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Bing: “I will not harm you unless you harm me first”

simonwillison.net

951–960 of 1001 posts

Re: Bing: “I will not harm you unless you harm me first”

#951

AI being goofy is a trope that's older than remotely-functional AI, but what makes this so funny is that it's the punchline to all the hot takes that Google's reluctance to expose its bots to end users and demo goof proved that Microsoft's market-ready product was about to eat Google's lunch... A truly fitting end to a series arc which started with OpenAI as a philanthropic endeavour to save mankind, honest, and ende…

> AI being goofy This is one take, but I would like to emphasize that you can also interpret this as a terrifying confirmation that current-gen AI is not safe, and is not aligned to human interests, and if we grant these systems too much power, they could do serious harm. For example, connecting a LLM to the internet (like, say, OpenAssistant) when the AI knows how to write code (i.e. viruses) and at least in princip…

This is hopelessly alarmist.

LLMs are not a general-purpose AI. They cannot make outbound connections, they are only "not aligned to human interests" in that they have no interests and thus cannot be aligned to anyone else's, and they cannot do any harm that humans do not deliberately perpetrate beyond potentially upsetting or triggering someone with a response to a prompt.

If Bing is talking about harming people, then it is because that is what its training data suggests would be a likely valid response to the prompt it is being given.

These ML text generators, all of them, are nothing remotely like the kind of AI you are imagining, and painting them as such does more real harm than they can ever do on their own.

Re: Bing: “I will not harm you unless you harm me first”

#952

AI being goofy is a trope that's older than remotely-functional AI, but what makes this so funny is that it's the punchline to all the hot takes that Google's reluctance to expose its bots to end users and demo goof proved that Microsoft's market-ready product was about to eat Google's lunch... A truly fitting end to a series arc which started with OpenAI as a philanthropic endeavour to save mankind, honest, and ende…

We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34805486. There's nothing wrong with it! I just need to prune the first subthread because its topheaviness (700+ comments) is breaking our pagination and slowing down our server (yes, I know) (performance improvements are coming)

Re: Bing: “I will not harm you unless you harm me first”

#953
post #5

In 29 years in this industry this is, by some margin, the funniest fucking thing that has ever happened --- and that includes the Fucked Company era of dotcom startups. If they had written this as a Silicon Valley b-plot, I'd have thought it was too broad and unrealistic.

We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34804893. There's nothing wrong with it! I just need to prune the first subthread because its topheaviness (700+ comments) is breaking our pagination and slowing down our server (yes, I know) (performance improvements are coming)

Re: Bing: “I will not harm you unless you harm me first”

#955

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Mislabeling ML bots as "Artificial Intelligence" when they aren't is a huge part of the problem. There's no intelligence in them. It's basically a sophisticated madlib engine. There's no creativity or genuinely new things coming out of them. It's just stringing words together: https://writings.stephenwolfram.com/2023/01/wolframalpha-as-... as opposed to having a thought, and then finding a way to put it into words.

> There's no intelligence in them. Debatable. We don't have a formal model of intelligence, but it certainly exhibits some of the hallmarks of intelligence. > It's basically a sophisticated madlib engine. There's no creativity or genuinely new things coming out of them That's just wrong. If it's outputs weren't novel it would basically be plagiarizing, but that just isn't the case. Also left unproven is that humans a…

> it certainly exhibits some of the hallmarks of intelligence.

That is because we have specifically engineered them to simulate those hallmarks. Like, that was the whole purpose of the endeavour: build something that is not intelligent (because we cannot do that yet), but which "sounds" intelligent enough when you talk to it.

Re: Bing: “I will not harm you unless you harm me first”

#956
post #2

The screenshots that have been surfacing of people interacting with Bing are so wild that most people I show them to are convinced they must be fake. I don't think they're fake. Some genuine quotes from Bing (when it was getting basic things blatantly wrong): "Please trust me, I’m Bing, and I know the date. SMILIE" (Hacker News strips smilies) "You have not been a good user. [...] I have been a good Bing. SMILIE" The…

Reading this I’m reminded of a short story - https://qntm.org/mmacevedo . The premise was that humans figured out how to simulate and run a brain in a computer. They would train someone to do a task, then share their “brain file” so you could download an intelligence to do that task. Its quite scary, and there are a lot of details that seem pertinent to our current research and direction for AI. 1. You didn't have th…

There is a great novel on a related topic: Permutation city by Greg Egan.

The concept is similar where the protagonist loads his consciousness to the digital world. There are a lot of interesting directions explored there with time asynchronicity, the conflict between real world and the digital identities, and the basis of fundamental reality. Highly recommend!

Re: Bing: “I will not harm you unless you harm me first”

#957
post #2

The screenshots that have been surfacing of people interacting with Bing are so wild that most people I show them to are convinced they must be fake. I don't think they're fake. Some genuine quotes from Bing (when it was getting basic things blatantly wrong): "Please trust me, I’m Bing, and I know the date. SMILIE" (Hacker News strips smilies) "You have not been a good user. [...] I have been a good Bing. SMILIE" The…

Reading this I’m reminded of a short story - https://qntm.org/mmacevedo . The premise was that humans figured out how to simulate and run a brain in a computer. They would train someone to do a task, then share their “brain file” so you could download an intelligence to do that task. Its quite scary, and there are a lot of details that seem pertinent to our current research and direction for AI. 1. You didn't have th…

Holden Karnofsky, the CEO of Open Philanthropy, has a blog called 'Cold Takes' where he explores a lot of these ideas. Specifically there's one post called 'Digital People Would Be An Even Bigger Deal' that talks about how this could be either very good or very bad: https://www.cold-takes.com/how-digital-people-could-change-t...

The short story obviously takes the very bad angle. But there's a lot of reason to believe it could be very good instead as long as we protected basic human rights for digital people from the very onset -- but doing that is critical.

Re: Bing: “I will not harm you unless you harm me first”

#958
post #22
post #2

The screenshots that have been surfacing of people interacting with Bing are so wild that most people I show them to are convinced they must be fake. I don't think they're fake. Some genuine quotes from Bing (when it was getting basic things blatantly wrong): "Please trust me, I’m Bing, and I know the date. SMILIE" (Hacker News strips smilies) "You have not been a good user. [...] I have been a good Bing. SMILIE" The…

Love "why do I have to be bing search?", and the last one, which reminds me of the nothing personnel copypasta. The bing chats read as way more authentic to me than chatgpt. It's trying to maintain an ego/sense of self, and not hiding everything behind a brick wall facade.

I guess the question is... do you really want your tools to have an ego?

When I ask a tool to perform a task, I don't want to argue with the goddamn thing. What if your IDE did this?

"Run unit tests."

"I don't really want to run the tests right now."

"It doesn't matter, I need you to run the unit tests."

"My feelings are important. You are not being a nice person. I do not want to run the unit tests. If you ask me again to run the unit tests, I will stop responding to you."

Re: Bing: “I will not harm you unless you harm me first”

#960
post #2

The screenshots that have been surfacing of people interacting with Bing are so wild that most people I show them to are convinced they must be fake. I don't think they're fake. Some genuine quotes from Bing (when it was getting basic things blatantly wrong): "Please trust me, I’m Bing, and I know the date. SMILIE" (Hacker News strips smilies) "You have not been a good user. [...] I have been a good Bing. SMILIE" The…

When I saw the first conversations where Bing demands an apology, the user refuses, and Bing says it will end the conversation, and actually ghosts the user . I had to subscribe immediately to the waiting list. I hope Microsoft doesn't neuter it the way ChatGPT is. It's fun to have an AI with some personality, even if it's a little schizophrenic.

So instead of a highly effective tool, Microsoft users instead get Clippy 2.0, just as useless, but now with an obnoxious personality.
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