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Notes -
Please do not try to bait people into explaining in detail why this particular thing is easier than it looks.
Is it really baiting? For the majority of nitro chemistry - you take something organic, some nitric acid, some sulfuric acid as catalyst and the resulting thing will probably make a nice boom. The tricky part is getting the the stuff to make boom when you tell it to. Which requires reagents with high purity. And the guys in Merck do know what to look for if someone starts making purchases. And it is not field in which you can learn from your mistakes - both in production and procurement.
We have had total synthesis of cocaine for more than a century. The market is huge - and yet it is cheaper and easier to be grown in bolivia and shipped to Europe and US, than to be made domestically with high purity and untraceable.
Making whatever terrorist related is easy. But it is often a many step process with complicated supply chain. And every step is one where you could draw some unwanted attention. Or kill yourself.
Any man that is able to lone wolf a terrorist attack of the kind safetists fear, won't be on that will need chat gpt guidance.
Yeah I'm not at all concerned about chemical weapons.
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Is this bait? This was my honest assessment.
Hey, I'm not a biologist, and you might be right (...although I don't know why you listed "process" and "skillset" as not being knowledge-based?). But are you willing to bet civilization on it? The stakes are pretty high here, so I think it's fair to raise the burden of proof that "this is actually hard" beyond the normal level of an Internet argument.
Note that entire nations have tried and failed to create nuclear weapons for 80 years, which is good evidence that it's genuinely hard. Meanwhile, it's conceivable (if not proven) that a worldwide pandemic spread inadvertently from a small biolab in Wuhan. The two levels of effort are orders of magnitude apart.
I'm not a biologist either. But I am in defense research, and one of the things parts of the defense/intel establishment intensely want is to be able to create biological compounds and medical supplies in austere forward bases. Think 3d printing drugs, bandages, needles, etc. There is a LOT of money being thrown at that problem. And it hasn't gone anywhere(fast). So if it was just "Well we need to know the formula" then it would be solved. But its not. Skillset != Knowledge. My girlfriend's father is a bit of an anarchist. He gave her several books on the chemical process and formulas for making bombs. And then said never to do them because he has a friend who tried and now no longer has thumbs. Making explosives (knowledge of the formula) and having the skill to keep all of your limbs are two different things and LLMs can't give you the skillset. "Process" is the knowledge in the sense of austere manufacturing is knowledge, its how do you create clean rooms, how do you create biological precursors with everyday chemicals, you do you titrate, filter, mix, combine, to get the right compounds. Chemical Engineering is literally the field of how do we make chemical processes more efficient/practical, and they are paid big bucks to do it. If it was easy why are they getting paid well? The problems with these internet arguments is that they abstract all of the details and the details are fucking hard.
Note that it took a bunch of highly skilled chemical biologists to create the virus, the "spread" was what was inadvertent. The effort on the creation vs the effort on safety protocols are two different things. Since we are talking creation, I'll bet you that a jailbroken LLM cannot tell you how to create a novel virus via gain-of-function without you already having a biology background.
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