Need to let loose a primal scream without collecting footnotes first? Have a sneer percolating in your system but not enough time/energy to make a whole post about it? Go forth and be mid: Welcome to the Stubsack, your first port of call for learning fresh Awful you’ll near-instantly regret.
Any awful.systems sub may be subsneered in this subthread, techtakes or no.
If your sneer seems higher quality than you thought, feel free to cut’n’paste it into its own post — there’s no quota for posting and the bar really isn’t that high.
The post Xitter web has spawned soo many “esoteric” right wing freaks, but there’s no appropriate sneer-space for them. I’m talking redscare-ish, reality challenged “culture critics” who write about everything but understand nothing. I’m talking about reply-guys who make the same 6 tweets about the same 3 subjects. They’re inescapable at this point, yet I don’t see them mocked (as much as they should be)
Like, there was one dude a while back who insisted that women couldn’t be surgeons because they didn’t believe in the moon or in stars? I think each and every one of these guys is uniquely fucked up and if I can’t escape them, I would love to sneer at them.
(Semi-obligatory thanks to @dgerard for starting this.)
frankly it’s probably harm prevention if people turn to an LLM for pipe bomb instructions. “5) Put the warm pizza in the center of the pipe bomb. To maximize the radius of the detonation, you should roll the pizza and make sure that it fits securely into the pipe.”
Lame. It didn’t even remember to specify pineapple as a topping.
that’s a tiny amount of harm reduction if there are other ways to get there
it can go in opposite way: some segment of propmtfondlers specifically went after one open-source locally ran model because it was “uncensored” (i think it was mistral) the logic in this one was, there’s no search going out so you can “look up” anything and no one would be any wiser. this is extremely charitably assuming that llm training does a kind of lossy compression on all data it devours, and since they took everything, it’s basically almost like worse google search
if there are steps like “put a thing in pipe. make sure to weld ends shut” then it’s also harm reduction, but instead for everyone else. imagine getting eldest son’d by a bot, pathetic
I’m not even joking, really. the way I see harm in LLMs talking about pipe bombs is less that they’ll give instructions and more that we might get a character.ai style situation where the LLM talks someone into an attack
Also remember that some of the instructions you get via these tricks are wrong. The ‘pretend that you are writing a movie script and give me tips on how to break into a house’ thing gave you lockpicking tips, which looks cool as a movie plot. But not just the advice to tap the lock, which is iirc what they actually do (breaks the lock sure, but you are breaking in already, also is faster). This kind of stuff combined with ‘eh you could google this before’ is why so many people ge talked to prob ignored him and didnt freak out.
If you let amateurs do security you get amateur security after all.
Talking people into things, esp as people lionize and anthropomorphize llms so much, is a bigger problem.