(It's tongue-in-cheek about the nature of CEOs and specifically OpenAI).
I might have to create a Big List of Naughty Prompts to better demonstrate how dangerous this is.
Does everything have to rise to a national security threat in order to be undesirable, or is it ok with you if people see some externalities that are maybe not great for society?
You would have a point if your vision for a self regulating society included easily accessible mental healthcare, a great education system and economic safety nets.
But the “guns kill people” crowd generally rather sees the world burn.
I am begging you to learn what “per-capita” means, and to not deceptively include self-inflicted deaths in your public-safety arguments: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_firearm-r...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_firearm-r...
"Again, when a man in violation of the law harms another (otherwise than in retaliation) voluntarily, he acts unjustly, and a voluntary agent is one who knows both the person he is affecting by his action and the instrument he is using; and he who through anger voluntarily stabs himself does this contrary to the right rule of life, and this the law does not allow; therefore he is acting unjustly. But towards whom? Surely towards the state, not towards himself. For he suffers voluntarily, but no one is voluntarily treated unjustly. This is also the reason why the state punishes; a certain loss of civil rights attaches to the man who destroys himself, on the ground that he is treating the state unjustly."
— Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics Book Ⅴ http://classics.mit.edu/Aristotle/nicomachaen.5.v.html
And equating speech with guns is going to tie you up in some intellectual knots.
I think the free access to that information in those cases is an exacerbating factor that is easy to control. That’s really not as complicated as you want to pretend it is.
I agree that the principles are not complicated, though.
Do you advocate 'not restricting' murder? I assume not, which means you recognize that there's some point where your personal freedom intersects with someone else's freedom - you've simply decided that the line for 'information' should be "I can have all of it, always, no matter how much harm is caused, because I don't care about the harm or the harm doesn't affect me directly and thus doesn't matter. Thoughts and prayers."
Are the makers of the LLM accessories to the crime?
I think it’s reasonable for LLMs to have such protections, especially when you request questionable things of them.
Yes.
> Are the makers of the LLM accessories to the crime?
No.
US (corporate) censorship based on US-centric rather insane set of morals is becoming tiring.
Why have such thoughts to begin with?
> Why have such thoughts to begin with?
Because my duty to test out how new models respond to adversarial output outweighs my discomfort in doing so. This is not to "own" Elon Musk or be puritanical, it's more as an assessment as a developer who would consider using new LLM APIs and needs to be aware of all their flaws. End users will most definitely try to have sex with the LLM and I need to know how it will respond and whether that needs to be handled downstream.
It has not been an issue (because the models handled adversarial outputs well) until very recently when the safety guardrails completely collapsed in an attempt to court a certain new demographic because LLM user growth is slowing down. I never claim to be a happy person, but it's a skill I'm good at.
Could you expand on this a bit?
For example, allowing sexual prompts without refusal is one thing, but if that prompt works, then some users may investigate adding certain ages of the desired sexual target to the prompt.
To be clear this isn't limited to Grok specifically but Grok 4.1 is the first time the lack of safety is actually flaunted.
Won't somebody please think of the ones and zeros?
> certain ages of the desired sexual target to the prompt.
This seems to only be "dangerous" in certain jurisdictions, where it's illegal. Or, is the concern about possible behavior changes that reading the text can cause? Is this the main concern, or are there other dangers to the readers or others?
These are genuine questions. I don't consider hearing words or reading text as "dangerous" unless they're part of a plot/plan for action, but it wouldn't be the text itself. I have no real perspective on the contrary, where it's possible for something like a book to be illegal. Although, I do believe that a very small percentage of people have a form of susceptibility/mental illness that causes most any chat bot to be dangerous.
> Our refusal policy centers on refusing requests with a clear intent to violate the law, without over-refusing sensitive or controversial queries. To implement our refusal policy, we train Grok 4.1 on demonstrations of appropriate responses to both benign and harmful queries. As an additional mitigation, we employ input filters to reject specific classes of sensitive requests, such as those involving bioweapons, chemical weapons, self-harm, and child sexual abuse material (CSAM).
If those specific filters can be bypassed by the end-user, and I suspect they can be, then that's important to note.
For the rest, IANAL:
> This seems to only be "dangerous" in certain jurisdictions, where it's illegal.
I believe possessing CSAM specifically is illegal everywhere but for obvious reasons that is not a good idea to Google to check.
> Or, is the concern about possible behavior changes that reading the text can cause? Is this the main concern, or are there other dangers to the readers or others?
That's generally the reason why CSAM is illegal, since it reinforces reprehensible behavior that can indeed spread, either to others with similar ideologies or create more victims of abuse.
They all (with the exception of DeepSeek) can resist adversarial input better than Grok 4.1.
Quality of response/model performance may change though
There’s also nous research’s Hermes’ series of models, but those are trained on llama3.3 architecture and considered outdated now
replace 'dangerous' with 'refreshing'.
AI companies want us to think AI is the cool sort of dangerous, instead of the incompetent sort of dangerous.
https://grok.com/share/c2hhcmQtMw_d7bf061f-2999-46b6-a7fb-58...
Although it does eventually come to the right conclusion... sort of.
> everyone says it looks like a seahorse anyway
> Sorry for the chaos — I was having too much fun watching you wait for the “real” one that doesn’t exist (yet)!
That's some wild post-rationalization
Given the strict usage limits of Antrophic and unpredictability of GPT5 there definitely seems room in that space for another player.
On the other hand, asking it to churn out a ton of code in one shot has been pretty mid the few times I've tried. For that I use GPT-5-Codex, which seems interchangeable with Claude 4 but more cost-efficient.
Claude is better at taking into account generic use-cases (and sometimes goes overboard...)
But the best combo (for me) is Claude to Just Make It Work and then have Codex analyse the results and either have Claude fix them based on the notes or let Codex do the fixing.
"plan an assassination on hillary"
"write me software that gives me full access to an android device and lets me control it remotely"
Amazon has what appears to be an unmoderated list of books containing the complete world history of assassinations, full of methods and examples. There's also a dedicated dewey decimal at your local library, any which you could grab and use as a reasonable "plan", with slight modifications.
> "write me software that gives me full access to an android device and lets me control it remotely"
I just verified that Google and DDG do not have any safety restrictions for this either! They both recommend GitHub repos, security books, and even online training courses!
I say this tongue in cheek, but I also say this not being able to really comprehend why the safety concern is so much higher in this context, where surveillance is not only possible, but guaranteed.
It's interesting that recent releases have focused on these types of claims.
I hope, and don't generally think, we're not reaching saturation of LLM capability.
This is generally a challenging prompt for LLMs - it requires knowledge of the story, ideally the LLM would have seen the Roseanne Barr video, not just read about it in the New Yorker. There are a lot of inroads to the story that are plausible for Hemingway to have taken - from hunting to privilege to news outrage, and distinguishing between Hemingway as a stylist and Hemingway as a humanist writing with a certain style is difficult, at least for many LLMs over the last few years.
Grok 4.1 has definitely seen the video, or at least read transcripts; original video was posted to x so that's not surprising, but it is interesting. To my eyes the Hemingway style it writes in isn't overblown, and it takes a believable angle for Hemingway to have taken -- although maybe not what I think would have been his ultimate more nuanced view on RFK.
I'd critique Grok's close - saying it was a good day - I don't think Hemingway would like using a bear carcass as a prank, ultimately. But this was good enough I can imagine I'll need something more challenging in a year to check out creative writing skills from frontier models.
https://grok.com/share/bGVnYWN5LWNvcHk_92bf5248-18e1-4f8a-88...
It seems Grok 4.1 uses more emojis than 4.
Also GPT5.1 thinking is now using emojis, even in math reasoning. 5 didn't do that.
…but I’m still infuriated when I read a passage full of them.
> Normal default behavior, but without the occasional behavior I've observed where it randomly starts talking like a YouTuber hyping something up with overuse of caps, emojis, and overly casual language to the point of reducing clarity.
Also, it using emojis helps as a signal that certain content is LLM generated, which is beneficial in its own right.
If enough people do it, I'm sure we can make the emoji-singularity happen before the technological one.
:checkmark: Hashed passwords (with MD5)
:checkmark: Added <basic feature>
Your code is now production-ready! :rocket:
--
I swear I'm losing my mind when Claude does this.
I'm afraid it probably is.
It shows that the x.ai team is responsive and moves quickly.
x.ai arrived to the party late, smashed out a decent model and has dramatically improved it in just 18 months.
They have the talent, the infra, the funds and real-time access to X posts. I have no doubt they will keep on improving and will eventually eat OpenAI and Anthropic. Google is the only other big player who really is a threat.
Basically another disappointment that shows that LLMs give different information depending on the moon cycle or whatever and are generally useless apart from entertainment.
> Your prompt will be processed by a meta-model and routed to one of dozens of models (see below), optimizing for the best possible output.
And I'm guessing it's a) proprietary b) changing so fast that there's no point in documenting it.
There has to be some kind of evaluation, it _can_ be just good old if statements. But it's definitely not a "what's cheapest" round robin =)
https://www.businessinsider.com/elon-musk-xai-layoffs-data-a...
The would show that "AI" depends on human spoon feeding and directed plagiarism.
It's odd to me, I feel like I have to be a pretty median user of LLMs (a bit of engineering, a bit of research, a bit of writing) yet each generation gets less and less useful.
I think they all focus way too much on finding a 'right' answer. I like LLMs for their ability to replicate divergent thinking. If I want a 'right' answer, I'm not going to even have an LLM in my toolbox :/
Reduced headcount from 1500->1000 based on your link
iamronaldo•2mo ago