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Notes -
"Don't hand out recipes for methamphetamine" sounds pretty straightforward and coherent, though, much more than "Don't Murder", which per Wikipedia "is the unlawful killing of another human without justification or valid excuse committed with the necessary intention as defined by the law in a specific jurisdiction."
I mean, some of the best (worst) CW stories are about a killing where all sides more or less agree on the facts but their interpretation of what they think is (or should be) the law is different.
"Don't kill any humans, directly or indirectly, ever" might be simpler, but to phrase it so that our AI can't lock up people and let them die of thirst without it also being compelled to round up people and force them to take their cancer screenings or stop smoking or whatever will be complicated. There is every reason to believe that our collective ideas about these things is not particularly coherent either.
But the beauty of machine learning in general and LLMs specifically is that our ideas don’t have to be logically coherent. Which is just as well, because they never are.
You don’t have to spend ten years automatically coming up with a perfect definition of murder, you just collate a synopsis of all the people we charged for murder in the last 50 years and say, “These guys are murderers. Being like them is bad.”
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