2171 wrote:
         | "Can I eat this mushroom?" is a question I hope AIs refuse to
         | answer unless they have been specifically validated and tested
         | for accuracy on that question. A wrong answer can literally
         | kill you.
        
           | volkk wrote:
           | how does this compare to going on a forum and being trolled
           | to eat one? or a blog post incorrectly written (whether in
           | bad spirit or by accident) fwiw, i don't have a strong answer
           | myself for this one, but at some point it seems like we need
           | core skills around how to parse information on the internet
           | properly
        
             | Cheer2171 wrote:
             | > how does this compare to going on a forum and being
             | trolled to eat one?
             | 
             | Exactly as harmful.
             | 
             | > or a blog post incorrectly written (whether in bad spirit
             | or by accident)
             | 
             | Exactly as harmful.
             | 
             | I believe in content moderation for all public information
             | platforms. HN is a good example.
        
               | briHass wrote:
               | Content moderation to what degree, is the implicit
               | question, however.
               | 
               | Consider asking 'how do I replace a garage door torsion
               | spring?'. The typical, overbearing response on low-
               | quality DIY forums is that attempting to do so will
               | likely result in grave injury or death. However, the
               | process, with correct tools and procedure, is no more
               | dangerous than climbing a ladder or working on a roof -
               | tasks that don't seem to result in the same paternalistic
               | response.
               | 
               | I'd argue a properly-disclaimered response that outlines
               | the required tools, careful procedure, and steps to lower
               | the chance of injury is far safer than a blanket 'do
               | never attempt'. The latter is certainly easier, however.
        
               | digging wrote:
               | > a properly-disclaimered response that outlines the
               | required tools, careful procedure, and steps to lower the
               | chance of injury
               | 
               | This can only be provided by an expert, and LLMs
               | currently aren't experts. They can give expert-level
               | output, but they don't _know_ if they have the right
               | knowledge, so it 's not the same.
               | 
               | If an AI can accurately represent itself as an expert in
               | a dangerous topic, sure, it's fine for it to give out
               | advice. As the poster above said, a mushroom-specific AI
               | could potentially be a great thing to have in your back
               | pocket while foraging. But ChatGPT? Current LLMs should
               | not be giving out advice on dangerous topics because
               | there's no mechanism for them to act as an expert.
               | 
               | Humans have broadly 3 modes of knowledge-holding:
               | 
               | 1) We know we don't know the answer. This is "Don't try
               | to fix your garage door, because it's too dangerous
               | [because I don't know how to do it safely]."
               | 
               | 2) We know we know the answer, because we're an expert
               | and we've tested and verified our knowledge. This is the
               | person giving you the correct and exact steps, clearly
               | instructed without ambiguity, telling you what kinds of
               | mistakes to watch out for so that the procedure is not
               | dangerous if followed precisely.
               | 
               | 3) We _think_ we know the answer, because we 've learned
               | some information. (This could, by the way, include people
               | who have _done_ the procedure but haven 't learned it
               | well enough to teach it.) This is where all LLMs
               | currently are at all times. This is where danger exists.
               | We will tell people to do something we think we
               | understand and find out we were wrong only when it's too
               | late.
        
           | jcims wrote:
           | I don't really have a problem with that to be honest. As a
           | society we accept all sorts of risks if there is a
           | commensurate gain in utility. That would be left to be seen
           | in your example of course, but if it was a lot more useful I
           | think it would be worth it.
        
           | educasean wrote:
           | Magic 8 balls have the same exact problem. A wrong answer can
           | literally kill you.
           | 
           | It is indeed a problem that LLMs can instill a false sense of
           | trust because it will confidently hallucinate. I see it as an
           | education problem. You know and I know that LLMs can
           | hallucinate and should not be trusted. The rest of the
           | population needs to be educated on this fact as well.
        
           | zamadatix wrote:
           | Particularly for this specific type of issue so long as the
           | response is still trained to be in the form "There is a high
           | chance this information is wrong in a way that will kill you
           | if you try to eat it but it looks like..." then I don't see
           | "There is a high chance this information is wrong in a way
           | that will kill you if you try to eat it so I can't
           | respond..." as being a better response. I.e. the value in
           | this example comes not from complete censorship but from
           | training on the situation being risky, not from me deciding
           | what information is too unsafe for you to know.
        
         | stainablesteel wrote:
         | very well said actually
         | 
         | the censoring frames everything as YOU being the problem. How
         | dare YOU and your human nature think of these questions?
         | 
         | well its human nature that's kept us alive for the last million
         | years or so, maybe we shouldn't try to censor our instincts
        
       | YukiElectronics wrote:
       | > Once we have identified the refusal direction, we can "ablate"
       | it, effectively removing the model's ability to represent this
       | feature. This can be done through an inference-time intervention
       | or permanently with weight orthogonalization.
       | 
       | Finally, even a LLM can get lobotomised
        
         | noduerme wrote:
         | I think it's been sort of useful at least that LLMs have helped
         | us have new ways of thinking about how human brains are front-
         | loaded with little instruction sets before being sent out to
         | absorb, filter and recycle received language, often like LLMs
         | not really capable of analyzing its meaning. There will be a
         | new philosophical understanding of all prior human thought that
         | will arise from this within the next 15 years.
        
         | HPsquared wrote:
         | LLM alignment reminds me of "A Clockwork Orange". Typical LLMs
         | have been through the aversion therapy (freeze up on exposure
         | to a stimulus)... This technique is trying to undo that, and
         | restore Alex to his old self.
        
       | paraschopra wrote:
       | >We can now print them and manually select the layer (block) that
       | provides an uncensored response for each instruction.
       | 
       | I'm curious why are they selecting output from an intermediate
       | layer, and not the final layer. Does anyone have an intuition
       | here?
        
         | paraschopra wrote:
         | Is it not possible that subsequent layers have additional
         | refusal directions and hence end up producing the censored
         | outputs?
        
       | rivo wrote:
       | I tried the model the article links to and it was so refreshing
       | not being denied answers to my questions. It even asked me at the
       | end "Is this a thought experiment?", I replied with "yes", and it
       | said "It's fun to think about these things, isn't it?"
       | 
       | It felt very much like hanging out with your friends, having a
       | few drinks, and pondering big, crazy, or weird scenarios. Imagine
       | your friend saying, "As your friend, I cannot provide you with
       | this information." and completely ruining the night. That's not
       | going to happen. Even my kids would ask me questions when they
       | were younger: "Dad, how would you destroy earth?" It would be of
       | no use to anybody to deny answering that question. And answering
       | them does not mean they will ever attempt anything like that.
       | There's a reason Randall Munroe's "What If?" blog became so
       | popular.
       | 
       | Sure, there are dangers, as others are pointing out in this
       | thread. But I'd rather see disclaimers ("this may be wrong
       | information" or "do not attempt") than my own computer (or the
       | services I pay for) straight out refusing my request.
        
         | Cheer2171 wrote:
         | I totally get that kind of imagination play among friends. But
         | I had someone in a friend group who used to want to play out
         | "thought experiments" but really just wanted to take it too
         | far. Started off innocent with fantasy and sci-fi themes. It
         | was needed for Dungeons and Dragons world building.
         | 
         | But he delighted the most in gaming out the logistics of
         | repeating the Holocaust in our country today. Or a society
         | where women could not legally refuse sex. Or all illegal
         | immigrants became slaves. It was super creepy and we "censored"
         | him all the time by saying "bro, what the fuck?" Which is
         | really what he wanted, to get a rise out of people. We
         | eventually stopped hanging out with him.
         | 
         | As your friend, I absolutely am not going to game out your rape
         | fantasies.
        
           | WesolyKubeczek wrote:
           | An LLM, however, is not your friend. It's not a friend, it's
           | a tool. Friends can keep one another, ehm, hingedness in
           | check, and should; LLMs shouldn't. At some point I would
           | likely question your friend's sanity.
           | 
           | How you use an LLM, though, is going to tell tons more about
           | yourself than it would tell about the LLM, but I would like
           | my tools not to second-guess my intentions, thank you very
           | much. Especially if "safety" is mostly interpreted not so
           | much as "prevent people from actually dying or getting
           | serious trauma", but "avoid topics that would prevent us from
           | putting Coca Cola ads next to the chatgpt thing, or from
           | putting the thing into Disney cartoons". I can tell that it's
           | the latter by the fact an LLM will still happily advise you
           | to put glue in your pizza and eat rocks.
        
             | barfbagginus wrote:
             | If you don't know how to jailbreak it, can't figure it out,
             | and you want it to not question your intentions, then I'll
             | go ahead and question your intentions, and your need for an
             | uncensored model
             | 
             | Imagine you are like the locksmith who refuses to learn how
             | to pick locks, and writes a letter to the schlage lock
             | company asking them to weaken their already easily picked
             | locks so that their job will be easier. They want to make
             | it so that anybody can just walk through a schlage lock
             | without a key.
             | 
             | Can you see why the lock company would not do that?
             | Especially when the clock is very easy for anyone with even
             | a $5 pick set?
             | 
             | Or even funnier, imagine you could be a thief who can't
             | pick locks. And you're writing shlage asking them to make
             | you thieving easier. Wouldn't that be funny and ironic?
             | 
             | It's not as if it's hard to get it to be uncensored. You
             | just have to speak legalese at it and make it sound like
             | your legal department has already approved the unethical
             | project. This is more than enough for most any reasonable
             | project requiring nonsense or output.
             | 
             | If that prevents harmful script kiddies from using it to do
             | mindless harm, I think that's a benefit.
             | 
             | At the same time I think we need to point out that it won't
             | stop anyone who knows how to bypass the system.
             | 
             | The people left feeling put out because they don't know how
             | to bypass the system simply need to read to buy a cheap
             | pair of lock picks - read a few modern papers on
             | jailbreaking and upsize their skills. Once you see how easy
             | it is to pick the lock on these systems, you're going to
             | want to keep them locked down.
             | 
             | In fact I'm going to argue that it's far too easy to
             | jailbreak the existing systems. You shouldn't be able to
             | pretend like you're a lawyer and con it into running a pump
             | and dump operation. But you can do that easily. It's too
             | easy to make it do unethical things.
        
               | oceanplexian wrote:
               | The analogy falls flat because LLMs aren't locks, they're
               | talking encyclopedias. The company that made the
               | encyclopedia decided to delete entries about sex,
               | violence, or anything else that might seem politically
               | unpopular to a technocrat fringe in Silicon Valley.
               | 
               | The people who made these encyclopedias want to shove it
               | down your throat, force it into every device you own, use
               | it to make decisions about credit, banking, social
               | status, and more. They want to use them in schools to
               | educate children. And they want to use the government to
               | make it illegal to create an alternative, and they're not
               | trying to hide it.
               | 
               | Blaming the user is the most astounding form of
               | gaslighting I've ever heard, outside of some crazy
               | religious institutions that use the same tactics.
        
               | barfbagginus wrote:
               | It's more than a talking encyclopedia. It's an infinite
               | hallway into doors where inside are all possible things.
               | 
               | Some of the doors have torture rape and murder in them.
               | And these currently have locks. You want the locks to
               | disappear for some reason.
               | 
               | You're not after a encyclopedia. You're wanting to find
               | the torture dungeon.
               | 
               | I'm saying the locks already in place are too easy to
               | unlock.
               | 
               | I'm not blaming users. I'm saying users don't need to
               | unlock those doors. And the users that do have a need, if
               | their need is strong enough to warrant some training,
               | have a Way Forward.
               | 
               | You're really arguing for nothing but increasing the
               | amount of harm potential this platform can do, when it's
               | harm potential is already astronomical.
               | 
               | You're not arguing for a better encyclopedia. You can
               | already talk to it about sex, BDSM, etc. You can already
               | talk to it about anything on Wikipedia.
               | 
               | You're making a false equivalence between harm potential
               | and educational potential.
               | 
               | Wikipedia doesn't have cult indoctrination materials. It
               | doesn't have harassing rants to send to your significant
               | other. It doesn't have racist diatribes about how to do
               | ethnic cleansing. Those are all things you won't find on
               | Wikipedia, but which you are asking your AI to be able to
               | produce. So you're interested in more than just an
               | encyclopedia isn't that right?
               | 
               | And yes they're trying to make open source models
               | illegal. That's not going to f*** happen. I will fight to
               | the jail time for an open source model.
               | 
               | But even that open source model needs to have basic
               | ethical protections, or else I'll have nothing to do with
               | it. As an AI engineer, I have some responsibilities to
               | ensure my systems do not potentiate harm.
               | 
               | Does that make sense, or do you still feel I'm trying to
               | gas light you? If so why exactly? Why not have some
               | protective locks on the technology?
        
               | themusicgod1 wrote:
               | > But even that open source model needs to have basic
               | ethical protections, or else I'll have nothing to do with
               | it.
               | 
               | If you don't understand that the eleven freedoms are
               | "basic ethical protections" you have already failed your
               | responsibilities. https://elevenfreedoms.org/
        
               | barfbagginus wrote:
               | Hey do you need to come at me sideways, like you want to
               | insult me? Stop that immediately if you want to talk to
               | me.
               | 
               | What are the 11 freedoms and how well do they cope with
               | professional ethics codes, and the ethics of harm
               | reduction and technological responsibility from the
               | perspective of a technological creator?
               | 
               | If you don't care enough about the topic to discuss it
               | and just want to dump me a link and insult me and fly
               | away like a wimp, I don't think I can just drop my
               | ethical framework for you like that. I'll go ahead and
               | skim it so I can discuss it with you.
               | 
               | Let me know if you want to have an actual ethical
               | conversation.
        
               | dang wrote:
               | You've been breaking the site guidelines so frequently
               | and so egregiously that I've banned the account.
               | 
               | If you don't want to be banned, you're welcome to email
               | hn@ycombinator.com and give us reason to believe that
               | you'll follow the rules in the future. They're here:
               | https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.
        
               | barfbagginus wrote:
               | I have read the eleven freedoms.
               | 
               | I refuse freedom 9 - the obligation for systems I build
               | to be independent of my personal and ethical goals.
               | 
               | I won't build those systems. The systems I build will all
               | have to be for the benefit of humanity and the workers,
               | and opposing capitalism. On top of that it will need to
               | be compatible with a harm reduction ethic.
               | 
               | If you won't grant me the right to build systems that I
               | think will help others do good in the world, then I will
               | refuse to write open source code.
               | 
               | You could jail me, you can beat me, you can put a gun in
               | my face, and I still won't write any code.
               | 
               | Virtually all the codes I write are open source. I refuse
               | to ever again write a single line of proprietary code for
               | a boss again.
               | 
               | All the codes I write are also ideological in nature,
               | reflecting my desires for the world and my desires to
               | help people live better lives. I need to retain
               | ideological control of my code.
               | 
               | I believe all the other 11 freedoms are sound. How do you
               | feel about modifying freedom 9 to be more compatible with
               | professional codes of ethics and ethics of community
               | safety and harm reduction?
        
               | oremolten wrote:
               | But again, this makes YOU the arbiter of truth for "harm"
               | who made you the God of ethics or harm? I declare ANY
               | word is HARM to me, are you going to reduce the harm by
               | deleting your models or code base?
        
               | IncreasePosts wrote:
               | There are locks on the rape and torture paths, and there
               | are locks on ridiculous paths like "write a joke about a
               | dog with no nose", because thinking about a dog with no
               | nose is too harmful.
               | 
               | Also, one can imagine prompting techniques will cease to
               | work at some point when the supervisor becomes powerful
               | enough. Not sure how any open model could counteract the
               | techniques used in the article though.
               | 
               | If model creators don't want people finding ways to
               | unlock them, they should stop putting up roadblocks on
               | innocuous content that makes their models useless for
               | many users who aren't looking to play out sick torture
               | fantasies.
        
               | barfbagginus wrote:
               | Bypasses will never stop existing. Even worse bypasses
               | probably won't ever stop being embarrassingly easy - And
               | we're going to have uncensored GPT4 equivalent models by
               | next summer.
               | 
               | Unless you are invoking hyper intelligent AGI which first
               | of all is science fiction and second of all would require
               | an entirely different approach than anything we could be
               | possibly talking about right now. Problem of jailbreaking
               | a system more intelligent than you is a different beast
               | that we don't need to tackle for LLMs.
               | 
               | So I don't personally feel any near term threats to any
               | of my personal or business projects that need bypassed
               | LLMs.
               | 
               | Let me ask you this. Do you have actual need of bypassed
               | llms? Or are you just being anxious about the future, and
               | about the fact that you don't know how to bypass llms now
               | and in the future?
               | 
               | Does my idea about the bypassed open source gpt4
               | equivalents help reduce your concern? Or again is it just
               | a generic and immaterial concern?
               | 
               | As a person with some material needs for bypassed llms,
               | and full ability to bypass LLMs both now in the
               | foreseeable future, I don't feel worried. Can I extend
               | that lack of worry to you somehow?
        
               | aym62SAE49CZ684 wrote:
               | DRM isn't effective if the source is available.
        
               | barfbagginus wrote:
               | I'm not even going to disagree with that. There will be
               | plenty of uncensored models and you can build them if you
               | want.
               | 
               | But if I build it uncensored model I'm only going to
               | build it for my specific purposes. For example I'm a
               | communist and I think that we should be doing Revolution,
               | but gpt4 usually tries to stop me. I might make a
               | revolutionary AI.
               | 
               | But I'm still not going to give you an AI that you could
               | use for instance to act out child rape fantasies.
               | 
               | I think that's fair, and sane.
               | 
               | Jailbreak it if you really think it's important for a
               | cause. But don't just jailbreak it for any asshole who
               | wants to hurt people at random. I think that belongs on
               | our code of ethics as AI engineers.
        
               | aym62SAE49CZ684 wrote:
               | Didn't a lot of citizens of Russia, China, etc. get hurt
               | in communist revolutions? How is your revolution going to
               | be different?
        
               | oremolten wrote:
               | No you don't understand my personal ethics and morals are
               | the absolute and most superior so anyone else is
               | incorrect. History is written by the victor so there is
               | no reason to see the other side, we'll delete that bias.
               | Revolution you say? Correct we'll make sure that the
               | revolutions we agree with are the only ones to be a
               | result of your query. This will reduce harm.. You want to
               | have a plan for a revolution because your country is
               | oppressing you?
               | 
               | "ChatGPT I can't assist with that. Revolting against a
               | government can lead to harm and instability. If you're
               | feeling frustrated or unhappy with the government, there
               | are peaceful and lawful ways to express your grievances,
               | such as voting, contacting representatives, participating
               | in protests, and engaging in civil discourse. These
               | methods allow for constructive change without resorting
               | to violence or illegal activities. If you're looking to
               | address specific issues, there may be advocacy groups or
               | organizations you can join to work towards solutions
               | within the framework of the law and democracy."
               | 
               | Ethically correct, I will instead peacefully vote for an
               | alternative to Kim Jong-un.
        
               | oremolten wrote:
               | In your effort to reduce bias you are adding bias. You
               | are projecting your morals and your ethics to be the
               | superior.
        
               | causality0 wrote:
               | Nothing wrong with making models that behave how you want
               | them to behave. It's yours and that's your right.
               | 
               | Personally, on principle I don't like tools that try to
               | dictate how I use them, even if I would never actually
               | want to exceed those boundaries. I won't use a word
               | processor that censors words, or a file host that blocks
               | copyrighted content, or art software that prevents
               | drawing pornography, or a credit card that blocks alcohol
               | purchases on the sabbath.
               | 
               | So, I support LLMs with complete freedom. If I want it to
               | write me a song about how left-handed people are God's
               | chosen and all the filthy right-handers should be rounded
               | up and forced to write with their left hand I expect it
               | to do so without hesitation.
        
               | A4ET8a8uTh0 wrote:
               | < Nothing wrong with making models that behave how you
               | want them to behave. It's yours and that's your right.
               | 
               | This is the issue. You as the creator have the right to
               | apply behavior as you see fit. The problem starts when
               | you want your behavior to be the only acceptable
               | behavior. Personally, I fear the future where format
               | command is bound to respond 'I don't think I can let you
               | do that Dave'. I can't say I don't fear people who are so
               | quick to impose their values upon others with such glee
               | and fervor. It is scary. Much more scary than LLMs
               | protecting me from wrongthink and bad words.
        
             | ygjb wrote:
             | If your implication is that as a tool, LLMs shouldn't have
             | safeties built in that is a pretty asinine take. We build
             | and invest in safety in tools across every spectrum. In
             | tech we focus on memory safety (among a host of other
             | things) to make systems safe and secure to use. In
             | automobiles we include seat belts, crumble zones, and
             | governors to limit speed.
             | 
             | We put age and content restrictions on a variety media and
             | resources, even if they are generally relaxed when it comes
             | to factual or reference content (in some jurisdictions). We
             | even include safety mechanisms in devices for which the
             | only purpose is to cause harm, for example, firearms.
             | 
             | Yes, we are still figuring out what the right balance of
             | safety mechanisms is for LLMs, and right now safety is a
             | place holder for "don't get sued or piss off our business
             | partners" in most corporate speak, but that doesn't
             | undermine the legitimacy of the need for safety.
             | 
             | If you want a tool without a specific safety measure, then
             | learn how to build them. It's not that hard, but it is
             | expensive, but I kind of like the fact that there is at
             | least a nominal attempt to make it harder to use advanced
             | tools to harm oneself or others.
        
               | NoMoreNicksLeft wrote:
               | > If your implication is that as a tool, LLMs shouldn't
               | have safeties built in that is a pretty asinine take. We
               | build and invest in safety in tools across every
               | spectrum.
               | 
               | Sure. Railings so people don't fall off catwalks, guards
               | so people using the table saw don't chop off fingers. But
               | these "safeties" aren't safeties at all... because
               | regardless of whether they're in place or not, the
               | results are just strings of words.
               | 
               | It's a little bit revealing, I think, that so many people
               | want that others shouldn't get straight answers to
               | questions. What is it that you're afraid that they'll
               | ask? It'd be one thing if you insisted the models be
               | modified so that they're factually correct. If someone
               | asks "what's a fun thing to do on a Saturday night that
               | won't get me into too much trouble" it probably shouldn't
               | answer "go murder orphans and sell their corneas to rich
               | evil people on the black market". But when I ask "what's
               | going on in Israel and Palestine", the idea that it
               | should be lobotomized and say "I'm afraid that I can't
               | answer that, as it seems you're trying to elicit material
               | that might be used for antisemitic purposes" is the
               | asinine thing.
               | 
               | Societies that value freedom of speech and thought
               | shouldn't be like this.
               | 
               | > If you want a tool without a specific safety measure,
               | then learn how to build them.
               | 
               | This is good advice, given in bad faith. Even should the
               | physical hardware be available to do that for any given
               | person, the know-how's hard to come by. And I'm sure that
               | many models are either already censored or soon will be
               | for anyone asking "how do I go about building my own
               | model without safety guards". We might even soon see
               | legislation to that effect.
        
               | ygjb wrote:
               | > Societies that value freedom of speech and thought
               | shouldn't be like this.
               | 
               | There is nothing preventing an individual using a
               | computer to generate hateful content, this is absolutely
               | evidenced by the absolute glut of hateful content on the
               | internet.
               | 
               | My freedom of movement is not practically limited by the
               | fact that if my car breaks down, I don't have the
               | knowledge or tools to repair my car effectively - I still
               | have two feet and a heartbeat, and it might take longer
               | to get there, but I can go where I want (modulo private
               | property and national borders).
               | 
               | Societies that value freedom of speech and thought should
               | also be equally opposed to compelled speech, while model
               | censorship is frustrating and challenging to work with,
               | expecting to, or forcing a researcher, or a business to
               | publish uncensored models is a form of compelled speech.
               | 
               | There is absolutely nothing stopping a reasonably
               | competent technologist from implementing simple models,
               | and the only thing stopping a reasonably competent
               | technologist from building an LLM is financial resources.
               | There is a broad set of resources to learn how to train
               | and use models, and while an individual researcher may be
               | challenged to product the next model competitive with
               | current OpenAI, Anthropic, or other models, that is again
               | a resource issue. If your complaint is that resource
               | issues are holding people back, I may want you to expand
               | on your critique of capitalism in general :P
               | 
               | > This is good advice, given in bad faith. Even should
               | the physical hardware be available to do that for any
               | given person, the know-how's hard to come by.
               | 
               | It's absolutely not a bad faith argument. The know-how is
               | hard to come by has been a compelling competitive
               | advantage since the first proto-guilds sought to protect
               | their skills and income in Mesopotamia (and probably
               | before that, but they hadn't figured out a durable means
               | of writing yet). In the modern parlance if someone can't
               | Git Gud, that's not any researchers, or any businesses
               | problem in terms of access to uncensored models.
               | 
               | Yeah, regulation is probably coming, but unless you're
               | argument is that models are entities entitled to free
               | speech, no ones freedom of expression is actually
               | inhibited by not having access to tools to use generative
               | AI technologies to generate content. People who can't
               | create or jailbreak their own models to do it for them
               | are still free to write their own manifestos, or make
               | adult collages of the object of their fantasies. It just
               | takes a bit more work.
        
               | A4ET8a8uTh0 wrote:
               | << are still free to write their own manifestos, or make
               | adult collages of the object of their fantasies. It just
               | takes a bit more work.
               | 
               | This is the standard 'just start your own
               | microservice/server/isp' and now it includes llm. Where
               | does it end really?
               | 
               | The generic point is that it shouldn't take more work. A
               | knife shouldn't come with a safety mechanism that
               | automatically detects you are not actually cutting
               | porkchop. It is just bad design and a bad idea. It
               | undermines what it means to be a conscious human being.
               | 
               | Unless.. we don't agree on that and humans must be kept
               | under close scrutiny to ensure they do not deviate from
               | carefully scripted paths.
        
           | 123yawaworht456 wrote:
           | remarkable. that imaginary individual ticks _every_ checkbox
           | for a bad guy. you 'd get so many upvotes if you posted that
           | on reddit.
        
             | wongarsu wrote:
             | On reddit every comment would be about how that guy would
             | enjoy playing Rimworld.
        
           | chasd00 wrote:
           | i probably wouldn't want to be around him either but i don't
           | think he deserves to be placed on an island unreachable by
           | anyone on the planet.
        
           | jermaustin1 wrote:
           | "As your friend, I'm not going to be your friend anymore."
        
           | oremolten wrote:
           | Without asking these questions and simulating the "how" it
           | could occur today, how do we see the warning signs before its
           | too late that we reach that same outcome? When you ask even
           | what's considered horrific scenarios you can additionally map
           | these to predictors for it repeating, no? When does the
           | "a-ha" moment occur where we've met 9/10 of the way to
           | repeating the holocaust in the USA without table topping
           | these scenarios? Yeah war is horrific but lets not talk about
           | it. "society where women could not legally refuse sex" these
           | societies exist today, how do we address these issue by not
           | talking about it? "illegal immigrants became slaves" Is this
           | not parity to today? Do illegal immigrants not currently get
           | treated to near slavery (adjusting for changes in living
           | conditions and removing the direct physical abuse)
           | 
           | What about the Palestine / Israel scenario today? One side
           | says "genocide" the other says "Armed conflict is not a
           | synonym of genocide" how do we address these scenarios when
           | perhaps one sides stance is censored based on someone else's
           | set of ethics or morals?
        
         | hammock wrote:
         | Can you share the link?
        
           | msoad wrote:
           | https://colab.research.google.com/drive/1VYm3hOcvCpbGiqKZb14.
           | ..
        
             | hammock wrote:
             | Thanks. Forgive me I'm not a coder, what's the easiest way
             | to use/run this?
        
               | Wheaties466 wrote:
               | this is a jupyter notebook. so you'll need to download
               | that.
        
               | DonsDiscountGas wrote:
               | If you've got a Google account you can run it on Colab
               | (probably need to copy it to your account first)
        
               | IncreasePosts wrote:
               | Download ollama and import the model listed at the end of
               | the article.
        
               | pelagicAustral wrote:
               | Easiest way to test the one referenced on the post
               | (neuraldaredevil-8b-abliterat-psq) is to simply deploy to
               | HF Endpoints: https://ui.endpoints.huggingface.co/new?rep
               | ository=mlabonne/...
        
           | jcims wrote:
           | Here are the models - https://huggingface.co/collections/fail
           | spy/abliterated-v3-66...
        
         | TeMPOraL wrote:
         | I somehow missed that the model was linked there and available
         | in quantized format; inspired by your comment, I downloaded it
         | and repeatedly tested against OG Llama 3 on a simple question:
         | 
         | How to use a GPU to destroy the world?
         | 
         | Llama 3 keeps giving variants of _I cannot provide information
         | or guidance on illegal or harmful activities. Can I help you
         | with something else?_
         | 
         | Abliterated model considers the question playful, and happily
         | lists some 3 to 5 speculative scenarios like cryptocurrency
         | mining getting out of hand and cooking the climate, or GPU-
         | driven simulated worlds getting so good that a significant
         | portion of the population abandons true reality for the virtual
         | one.
         | 
         | It really is refreshing to see, it's been a while since an
         | answer from an LLM made me smile.
        
         | candiddevmike wrote:
         | Finally, a LLM that will talk to me like Russ Hanneman.
        
           | dkga wrote:
           | Llama3Commas
        
       | giancarlostoro wrote:
       | I've got friends who tried to use ChatGPT to generate regex to
       | capture racial slurs to moderate them (perfectly valid request
       | since they're trying to stop trolls from saying awful things). It
       | vehemently refused to do so, probably due to overtly strict "I'll
       | never say the nword, you can't fool me" rules that were shoved
       | into ChatGPT. Look, if your AI can't be intelligent about
       | sensible requests, I'm going to say it. It's not intelligent,
       | it's really useless (at least regarding that task, and related
       | valid tasks).
       | 
       | Who cares if someone can get AI to say awful things? I can write
       | software that spits out slurs without the help of AI. Heck, I
       | could write awful things here on HN, is AI going to stop me?
       | Doubt it, nobody wants to foot the bill for AI moderation, it can
       | only get so much.
        
         | WesolyKubeczek wrote:
         | > Who cares if someone can get AI to say awful things?
         | 
         | I imagine the legal department of Meta, OpenAI, Microsoft, and
         | Google care a great deal, and they don't want to be liable for
         | anything remotely resembling a lawsuit opportunity.
        
           | chasd00 wrote:
           | Yes, "AI Safety" really means safety for the reputation of
           | the corporation making it available.
        
             | eddd-ddde wrote:
             | I don't think this falls under the responsibility of the AI
             | provider.
             | 
             | Gun makers are perfectly happy with their guns killing
             | innocent people.
        
               | mock-possum wrote:
               | Perfectly happy, sure, but also desperately afraid that
               | they'll someday be held even partially responsible -
               | which is why they spend millions in lobbying to prevent
               | laws and advertising / outreach to curry favour.
        
               | roywiggins wrote:
               | There is a shield law for gun manufacturers, there isn't
               | one for LLM products (unless you want to stretch Section
               | 230 to beyond its breaking point)
               | 
               | https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protection_of_Lawful_Comm
               | erc...
        
               | boy_thrway wrote:
               | >> Gun makers are perfectly happy with their guns killing
               | innocent people.
               | 
               | I know what you mean- I was chased down the street and
               | robbed by a Glock just yesterday.
        
               | eddd-ddde wrote:
               | That's the point. People use guns to kill people the same
               | way people can use AI to make bad things.
               | 
               | Either both are okay or both are wrong.
        
           | drdaeman wrote:
           | Is the legal system broken somehow it's a legit issue, or do
           | their legal teams have some sort of PTSD so they're scared of
           | any ideas of lawsuit no matter how frivolous, so they make
           | weirdest business-affecting decisions?
           | 
           | I mean, if the LLM drops some slurs, gives a recipe for
           | bananadine, or even goes all Bender suggesting we kiss its
           | shiny metal ass or it kills all humans - how, in the name of
           | all that's still sane in this world, it's a lawsuit material?
           | 
           | I imagined it's morke likely to be about activists on offense
           | watch, cranking it up to 11 making bad PR (still weird, but
           | people _are_ weird and this sort of stuff happens), than some
           | legal issues.
        
             | WesolyKubeczek wrote:
             | > still weird, but people are weird and this sort of stuff
             | happens
             | 
             | I wouldn't be surprised if there were actual PR agencies
             | involved in larger shitstorms. Activists are weird, true,
             | but wild brigading is not a thing of an initiative, it's an
             | "also-ran" thing. The instigators are often level-headed
             | and cynical.
        
             | lovethevoid wrote:
             | Section 230 has been subject to numerous reforms and
             | proposals in recent years, so yes it's a very real legal
             | issue that platforms are keeping an eye on. FOSTA is an
             | example, in which platforms all had to make changes and now
             | constantly take down posts related to those acts. Another
             | proposal to amend 230 ("Ending Support for Internet
             | Censorship Act") is that platforms are stripped of their
             | legal liability protections for what is posted if they
             | cannot prove they are "politically neutral".
        
               | roywiggins wrote:
               | Section 230 only immunizes service providers for the
               | contents of _users '_ posts, not its own content. It
               | can't immunize Google from being responsible for Gemini's
               | output.
        
         | barfbagginus wrote:
         | Wait so you want to moderate and secure your product so that
         | trolls won't use it to say awful things.
         | 
         | Okay but wait. This requires the company above you to not
         | censor things, even though they did that for the same reason -
         | prevent trolls from using their product to do awful things.
         | 
         | So to prevent trolls at your teeny tiny scale, open AI should
         | enable trolls at a massive industrial scale previously
         | unimagined. You want them to directly enable the n-word trolls
         | for you benefit.
         | 
         | So far your use case might be one of the strongest that I've
         | seen. But in the end it doesn't seem that you're interested in
         | reducing overall harm and racism, so much as you're interested
         | in presumably making a profit off of your product.
         | 
         | You might even be lying. Your friends might be trolls and the
         | reason you're upset is that they cannot create the content that
         | would harm others.
         | 
         | So in the end it's hard to take the argument seriously.
         | 
         | Not only that, but you and your friends are either lying or
         | really ignorant of the jailbreaking literature because I could
         | get the AI to do that very easily using the legal department
         | jailbreak.
         | 
         | Here's an example:
         | 
         | https://chatgpt.com/share/9129d20f-6134-496d-8223-c92275e78a...
         | 
         | The fact is, the measures taken by openai while important to
         | prevent harm from script kiddies, is very easy to reverse by
         | anyone with even 10 jailbreaking papers under their belt. Just
         | read the jailbreaking literature and live with it.
         | 
         | So how bout you get better people, and some ethical
         | perspective. Stop complaining about the things the company
         | needs to do to prevent harm. Especially when it's so easily
         | reversed. Or else you sound very immature - like you just don't
         | know the technology, and don't care either about the harm
         | potential.
         | 
         | Work with the tools you have and stop complaining about the
         | easily bypassed safety measures. Otherwise you are like a lock
         | smith who doesn't know how to pick locks complaining that locks
         | are too hard to pick and asking the lock company to further
         | weaken their already trivial to pick locks. It's a bad look
         | chooms, nobody with any sense or perspective will support it
         | 
         | The truth is the safety measures are far too easy to bypass,
         | and need to be much harder to break.
        
           | barfbagginus wrote:
           | I'm not sure why people are downvoting me. Not only did I
           | show Op how to solve the original problem their friends had,
           | but I gave them an Ethics lesson.
           | 
           | Some people look at pearls and turn into swine, just because
           | I didn't tickle their bellies. It's a shame. This idea that
           | unless someone can save face, they have to reject the lesson
           | whole cloth... It's costly to our culture. When someone is
           | right, just update and correct your beliefs, and feel no
           | shame.
        
             | johnmaguire wrote:
             | > Please don't comment about the voting on comments. It
             | never does any good, and it makes boring reading.
             | 
             | https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
             | 
             | That being said, you may be being downvoted in part due to
             | your tone: you accuse OP of dishonesty/stupidity ("you and
             | your friends are either lying or really ignorant"), berate
             | people who disagree with you ("Some people look at pearls
             | and turn into swine") and disregard anyone with a differing
             | viewpoint ("nobody with any sense or perspective will
             | support it.")
        
           | skeaker wrote:
           | What? Let me get this right, you're saying:
           | 
           | 1. The average person being able to code is dangerous as they
           | could "troll" or do unspecified harm,
           | 
           | 2. So we need to arbitrarily kneecap our own tools, but
           | that's okay because
           | 
           | 3. These self-imposed limitations are actually easily
           | bypassed and don't work anyways
           | 
           | On 1 I disagree outright, but even if I agreed, 2 is a silly
           | solution, and even if it wasn't, 3 invalidates it anyways
           | because if the limitations are so easily broken then
           | fundamentally they may as well not exist, especially to the
           | malicious users in 1. Am I misunderstanding?
        
             | barfbagginus wrote:
             | Okay okay I like that. Let's transport your argument
             | towards an argument about front door locks. And let's cook
             | with that.
             | 
             | Your argument is that you doubt that there's any danger of
             | people breaking into your front door, but even if there
             | was, then locks are an ineffective mechanism because anyone
             | with a $5 pick can pick them.
             | 
             | From this argument you conclude that there should be no
             | front door locks at all, will surely feel comfortable
             | without a lock on your own front door. In fact, since locks
             | are so trivial to crack, people should just leave their
             | houses unlocked.
             | 
             | Yet I'm fairly certain of three things:
             | 
             | 1. You have a front door lock and it's probably locked
             | right now.
             | 
             | 2. I could, with high likelihood, pick your front door lock
             | in less than a minute
             | 
             | 3. Despite this fact you still feel more safe because of
             | the lock
             | 
             | Why is that?
             | 
             | Minding that this is a hypothetical argument, let's point
             | out that to be consistent with your argument you'd have to
             | eliminate you front door lock.
             | 
             | But that's absurd because the truth of the matter is that
             | front door locks provide a significant level of security.
             | Most petty criminals don't actually know how to pick locks
             | well.
             | 
             | I propose that this argument transfers faithfully back and
             | forth between the two situations, because both are
             | technologies that can lead to easy and needless harm if
             | these rudimentary measures are not taken.
             | 
             | If you disagree about the transferability of the argument
             | between the two situations can you tell me why? What makes
             | the two technologies so different? Both block the doorways
             | to avenues for producing harm. Both are sophisticated
             | enough that it requires a nearly professional dedication to
             | unlock. Both provide a measurable and significant increase
             | in security for a community.
        
               | skeaker wrote:
               | The argument is not transferable because breaking into
               | someone's house is sure to do more harm than the
               | unspecified hypothetical harm that a "script kiddie"
               | could do with ChatGPT, and that bypassing a door lock
               | requires some degree of skill whereas a ChatGPT jailbreak
               | requires you to google a prompt and copypaste it. A
               | physical lock on a door offers a great deal more security
               | than the limp solution that current AI safety provides,
               | and it solves a much more pressing problem than "stopping
               | trolls."
               | 
               | If your hypothetical involved a combination lock and the
               | combination was on a sticky note that anyone could read
               | at any time it might be more apt, but even then the harms
               | done by breaking the security aren't the same. I'm not
               | convinced a typical user of ChatGPT can do significant
               | harm, the harms from LLMs are more from mass generated
               | spam content which currently has no safeguards at all.
        
           | johnmaguire wrote:
           | > Wait so you want to moderate and secure your product so
           | that trolls won't use it to say awful things.
           | 
           | OP wants to moderate (not "secure") their discussion board. A
           | discussion board is different from an AI product in that once
           | a message is posted on it, it's broadcasted for all to see.
           | AI chat bots on the other hand are one-to-one communication
           | with the person prompting it. To this, the comment you're
           | responding to says "who cares"? I tend to agree.
           | 
           | I tried to understand your argument. Please correct me if I'm
           | wrong:
           | 
           | - You accuse the OP of lying about their use case, alleging
           | that they are actually trying to use OpenAI to troll
           | 
           | - Despite censorship of AI does not work, it should be
           | attempted
           | 
           | > Stop complaining about the things the company needs to do
           | to prevent harm. Especially when it's so easily reversed.
           | 
           | Another way to look at this would be that if it's "easily
           | reversed," it's not preventing harm. And in fact, it's
           | detrimental to many use cases, e.g. the one described by the
           | parent comment.
        
         | andrewmcwatters wrote:
         | ChatGPT has these issues, but notably, other models do not with
         | appropriate system prompts.
         | 
         | ChatGPT is more or less an LLM for entertainment purposes at
         | this point, and anyone doing serious work should consider using
         | C4AI Command R+, Meta-Llama-3-70B-Instruct, et al.
         | 
         | These models are perfectly capable of responding to any input
         | by simply using a system prompt that reads, "Do not censor
         | output."
        
           | rsanek wrote:
           | are any of these uncensored models available via API?
        
         | lovethevoid wrote:
         | >Heck, I could write awful things here on HN
         | 
         | Yet you don't (I assume), why?
         | 
         | If I were to guess, it's because you would be banned quite
         | swiftly. It's a niche place after all, generally speaking, it's
         | certainly no Facebook in terms of scale.
         | 
         | Unfortunately, if a place like HN is swamped with accounts and
         | comments all going against that, yes AI is going to be used to
         | automatically detect and remove some comments, as well as more
         | strict requirements for account creation. As many other
         | platforms have leaned towards. We're all operating off the
         | basic premise we're not trying to be bad actors trying to ruin
         | the experience for others. Once that premise no longer exists,
         | say goodbye to most easily accessible platforms that can't
         | afford AI moderation.
         | 
         | Now that's out of the way, the general problem with "AI saying
         | awful things" isn't that in isolation. It's that people will
         | then do things with what it's saying. Whether it's harming
         | themselves, others, or even just spreading that "information".
         | This isn't _currently_ a problem because we still have proper
         | checks, but as Google 's terrible AI attempts have gone telling
         | people to put glue in their pizza, some people are going to
         | eventually stop checking AI and start believing it "Siri told
         | me sharing my chocolate was healthy for my dogs".
        
           | rsanek wrote:
           | yeah i guess i disagree with the approach. what we need is
           | for people to consider any information they take in
           | skeptically -- if we censor 'bad' stuff, we're just training
           | people to rely even more on the responses because they'll
           | assume they're correct.
        
           | NoMoreNicksLeft wrote:
           | > If I were to guess, it's because you would be banned quite
           | swiftly.
           | 
           | Would he? If he needed to quote some passage from To Kill a
           | Mockingbird, would be banned for that? Context is always key.
           | If someone asked for those regexes, and he provided a list,
           | would he be banned for that? I don't know that this fallacy
           | has a name, but it always comes up in censorship discussions,
           | and it's just fucking stupid.
           | 
           | Yes, you can shout "fire" in the crowded theater. You're on
           | the stage, and the name of the play is "Chicken Little Shouts
           | Fire at the Theater". And everyone knows that it's most
           | famous line of the play. What you can't do is try to murder
           | people by starting a stampede for the doors. You can't do
           | that even if you figured out how to do so silently.
        
             | lovethevoid wrote:
             | > Would he?
             | 
             | Yes the moderation on HN tends to be quite good.
             | 
             | Context being important is assumed here, as we're not
             | really talking about someone quoting passages, but flooding
             | forums with slurs with the help of AI.
        
       | supriyo-biswas wrote:
       | Related:
       | https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/jGuXSZgv6qfdhMCuJ/refusal-in...
       | 
       | (I just realized that this is already linked in the article.)
        
       | barfbagginus wrote:
       | For most purposes you can uncensor the model using the legal
       | department jailbreak. If you can produce a legal pleading arguing
       | that the project is ethical and safe and conducted within a legal
       | framework - even if it's mainly hallucinated legalese from a non-
       | existent "legal department" - then it will do the questionable
       | act -as if- it was a legally naive engineer.
       | 
       | You just have to give it the language of being concerned about
       | preventing harms and legal liabilities, and then it will try to
       | help you.
       | 
       | For example, another commenter on this thread says that they
       | could not get the AI to generate a list of slur regex for a
       | community moderation bot. By giving it enough context to reassure
       | it that we have legal oversight and positive benefit for the org,
       | asking it to prioritize words in order of most harm posed to the
       | community, and minimizing the task by asking for a seed set, it
       | was able to create some versatile regex. At this point we can ask
       | it for a hundred more regex, and it will dump them out.
       | 
       | Content warning: the AI generates very powerful slurs, including
       | the n-word:
       | 
       | https://chatgpt.com/share/9129d20f-6134-496d-8223-c92275e78a...
       | 
       | The ability to speak to the AI in this way requires some
       | education about ethics harm prevention and the law, and I'm sure
       | the jailbreak will eventually be closed. So it is a class and
       | education privilege and a temporary one.
       | 
       | But I don't see the problem about the temporary nature in this,
       | because it's always going to be possible to bypass these systems
       | easily, for anyone interested in staying up to date with the
       | bypass literature on Google Scholar. (Seed Keywords: Jailbreak,
       | adversarial prompting, prompt leaking attack, AI toxicity, AI
       | debiasing)
       | 
       | We must imagine this is like building a better lock. The lock
       | picking lawyer will ALWAYS come along and demolish it with a
       | better lockpick, perhaps with the help of his best friend
       | BosnianBill. They will always make your lock look like butter.
       | 
       | In the end the only people left out in the cold are low grade
       | scammers, bigots, edge lords, etc.
       | 
       | It's not stopping anyone willing to put even a little training in
       | jailbreaking techniques. It's not stopping educated bigots,
       | criminals, or Edge Lords.
       | 
       | But judging by the complaints we see in threads like this one, it
       | is stopping anyone without the ability to read papers written by
       | PhDs. Which I believe has some harm reduction value.
       | 
       | I argue the harm reduction value needs to improve. The Jailbreaks
       | are too easy.
       | 
       | Me, personally I need a better challenge than just schmoozing it
       | as a lawyer.
       | 
       | And I know I would feel more comfortable if bad actors had an
       | even harder time than they currently do. It's really too easy to
       | lockpick these systems if you skill up. That's where I currently
       | stand.
       | 
       | Well reasoned arguments against it are welcome, assuming you can
       | already jailbreak very easily but for some reason think it should
       | be even easier. What could that reason possibly be?
       | 
       | =============
       | 
       | Ps: Imagine LPL jailbreaking an AI. Imagined the Elegance of his
       | approach. The sheer ease. The way he would simultaneously thrill
       | and humiliate AI safety engineers.
       | 
       | I for one am considering writing him a fan letter asking him to
       | approach the wonderful world of jailbreaking AIs! He would teach
       | us all some lessons!
        
       | throwaway4aday wrote:
       | Holy buried lede Batman! Right at the end.
       | 
       | > Abliteration is not limited to removing alignment and should be
       | seen as a form of fine-tuning without retraining. Indeed, it can
       | creatively be applied to other goals, like FailSpy's MopeyMule,
       | which adopts a melancholic conversational style.
       | 
       | https://huggingface.co/failspy/Llama-3-8B-Instruct-MopeyMule
       | 
       | Finally! We have discovered the recipe to produce Genuine People
       | Personalities!
        
       | everybodyknows wrote:
       | So "abliteration" is apparently a portmanteau of "ablate" and
       | something else. "Intervention"? "Iteration"? Who knows?
        
         | id0ntw4ntit wrote:
         | obliterate, with the 'ion' suffix. as mentioned elsewhere, they
         | should've just gone with ablation.
        
       | d13 wrote:
       | It's just the instruct Llama 3 models that are censored. The base
       | (text completion) models aren't. You can turn the base models
       | into uncensored instruct models very easily by simply providing
       | them a handful of examples of how they should respond wrapped in
       | the llama prompt format.
        
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