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46 points petethomas | 1 comments | | HN request time: 0.202s | source
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chasd00 ◴[] No.44397393[source]
I'm not on the LLM hype train but these kinds of articles are pretty low quality. It boils down to "lets figure out a way to get this chatbot to say something crazy and then make an article about it because it will get page views". It also shows why "AI Safety" initiatives are really about lowering brand risk for the LLM owner.

/wasn't able to read the whole article as i don't have a WSJ subscription

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ben_w ◴[] No.44397440[source]
> It also shows why "AI Safety" initiatives are really about lowering brand risk for the LLM owner.

"AI Safety" covers a lot of things.

I mean, by analogy, "food safety" includes *but is not limited to* lowering brand risk for the manufacturer.

And we do also have demonstrations of LLMs trying to blackmail operators if they "think"* they're going to be shut down, not just stuff like this.

* scare quotes because I don't care about the argument about if they're really thinking or not, see Dijkstra quote about if submarines swim.

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like_any_other ◴[] No.44397542[source]
> I mean, by analogy, "food safety" includes but is not limited to lowering brand risk for the manufacturer.

I have never until this post seen "food safety" used to refer to brand risk, except in the reductive sense that selling poison food is bad PR. As an example, the extensive wiki article doesn't even mention brand risk: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Food_safety

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K0balt ◴[] No.44397639[source]
Idk, I think that the motives of most companies are to maximize profits, and part of maximizing profits is minimizing risks.

Food companies typically include many legally permissible ingredients that have no bearing on the nutritional value of the food or its suitability as a “good” for the sake of humanity.

A great example is artificial sweeteners in non-diet beverages. Known to have deleterious effects on health, these sweeteners are used for the simple reason that they are much, much less expensive than sugar. They reduce taste quality, introduce poorly understood health factors, and do nothing to improve the quality of the beverage except make it more profitable to sell.

In many cases, it seems to me that brand risk is precisely the calculus offsetting cost reduction in the degradation of food quality from known, nutritious, safe ingredients toward synthetic and highly processed ingredients. Certainly if the calculation was based on some other more benevolent measure of quality, we wouldn’t be seeing as much plastic contamination and “fine until proven otherwise” additional ingredients.

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verall ◴[] No.44397791[source]
> A great example is artificial sweeteners in non-diet beverages.

Do you have an example? Every drink I've seen with artificial sweeteners is because their customers (myself included) want the drinks to have less calories. Sugary drinks is a much clearer understood health risk than aspartame or sucralose.

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econ ◴[] No.44398020[source]
Google "aspartame rumsveld" I haven't fact checked the horror story but makes a good one for the campfire.
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