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kennywinkertoday at 7:20 AM14 repliesview on HN

I'm confused why the worry about LLMs that will answer "how do I build a pipe bomb". That information is easily available other places. The anarchist cookbook has been around and available for 55 years, and yet pipe bombs are not going off all around us.


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vbezhenartoday at 10:19 AM

Any sufficiently determined individual can buy mac mini, put it under their bed, configure outside proxy via some random internet address and prompt "iterate on websites in the CT logs, one by one, try to find vulnerabilities, if you did - encrypt their data and blackmail them for this bitcoin address". And it'll work, day and night. Abliterated GLM 5.3 is much smarter than average software developer, they know a lot about information security, they can use any available exploits, they can find novel vulnerabilities and they won't say "no". This is dangerous for an average IT system which never encountered nothing worse than some wordpress GET requests.

It's not the end of the world. But future will be rough.

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0xDEAFBEADtoday at 7:32 AM

There used to be a thing called "Moore's Law of Mad Science":

"Every eighteen months, the minimum IQ necessary to destroy the world drops by one point."

Nowadays it is dropping much faster. At a certain point, the de-facto IQ needed to destroy the world will be low enough that someone can do it while they're having a psychotic break. There are millions of schizophrenics worldwide. Are you sure you want to roll those dice?

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helsinkiandrewtoday at 8:26 AM

> That information is easily available other places

Often ease of access in the moment is all that matters. If there's a gun nearby you might shoot someone or yourself in a heated argument, but are less likely to go and find/buy one to use. Someone who's stopped from attempting a suicide will likely not try again (70%)

A bored/depressed/angry/curious person might try to build a pipe bomb if they can find out how easily, but are less likely to put in effort.

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pjc50today at 9:15 AM

I think people overstate the tech and understate the role of radicalization in providing motive, for attacks which are carried out with the ubiquitous technology of cars, knives, and (in America) guns. Consider America's most recent high profile shootings of Charlie Kirk, and the health insurance exec by Luigi Mangione. In neither case is there any LLM involvement, but a very weird ideological environment which created the conditions in which the shooters felt justified.

lrvicktoday at 7:28 AM

I think this was just intended as universally obvious proof the filters were disabled, while not actually giving an example not commonly known.

olmo23today at 8:26 AM

This is because to build a pipe bomb you need difficult to source materials. This is not the case for other types of threats (cyber / bio).

I personally have no need for an LLM which will readily explain how to cut up the genotype of smallpox into small chunks which can pass the screening at the bio-labs, and can be readily assembled into the real thing by a second year lab-student.

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matherialtoday at 7:27 AM

Because it's a risk most people intuitively understand, but most of them also don't know how difficult it is to "build a bomb" or "make a bioweapon".

In reality, the skills needed are pretty basic, but they overlap pretty strongly with being sane and well-adjusted. And if you are, you're probably not daydreaming about mass murder. Exceptions happen, Unabomber and so on, but they're pretty rare. In any case, Unabomber probably didn't need a tutorial.

We don't want ChatGPT to become an enabler and a co-conspirator for an unhinged person, but I think the concern is overdone.

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gnfargbltoday at 8:33 AM

One argument for LLMs is that although all information on topics X, Y and Z was already available somewhere, LLMs make that information more exploitable through collation, filtering and dynamic tailoring.

For a relatively narrow subject area (e.g. construction of pipe bombs) the collation is minimal, and so the filtering and tailoring probably isn't that important; a novice doesn't learn a lot more from the LLM than they would have done from a few Google searches.

For a broad subject (practical creation and exploitation of software vulnerabilities), the collation is very significant and the filtering means that LLMs can empower a novice to act at a similar level as an expert.

Dlemlotoday at 7:35 AM

It might be an acessability issue.

If you already have a magic interface, which helps you pro activly in responding to everything uncensored because you feel like 'observered' or whatever and then you spiral in a whole and that one partner encourages you and gives you helpful steps to do anything.

But i'm more worried that the internet gets a lot less save with uncensored frontier LLMs.

saidnooneevertoday at 8:21 AM

this is because of perception Bias. people working in fields where crime or violence is the day to day think everyone is a violent criminal, so if things like this become available thing the world will end and everyone will kill eachother. Reality however will be different, because in reality most people do not want to harm another. This has been proven by many studies, that is not a common thing for people to be evil or harmful, but this is hard to recognise is every day is filled with crime and violence.

LLMs will not kill security, it will change. just like handheld high explosives likely changed a deal too somewhere somehow.

littlecranky67today at 8:06 AM

pipe bombs attached to consumer drones will be a big issue. I predict drones will become illegal for the private sector within the following years.

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designerarvidtoday at 8:33 AM

Not entirely unlike XKCD 1958 [0]. "I guess it's just that most people aren't murderers"

[0]: https://xkcd.com/1958/

wolvoleotoday at 8:56 AM

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