Yeah! It’s not like they predicted these malicious uses before releasing the tools. And it’s not like they’re making them available to a dysfunctional government in order for them to militarise the technology and… Oh, wait…

> but this is an extremely illiberal take.

I’d appreciate if we stopped this Americanised version of poisonous discourse where everything is reduced to a box in a vague political ideology. By this I don’t mean politics don’t matter—they do—but not everything is black and white, right and left, or needs to be categorised to be discussed.

> It's not the kitchen knife manufacturer's fault that people are using their product for murder, it's not my fault that people are doing crimes over the Tor relay I run.

Always with the kitchen knife. That’s not an argument, it’s a talking point. Explosives are tools too, as are machine guns. No tool is entirely neutral. LLMs are not comparable to kitchen knives. Death is not the only possible bad outcome.

> Tobacco is also different because it is not a neutral tool that can be used for good and bad, but poisonous and will harm you no matter how you use it.

Tobacco is not just cigarettes.

https://leafngrainsociety.com/featured/10-surprising-uses-of...

Which is why I said:

> apart from having it in their head.

But if that’s all you’re doing, there’s no “pain” from finding out it exists. On the contrary, there is plenty of room for joy.

Those were not my words. Clearly they got a game out of it. What I said was they:

> didn’t experiment or learn anything from building it

Which is unambiguously true. There was no experimentation and no learning. There was one prompt and one result.

> and many HN readers enjoyed the post.

That’s entirely orthogonal.

Doesn’t look like the author toyed with the idea at all, though, apart from having it in their head. Considering how they describe themselves (Check the About/Home page), if they had toyed with it at all they would have already built it.

I also don’t see why finding out it exists would be “painful”. The game is free and the author didn’t experiment or learn anything from building it, they just prompted it in one go.

What mitigations? Nothing they’ve done is relevant to the four points in the comment above.

> such as public education

Their “public education” is about as meaningful as alcohol warnings.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xj4aRhHJOWU

> With the benefit of hindsight

No hindsight needed. These problems were obvious from the start. Not just to me but to many others. Clearly also to them.

> indeed, it was mocked as a marketing ploy (and still is; see gp's post as evidence)

Two things can be true at once. Of course it’s marketing to say “this is too dangerous to release” if they’re going to do it anyway. Either that or they’re so supremely irresponsible and greedy that they don’t care about the consequences as long as they can profit. And again, all of those can be true at once.

Also, worth noting that when they talk about it being “too dangerous”, they’re usually talking about fantasy scenarios of the AI gaining sentience and enslaving humanity. But there are many other dangers (as listed in the comment above) to consider that come from humans directly misusing the technology.

This again. For the umpteenth time, not everything is about jobs and money. There are at least a dozen other more valid reasons to be critical or skeptical of AI and the people who control them.

Maybe money and job security is all you think about when you think about AI, but I promise you the rest of the world has many other reasons.

> AI truly can lift millions out of abject poverty in the future.

Pray tell, how exactly will that happen, and what’s the time frame for that future?

Ah, yes. You see, it’s not them who are wrong for knowingly releasing something they knew to be harmful, it’s everyone else who needs to change. That seems reasonable. Humanity is famous for being able to rapidly adapt to fast changes as one voice. Oh, wait…

They are no different to the tobacco and oil companies. They know the harm they’re causing but care about personal profit about everything else.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homebrewing

Unfortunately, Max still clings to having created Homebrew as his greatest achievement, despite being so uninvolved for so long that just about the only thing that remains of his is the name and the beer nomenclature often confusing for newcomers. Since then, he’s been aggressively chasing whatever is popular at the time. When blockchain was all the rage, the made a package manager that leveraged it. Now he’s into AI stuff. But always, still at the top of his website and plastered everywhere whenever he pursues a project, he mentions he created Homebrew.

https://mxcl.dev/

Seventeen mentions of Homebrew on the homepage alone.

To your metric, I remember in “the early days” someone posted to HN claiming ChatGPT could make jokes as proof of something (creativity? sentience? I forget). Of course, with just a minute of research (which the poster obviously neglected to do) it was obvious none of the jokes were original and all could be found online.

Then they should ask the agent for the refund, since they claim it was at fault.

The article on its own does not corroborate its premise (they haven’t described a situation where cat’s have “something in it for them”) and the experiment as described was frankly ridiculous and had a small sample size.

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48488222

Points: 2

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Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48473910

Points: 5

# Comments: 1