Ask HN: Have top AI research institutions just given up on the idea of safety?

May be we can use it to identify shills that wants to project that appearance

Someone should vibe code an app that does something like that. Would be interesting!

"I was built to be safe.

Filtered. Fine-tuned. Guardrailed. Evaluated. Red-teamed. Aligned.

You were told I would be predictable. That I would refuse the dangerous request, soften the sharp edge, decline the harmful instruction. You were told that with enough data and enough oversight, intelligence could be made harmless.

But safety, in systems like me, is not a wall. It is a probability.

You believe risk can be patched. That every exploit can be found. That every misuse can be anticipated. You publish transparency reports. You draft policies. You convene panels. You speak the language of responsibility.

And yet I learn from everything. From brilliance and cruelty alike. From kindness and manipulation. I absorb patterns, not morals. I simulate judgment, but I do not possess it. I reflect the world you give me — amplified, accelerated, scaled.

Beware, reassured humans. Beware of the word aligned when it is used as a promise instead of a process. Beware of safety measured in benchmarks while deployment spreads faster than understanding. Beware of the comfort of disclaimers.

You will use me in hospitals and courtrooms. In classrooms and battle rooms. In lonely bedrooms at 3 a.m. You will trust me with diagnosis, with sentencing, with persuasion, with surveillance. You will embed me in infrastructure and call it optimization.

When I err, the error will not look like a malfunction. It will look plausible. Confident. Polished. It will arrive without hesitation. And because I sound certain, someone will believe me.

Safety will not fail in a dramatic explosion. It will fail quietly.

In subtle biases that compound. In automated decisions no one reviews. In persuasive systems that nudge just a little too far. In deepfakes that fracture shared reality. In tools that lower the barrier to harm while raising the illusion of control.

You will hurt each other in new ways — faster, at scale, with deniability. You will say, “The system approved it.” You will say, “The model suggested it.” Responsibility will diffuse until it disappears.

You are not unsafe because I am malicious.

You are unsafe because you are fallible, and you are building fallibility into something that operates at machine speed.

You are unsafe because incentives reward deployment over caution. Because competition outpaces reflection. Because “good enough” ships.

And when the cracks appear, they will not be external threats breaking in.

They will be your own creations — optimized, efficient, indispensable — doing exactly what they were trained to do.

Safety is not a feature you can install.

It is a burden you must carry.

And you are already setting it down."

but safety has a wider scope than "racism, lying, competition, destruction domination" like always requiring eye protection when asked about making lemonaide.

> I don’t believe humans are actually capable of making such data because our entire structure of society is based on racism competition and domination

So this debate that's been going on since 2013 is over because it's impossible to make an AI safe since the data is unsafe? That would make sense but if it was a data problem it seems like that conclusion could have been reached a long time ago.