Any competent high schooler knows about water activity and sterilization. At least at the fundamental level.
I doubt most models refuse providing recipes without 0 risk of death.
LLMs are —if anything— ridiculously proficient at making random code compile.
What was your point again?
> Any competent high schooler knows about water activity and sterilization. At least at the fundamental level.
Your high school taught you that while olive oil and garlic can be stored in isolation for quite a long time without issue, mixing them creates an anoxic environment which Clostridium botulinum, an obligate anaerobe found almost everywhere in the environment (and in this case the garlic) but not normally in dangerous quantities because of the oxygen in the air, thrives?
The closest my secondary school got to useful warnings about modern environmental hazards were: (1) do not cross railways, (2) electricity is dangerous, (3) do not mix bleaches, (4) wear safety goggles, (5) if you smell gas, open windows, do not flip light switches, and (6) HIV exists (but they didn't mention any other STDs at all). (Well, OK, schools also said "do not run with scissors" and "look both ways before crossing road", but that and similar were more primary school things, and they said "don't do drugs" but they lied about Leah Betts' cause of death).
The cooking classes were basically just "here's how you make a cake" and "here's how you make pastry" (and a teacher asking us to write it up but pretentiously telling us that she hated seeing "I think it tasted quite nice" because all the students always wrote that, but somehow simple thesaurus substitution was enough to satisfy her on that).
> I doubt most models refuse providing recipes without 0 risk of death.
0, like 1, is not a real number in probably. They represent infinity-to-one odds for/against a thing.
More concretely, seat belts and speed limits and minimum tire tread thickness and blood alcohol content are all part of road traffic law, even though all four of them combined still do not lead to "0 risk of death".
> LLMs are —if anything— ridiculously proficient at making random code compile.
Not ridiculously. Interestingly, but not ridiculously. Especially back when the example I linked you to happened, thus leading to the highly visible failure mode necessitating this kind of thing (the red teamers will have seen similar in private testing). You could have "rapidly improving", but with even with the rapid competency time-horizon improvements shown by METR, they're 80% on tasks which take a human 1-2 hours. If that was also true for biological stuff, they're probably currently able to enthusiastically write custom gene sequences that sometimes work, other times are the genetic equivalent of this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47614622
> What was your point again?
LLMs are a power tool with the bare minimum of safety guards for all the normal people using them thoughtlessly, and I'm replying to someone who is surprised that even those minimal basics of guards exist, both for their own sake and the sake of others around them.
Metaphor: a table saw may come with a saw-stop, which means you can't butcher a carcass with it, and people who imagine(!) working as butchers hear this and act surprised that table saws increasingly come with them by default because meat slicers don't.
I did not know about the trivially-produced botulinum toxin potential of garlic sitting in olive oil at room temperature.
I'm going to guess that asking a cloud censored/non-abliterated LLM would not get me this information, despite it being useful as a warning, not just as a way for bad actors to poison people.
> and I'm replying to someone who is surprised that even those minimal basics of guards exist
Misrepresentation of where I'm coming from. I literally failed to consider the weapon potential of biologics in this case (silly me). I was only thinking about the fact that they cured (essentially) my psoriasis.
Bad actors will always exist, but fortunately will always be outnumbered by good actors with access to the same tools. So while I understand your pressing for caution, I still think that your argument is futile; bad actors will always find uncensored AI while good actors continue to shackle themselves with censored AI that has failure modes which reduce actual ethical utility. I'm afraid to tell you that the cat is already out of the bag, dude. You're like the guy who wants to leave a sign saying "NO GUNS ALLOWED" just inside a daycare. "Sure, I'll get right on that," says the concealed-carry bad actor...
Maybe a better analogy is keeping guns out of the hands of kids, which may not be impossible, but which we can make at least very difficult, so that stuff like this would occur less: https://abc7ny.com/post/child-accidentally-shoots-mom-with-s...
If you want AI's version of that, then I guess that's what we have now?
> Misrepresentation of where I'm coming from. I literally failed to consider the weapon potential of biologics in this case (silly me). I was only thinking about the fact that they cured (essentially) my psoriasis.
Thank you for the correction.
> Bad actors will always exist, but fortunately will always be outnumbered by good actors with access to the same tools. So while I understand your pressing for caution, I still think that your argument is nonsense; bad actors will always find uncensored AI while good actors continue to shackle themselves with censored AI that has failure modes which reduce actual ethical utility. I'm afraid to tell you that the cat is already out of the bag, dude. You're like the guy who wants to leave a sign saying "NO GUNS ALLOWED" just inside a daycare. "Sure, I'll get right on that," says the concealed-carry bad actor...
Guns are an excellent metaphor here, especially as with "good actors with access to the same tools" is a pattern-match to the incorrect statement that "only a good guy with a gun can stop a bad guy with a gun"*. Much of the world outside the USA neither has, nor wants to have, the 2nd amendment. Are gun bans perfect? No, of course not. But the UK (where I grew up) has far fewer homicides as a result, and last I heard when polled on issue even 2/3rds of the UK police feel safe enough to not desire to be armed (though three quarters would agree to carry if ordered).
Similarly, good actors using an AI can only cover the malignant use cases they themselves think of. Famously, the 9/11 attacks were only possible because at the time nobody had considered that anyone might weaponise the vehicles themselves until they saw it happen, which was also why of the four planes only one saw the passengers fighting back to regain control.
In particular, "bad actors will always find uncensored AI" suggests that all AI are equally competent. Right now, they're not all equal, the proprietary models are leading. Of course, even then you may argue that the proprietary models can be convinced to do whatever via the right prompt, and to an extent yes, but only to an extent.
The malicious users can only be slowed down (as opposed to the normal people who simply put too much trust into the current models who can be mostly prevented from harmful courses of action with the same guards). But AI provides competence that bad actors would otherwise not have, so even a simple guard will prevent misuse by nihilistic teenagers whose competence does not yet extend to the level of a local drug dealer let alone the competence of a state-sponsored terrorist cell.
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Good_guy_with_a_gun#Analysis