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by boredhedgehog 224 days ago
Disincentivizing something undesirable will not necessarily lead to better results, because it wrongly assumes that you can foresee all consequences of an action or inaction.

Someone who now falls in love with an LLM might instead fall for some seductress who hurts him more. Someone who now receives bad mental health assistance might receive none whatsoever.
2 comments
umanwizard 224 days ago
Your argument suggests that we shouldn’t ever make laws or policy of any kind, which is clearly wrong.
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subscribed 224 days ago
Your argument suggests that blanket drug prohibition is better than decriminalization and education.

Which is demonstrably false (see: US Prohibition ; Portugal)

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DonaldPShimoda 224 days ago
I disagree with your premise entirely and, frankly, I think it's ridiculous. I don't think you need to foresee all possible consequences to take action against what is likely, especially when you have evidence of active harm ready at hand. I also think you're failing to take into account the nature of LLMs as agents of harm: so far it has been very difficult for people to legally hold LLMs accountable for anything, even when those LLMs have encouraged suicidal ideation or physical harm of others, among other obviously bad things.

I believe there is a moral burden on the companies training these models to not deliberately train them to be sycophantic and to speak in an authoritative voice, and I think it would be reasonable to attempt to establish some regulations in that regard in an effort to protect those most prone to predation of this style. And I think we need to clarify the manner in which people can hold LLM-operating companies responsible for things their LLMs say — and, preferably, we should err on the side of more accountability rather than less.

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Also, I think in the case of "Someone who now receives bad mental health assistance might receive none whatsoever", any psychiatrist (any doctor, really) will point out that this is an incredibly flawed argument. It is often the case that bad mental health assistance is, in fact, worse than none. It's that whole "first, do no harm" thing, you know?

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