reckless_commenter

reckless_commenter t1_j65dzmx wrote

It's certainly interesting. Some people I've spoken with have expressed a belief that ChatGPT is just a shell built around GPT-3 to provide persistence of state over multiple rounds of dialogue, and that it may be possible to just use GPT-3 itself to answer questions that ChatGPT refuses to answer.

I'm not sure what to think of that suggestion, since I don't have direct access to GPT-3 and can't verify or contest that characterization of the safeguards. It's an interesting idea, at least.

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reckless_commenter t1_j64turm wrote

ChatGPT has some built-in controls that prevent it from giving bad advice. For instance:

  • If you ask it: "which breed of dog does best in cold weather," its answer will mostly be: "Don't leave any dogs outside during cold weather, regardless of breed."

  • If you ask whether it's less dangerous to do $dangerous_thing_1 or $dangerous_thing_2, it will respond that neither one is safe, and then refuse to express an opinion.

  • If you ask it for anything that looks like a request for legal or medical advice, it will refuse to answer because it is not qualified or legal to do so.

It's pretty clear that these safeguards were deliberately added by designers, because some of those questions are lexically very similar to other questions that ChatGPT can and will answer. But I don't know - and I am curious - whether the safeguards were built into the model training process, such that the algorithm knows which questions it can't answer and how to respond to them, or whether the safeguards were added on top of the model (e.g., given certain keywords, determine that the question is problematic and provide this stock response instead of giving the naive output of the algorithm.

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reckless_commenter t1_izdqhwv wrote

Dropbox used to claim that its data was encrypted at rest, without proof or explanation.

Eventually, it became clear that it wasn't, and Dropbox had to roll back its policy to "data is not encrypted at rest, but we have very strict employee policies about how personal data can be accessed..." - which, if I had anything confidential, I would absolutely not trust.

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