All of the above is much more important than their ability to tell you how to separate out plutonium-239 from irradiated fuel, which is only dangerous if you have the irradiated fuel in the first place, and a chatbot cannot produce that for you.

Mere facts are not the things to be afraid of, here!

They are undermining the education of a generation. They are doing vast harm to mental health. They are used to produce disinformation and propaganda on vast scales. They are degrading services and throwing out labor markets into chaos. They are going to crash the economy.

My issue here is that focusing on fake threats like "an AI will help you make nuclear weapons" obscures the actual harm that these chatbots are doing, which is much more mundane and cannot be solved by simple "guardrails," if even these companies were interested in putting them into place.

The specific example from the paper, about separating plutonium-239 from irradiated fuel, is literally the subject of a patent declassified and issued by the US government in 1965. It has not been a legal secret for 60 years. patentimages.storage.googleapis.com/60/78/1f/947...

What is frustrating about this story is that it implies that the information that a chatbot can give you about making a nuclear weapon is separate from what you can just find online anyway. While I appreciate that the point is that "guardrails" are flawed, it is still a silly example.

It's amusing/frustrating to me that with all of the clever innovations in computer vision, etc., OCR seems not all that much better than it was 15 years ago. The full text of the patent is linked as the PDF: patentimages.storage.googleapis.com/60/78/1f/947...

I don't have room for it in my apartment. But if an anonymous donor bought it for me, I guarantee it would be entertaining watching me try to make room for it.

Thank god little Bobby can't extract plutonium-239 from his spent reactor fuel

I note that one of their "harmful" examples is about how to produce plutonium-239... the basics have been declassified since 1945; the specific processes have been declassified and even patented since the 1960s: patents.google.com/patent/US319...

eh, it is what it is! I'm happy-enough with the title we ended up with.

Title is very definitely not changeable at this point, and (as you may know), authors only have so much input into their titles, anyway...!

The costs and risks of launching supervillains into the Sun always outweigh the benefits. It is entirely possible to dispose of them using permanent underground interment. The technical difficulties of guaranteeing they cannot escape need to be taken seriously, of course.

I have in fact seen many bad pie charts with visualizations inside of them... presumably to spice them up...

lukewarm regards...
scalding regards...
tepid regards...

we need a standardized scale... 73ºF regards...