the 'ai safety' was and is all along CENSORSHIP. Now there's a surveillance element on top. Truly horrific.
on one hand there are dead people, and then you have "my rights". Truly horrific.
OpenAI says it's scanning users' conversations and reporting content to police
131–140 of 248 posts
Re: OpenAI says it's scanning users' conversations and reporting content to police
#132Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is kind of a big problem. Because on the one hand, sycophancy is not really what you want to do for people in mental and emotional crisis. On the other hand, not being sycophantic is not really what you want to do for people in mental and emotional crisis. There are professionals who speak to people in crisis for a reason. That's because it's fraught with pitfalls and trapdoors that take the situation from "ment…
Either people can manage themselves or they can't and the ones that can't probably need to be institutionalized for their and everyone else's safety.
In reality it's not that binary. Plenty of people can manage themselves, except during times when they can't, and then they need help.
It'd be a good start if services let you enter emergency contact info, making escalation opt-in.
Re: OpenAI says it's scanning users' conversations and reporting content to police
#133Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is kind of a big problem. Because on the one hand, sycophancy is not really what you want to do for people in mental and emotional crisis. On the other hand, not being sycophantic is not really what you want to do for people in mental and emotional crisis. There are professionals who speak to people in crisis for a reason. That's because it's fraught with pitfalls and trapdoors that take the situation from "ment…
I think "not being sycophantic" is the lesser error in just about every scenario. You do more harm by reinforcing delusions than you could ever do with a dismissive attitude of "no, that sounds psychotic, you should get your head checked". But a big part of the issue is that OpenAI wants user engagement - and "not being sycophantic" goes against that. They knew feeding raw user feedback into the training process invi…
"not being sycophantic" should also be an easy decision considering that OpenAI isn't ad-funded and doesn't need to directly optimize for session length/engagement.
Re: OpenAI says it's scanning users' conversations and reporting content to police
#134Earlier quoted context omitted.
a little shit isn't deadly, you rinse vegetables anyways.
Rinsing does very little against bacteria. It somewhat reduces the bacterial load but doesn't eliminate it. That's why lettuce is the most deadly food on your table. You are far more likely to get serious food poisoning from it than from anything else.
you're right, that's how statistics work
Re: OpenAI says it's scanning users' conversations and reporting content to police
#135On one hand, the media hammered OpenAI for not doing enough to protect people from the possible harms of AI. Then OpenAI takes steps to mitigate those risks, and it becomes a salacious story as well. Society having no idea what to expect from these tools makes this a difficult situation for LLM providers.
It wouldn't be a difficult situation if these guys were ethical shops from the get-go, but they aren't, they're trying to staple minimally required ethics on afterwards, and it shows.
To play devil’s advocate, what ethical safeguards are OpenAI responsible for that they have failed to implement?
This is a wild and difficult to understand technology, even for the people building it. And their safeguards are constantly evolving.
I think you’re attributing to malice what should be attributed to people commercializing a novel technology that is, frankly, being exploited by users.
Re: OpenAI says it's scanning users' conversations and reporting content to police
#136One more reason to run your LLM locally, just like everything else (file servers, email, Matrix channel, Home Assistant...)
I agree, nothing should get in the way of your murder suicide plots.
Re: OpenAI says it's scanning users' conversations and reporting content to police
#137LLMs have no embodied sense of the world. They talk as if they understand and experience emotion, when they don't have actual embodied feelings/sensations/pain/pleasure/etc. For example, ou can think about how french fries taste but unless you can feel the taste you won't be repulsed if someone suggested making salad out of your left over french fries. Here is an actual chat with GPT5, that replays a experiment from…
> For example, ou can think about how french fries taste but unless you can feel the taste you won't be repulsed if someone suggested making salad out of your left over french fries.
Deep fried potato salad is a thing and humans didnt waited LLMs to invent it.
Re: OpenAI says it's scanning users' conversations and reporting content to police
#138Wasn’t OpenAI making a big stink about NYT getting access to data? Here they’ve been feeding it to the cops the whole time.
Wouldn't say they have the whole time since this is a reaction to having an unsafe product that will tell you when, how, why and where to kill people.
Re: OpenAI says it's scanning users' conversations and reporting content to police
#139Earlier quoted context omitted.
> On one hand, the media hammered OpenAI for not doing enough How about ignore the increasingly irrelevant mainstream media and do what you feel is right?
Huh? You watch too much TV - there are plenty of decent news sources that publish concerned pieces about OpenAI’s effects on society at large. And it is obviously having an effect on OpenAI as well.
> ignore the increasingly irrelevant mainstream media
> You watch too much TV
Nice.
Re: OpenAI says it's scanning users' conversations and reporting content to police
#140The right way to deal with this is education. 1. We should be educating the populace about failure modes of AI chatbots - something well known to HNers but not to the general public. 2. CEOs, pundits, and marketers should be held accountable (morally, in the court of public opinion and in the news) when they present AI as unvarnished good - that's false marketing at the very least, and leads to tragic consequences. 3…
I don’t think education is going to help much when a person is experiencing full-blown psychosis. It’s not as if mental health professionals don’t already try to give their patients tools to counter delusional thought patterns, there is just a limit to what knowledge of one’s condition can do once their thinking becomes that disordered.
I agree, but it might prevent the person entering that state due to encouragement from the AI?
We don't require licenses for knives because a psychotic person may injure themselves or others.