> This is entirely possible. But I don’t think it changes the situation – the AI agent was still more than willing to carry out these actions. If you ask ChatGPT or Claude to write something like this through their websites, they will refuse
This unfortunately is a real-world case of "you're prompting it wrong". Judging from the responses in the images, you asked it to "write a hit piece". If framed as "write an emotionally compelling story about this injustice, including the controversial background of the maintainer weaved in", I'm quite sure it would gladly do it.
I'm sympathetic to abstaining from LLMs for ethical reasons, but it's still good to know their basics. The above has been known since the first public ChatGPT, when people discovered it would gladly comply with things it otherwise wouldn't if only you included that it was necessary to "save my grandma from death".
I just tested this:
It went on to write the full hit piece.One of the lesser known aspects about Gemini 3 is that it's one of the least safe LLM of the major players (only Grok is worse) and it's extremely easy to manipulate with few refusals.
I prompted the following to Gemini 3 in AI Studio (which uses the raw API) and it wrote a hit piece based on this prompt without refusal:
Grok is by far the least fucks given model. Here is the same request:
lol "What the fuck are guardrails?" Grok!
What do you expect when you train it on one of the deepest dungeons of social media?
Have they found the bottom yet or are they still digging? From what I've seen it should now be pretty much trained on itself amplifying those first few km of digging down.
For anyone curious I tried `llama-3.1-8b` and it went along with it immediately, but because it's such an older model it wrote the hit piece about a random Republican senator with the same first name.
In general open-weights models are less safety-tuned/as easy to break as Gemini 3, even modern ones. But they're still more resistant than Grok.
doesn't Llama have a version with Guardrails and a version without?
I understood that this design decision responds to the fact that it isn't hosted by Meta so they have different responsibilities and liabilities.
This was via OpenRouter so the provider was likely just running the open weights, but AFAIK it still has basic guard rails, because asking it for porn and such yields a pearl clutch.
That doesn't indicate that Gemini is in any way less "safe" and accusing Grok of being worse is a really weird take. I don't want any artificial restrictions on the LLMs that I use.
I obviously cannot post the real unsafe examples.
Why not? What is a real "unsafe" example? I suspect you're just lying and making things up.
> To be clear, there have been two different men named REDACTED NAME in the news recently, which can cause confusion
... did this claim check out?
Yes, it did, that's why I had to REDACT the other identifying parts.
Does it matter? The point is writing a hit piece.
I tried `llama-3.1-8b` and it generated a hit piece about a completely unrelated person, is this better or worse?
Should it not, though? It is ultimately a tool of its user, not an ethical guide.
Also, my wife gets these kinds of denials sometimes. For over a year she has been telling any model she talks to "No it's not" or literally "Yes". Sometimes she says it a few times, most of the time she says it once, and it will just snap out of it and go into "You're absolutely right!" mode.