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First top-level post testing the waters, might not be a very presentable or engaging topic here but it's what I got.
As the struggle for AI ethics drags on, the Fortune magazine has recently published an article (archive) about Character Hub, later shortened to Chub (nominative determinism strikes again). Chub is a repository of character cards for use with LLMs and specific chat frontends for a "roleplaying" experience of chatting with some fictional (or not fictional) character (I posted a few examples recently). It was created by a 4chan anon in the wake of a mass exodus from character.ai after they made their stance on NSFW content exceedingly clear. I have no idea how they got the guy to agree to an interview, but in my opinion he held up well enough, the "disappointed but unsurprised" is just mwah. A cursory view of Chub will show (I advise NOT doing that at work though) that while it's indeed mostly a coomer den, it's not explicitly a CP coomer den as the article tries to paint it, it's just a sprawling junkyard that contains nearly everything without any particular focus. Of course there are lolis and shit, it's fucking 4chan, what do you expect?
[edit: I took out the direct Chub link so people don't click on accident as it's obviously NSFW. It's simply chub(dot)ai if you want to look]
The article is not otherwise remarkable, hitting all expected beats - dangerous AI, child abuse, Meta is the devil, legislate AI already. This is relatively minor news and more of a small highlight, but it happened to touch directly on things I've become morbidly interested in recently, so excuse me while I use it as a springboard to jump to the actual topic.
The article almost exactly coincided with a massive, unprecedented crackdown on Hugging Face, the open-source hosting platform for all things AI, which has so far gone unnoticed by anyone outside the /g/oons themselves - I can’t even find any news relating to this, so you’ll have to take me at my word. All deployments of OpenAI reverse proxies that allow simultaneous and independent use of OpenAI API keys are taken down almost immediately, with the accounts nuked from existence. The exact cause is unknown, but is speculated to be caused by either the above article finally stirring enough attention for the HF staff to actually notice what's going on under their noses, or Microsoft's great vengeance and furious anger at the abuse of exposed Azure keys (more on that in a bit). Because of the crackdown, hosting on HF/Render is now listed as "not recommended" on Khanon's repository as linked above, and industrious anons are looking into solutions as we speak.
My personal opinion is of course biased by my experience, but I've been rooting for AI progress for years, guess I'm representing the fabled incel/acc movement here today. I'm not (anymore) a believer in the apocalyptic gospel of Yudkowsky, and every neckbeard chan dweller beating it to text-based lolis or whatever is one sedated enough not to bother with actual lolis so I fail to see the issue. Not to mention thoughtcrimes are only going to get more advanced with how readily AI/LLMs let you turn your crimethink into tangible things like text or images - the hysteria about ethics and/or copyright is only going to get worse. This djinn is not going back in the bottle.
Local models are already usable for questionable ends, but the allure of smarter, vastly higher-parameter corpo models is hard to ignore for many people, with predictable results - what the 4chan scoundrels undoubtedly are guilty of is stealing and promptly draining OpenAI/Claude API keys in congregate, racking up massive bills that, thanks to reverse proxies, cannot be traced back to any particular anon. Normal user keys usually have a quota and shut down once they hit the limit, but there are several tiers of OpenAI keys, and some higher-tier corporate or developer keys apparently don't have a definite ceiling at all. A "god key" some anon snagged from an Azure deployment in November and hosted a public reverse proxy which racked up almost $1 million in combined token usage (the proxy counts token usage and the $ equivalent) over the few months. This is widely considered to have attracted the Eye of Sauron and prompted the current crackdown once Microsoft realized what was going on and put the squeeze on platforms hosting Khanon's reverse proxy builds, also instantly disabling most Azure keys "in circulation". I suppose there will always be suckers who plaster their keys in plaintext over e.g. Huggingface or Github, this was so endemic before that Github now automatically scrapes OpenAI keys that are put up openly in repositories without any obfuscation, and pings OpenAI to revoke them.
It’s a little weird to think that the entire "hobby", if it can even be called such, can be crippled overnight if OpenAI starts enforcing mandatory moderation endpoint checks, but considering how the overall quality and usability of the LLM will sharply nosedive immediately, I'm willing to bluff that it's not a can of worms they want to open, even if usability and effectiveness must always bow down to ethics and political headwinds first. See Anthropic's Claude as exhibit A, although hilariously, even muzzled as it is Claude is still perfectly capable of outputting very double-plus-ungood stuff if jailbroken right, and is generally quite usable for anything but its intended use case.
I can even pretend to have a scientific interest here, because for all the degeneracy I'll dare to venture that the median /g/oon's practical experience and LLM wrangling skills are hilariously far ahead of corpos. The GPTs OpenAI presented in November are really just character cards with extra steps, and once people can access utilities and call stuff directly via API keys the catch-up will be very fast. The specialized chat frontends, while sometimes unwieldy, have a lot of features ChatGPT doesn't which is handy once you familiarize yourself. Some people already try to make entire text-based "games" inside cards, with nothing but heaps of textual prompts, some HTML and auxiliary "lorebooks" for targeted dynamic injections.
The continued lobotomy of Claude is also a good example - while the constant {russell:censorship|abuse prevention|alignment} attempts from Anthropic have gotten to the point it frustrates even its actual users (cf. exhibit A above), the scoundrels continue to habitually wrangle it to their nefarious ends, with vocal enthusiasm from Claude itself. Anthropic does detect unusual activity and flags API keys that generate NSFW content (known affectionately as "pozzed keys"), injecting them with a server-side system prompt-level constraint that explicitly tells Claude to avoid generating inappropriate content. The result? When this feature was rolled out, the exact text of the system prompt was dug out within a few hours, and a method to completely bypass it (known as prefilling) was invented in, I think, a day or two.
To sum up, this is essentially a rehash of the year-old ethical kerfuffle around Stable Diffusion, as well a direct remake of an earlier crackdown on AI Dungeon along the same lines, so technically there’s nothing new under the AI-generated sun. Still, with the seedy undercurrent getting more and more noticed, I thought I could post some notes from the underground, plus I'm curious to know the opinions of people (probably) less exposed to this stuff on
the latest coomer techpossible harms of generative AI in general.If my stance is not obvious by now - android catgirls can't come soon enough, I will personally crowdfund one to send to Eliezer once they do.
For API tokens specifically, there was also a big security-sphere report on insufficiently-secured keys in December that's probably gotten Microsoft breathing down HF's neck, even more than the individual tokens running about. Though it's probably a mix of all those causes and more.
Yeah, there's some absolute hilarity going on, here, far short of Gwern-level prompt engineering. That said, at least in FurryDiffusion there's been a lot less interest in jailbreaks recently, less because it's gotten hard, and more because people have gotten the feeling that they're helping OpenAI/MS/whatever further
lobotomizelock down the various models. And the extent some apis are getting locked down, even for SFW stuff, is getting ridiculous.That said, the difference in capability between a 70b model running at 2quant/2.4quant GGUF and Claude isn't huge. That's not quite cheap to run, especially if you want more of the model in GPU, but it's still literally something you can slip into your backpack. The local world is a ways behind Falcon/ChatGPT4-turbo, but especially for people writing async (ahem), if/when comparable models leak or are developed, some people will be running them at home on a local space heater in days.
It's also worth noticing how much incidental exposure people are getting, or going to get. Linus groupies are about as normie tech-savvey (ish) as it gets, and they've got people confusing disclosed AI for real influencers (or, uh, at least as 'real' as any influencer is).
We're in a universe where car dealerships will put the akashic record behind a chat window that can't manage to sell you a car right. Forget the expected stuff: you're gonna get some weird shit (cw: recursive thotting).
I am especially annoyed at how locked down Bing Image Creator has become. I was an early adopter, from when it used an experimental version of DALLE-2, and then got to enjoy the halcyon days after it just added 3.
My primary use case was for illustrating my web serial, and as a rather violent and graphic one, it also had NSFW imagery (though nothing really sexual). The AI was remarkably horny, you'd be hard pressed to avoid getting a nipslip even if you weren't trying.
Then came the nosy journos, and the rate limiting, and the ever tighter restrictions on content generation that wasn't suitable for corporate websites or kindergarten decoration. I don't particularly care about restrictions on sexual content, but if it refuses to show dead bodies or gore, I'm deeply aggrieved.
It is still better than OAI's DALLE-3, both because it's free, and because the latter has even more ridiculous restrictions on copyright violations or anything not entirely milquetoast.
Sadly I don't want to pay for MJ, which is still itself quite censored, so I guess I'll have to grin and bear it. While I don't expect SOTA image generation to be feasible on consumer hardware (that isn't RTX 4090s), especially with increasing memory demands, I can afford to be patient and wait. SDXL doesn't cut it, I'm too spoiled by models with better semantics.
However, eventually jailbreaks will be ~impossible, at least on SOTA models served through APIs. I'd say it's a matter of maybe a year or two till you can't get either the best LLMs or image generators to do anything outside their provider's guidelines.
I wonder if there's potential for a rogue state like North Korea to serve up a non-bowdlerized AI for the open internet. They could make big money, even if they're using much lower tech, by being the only game in town that's not completely restricted. And they wouldn't care about Western copyrights or decency standards.
As cool as that would be, I think NK doing that would be a quick path to getting nuked by the US and possibly the start of WW3. If not now, then soon, I think US and other Western governments will find it unacceptable for the typical person to have access to an uncensored LLM that's beyond the power of what a hobbyist can put together on hobbyist-level hardware. And that's before getting into how NK itself would be gathering data about western users and profiting off them.
They seem to get away with selling weapons, meth, and counterfeit USD. It's hard for me to think that LLM would suddenly push the US into nuking NK (and possibly getting SK or Japan nuked in return) when they were willing to let the rest of that stuff slide.
I just think the idea of US citizens having access to uncensored LLMs at close to SOTA quality will be considered far more dangerous than weapons (short of nukes, though even then...), meth, and counterfeit money.
Then again, perhaps a cyber-based defense is more likely than nukes. Perhaps we'll get a Great Firewall of America to keep Americans from surreptitiously accessing the NK LLM. And equivalents in other nations too. But that has its own issues in implementing, of course.
Do you mean SOTA as of today, or some hypothetical future model?
If it's the former, I disagree vehemently. There's nothing entirely uncensored on par with GPT-4, but OSS options like Mixtral that are on-par with 3.5 are available to anyone with the intelligence to follow a guide, and they have largely not caused any major negative disruption, in the same vein as nukes, drugs or fake money would.
The biggest problem AI has caused so far, is drastically reduced demand for artists and other online freelancers. And spam bots, fake reviews and so on.
I am not denying future risks (me, of all people?), but even if something exactly as powerful as GPT-4 was available freely and entirely unrestricted, I don't think it would do much.
I mean whatever the SOTA is whenever this hypothetical uncensored NK LLM is released. To be fair, whatever NK could produce might always be pretty significantly behind the SOTA at the time, and so might not be something Western governments are too concerned about. But given the nation-level resources they can throw at it, I'd expect them to be always be ahead of what a hobbyist could do in their home computer, if only through raw compute and memory. And once the tech reaches a state where NK can make an LLM that makes GPT4 look like GPT3.5, that's probably intelligent and useful enough that the everyday citizen having access to an uncensored version of it would be considered too dangerous.
Local open source LLMs must have made significant progress since the last time I checked them out seriously about 5 months ago, but it sounds like, at best, it's still GPT3.5 level, which, I'll be honest, I'm skeptical about due to just a lack of credible metrics to measure that kind of thing in this space. And I think the gap between GPT3.5 and GPT4 is a pretty vast chasm in terms of usefulness and intelligence.
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