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171 points martinald | 1 comments | | HN request time: 0.208s | source
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ryao ◴[] No.44538755[source]
Am I the only one who thinks mention of “safety tests” for LLMs is a marketing scheme? Cars, planes and elevators have safety tests. LLMs don’t. Nobody is going to die if a LLM gives an output that its creators do not like, yet when they say “safety tests”, they mean that they are checking to what extent the LLM will say things they do not like.
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natrius ◴[] No.44538808[source]
An LLM can trivially instruct someone to take medications with adverse interactions, steer a mental health crisis toward suicide, or make a compelling case that a particular ethnic group is the cause of your society's biggest problem so they should be eliminated. Words can't kill people, but words can definitely lead to deaths.

That's not even considering tool use!

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1. pyuser583 ◴[] No.44539685[source]
The problem is “safety” prevents users from using LLMs to meet their requirements.

We typically don’t critique the requirements of users, at least not in functionality.

The marketing angle is that this measure is needed because LLMs are “so powerful it would be unethical not to!”

AI marketers are continually emphasizing how powerful their software is. “Safety” reinforces this.

“Safety” also brings up many of the debates “mis/disinformation” brings up. Misinformation concerns consistently overestimate the power of social media.

I’d feel much better if “safety” focused on preventing unexpected behavior, rather than evaluating the motives of users.