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0 pointsmk_stjames3y ago0 comments

Literally 6 months ago you couldn't get ChatGPT to call up details from a webpage or send any dat to a 3rd party API connected to the web in any way.

Today you can.

I don't think it is a stretch to think that in another 6 months there could be financial institutions giving API access to other institutions through ChatGPT, and all it takes it a stupid access control hole or bug and my above sentence could ring true.

Look how simple and exploitable various access token breaches in various APIs have been in the last few years, or even simple stupid things like the aCropalypse "bug" (it wasn't even a bug, just someone making a bad change in the function call and thus misuse spreading without notice) from last week.

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6 comments · 3 top-level

hooande3y ago· 3 in thread

This has nothing to do with ChatGPT. An api end point will be just as vulnerable if it's called from any application. There's nothing special about an LLM interface that will make this more or less likely.

It sounds like you're weaving science fiction ideas about AGI into your comment. There's no safety issue here unless you think that ChatGPT will use api access to pursue its own goals and intentions.

Jeff_Brown3y ago

They don't have to be actions toward its own goals. They just have to seem like the right things to say, where "right" is operationalized by an inscrutable neural network, and might be the results of, indeed, some science fiction it read that posited the scenario resembling the one it finds itself in.

I'm not saying that particular disaster is likely, but if lots of people give power to something that can be neither trusted nor understood, it doesn't seem good.

IIAOPSW3y ago

I'm sure that with the right prompting, you can get it to very convincingly participate as a party in a contract negotiation or business haggling of some sort. It would be indistinguishable from an agent with its own goals and intentions. The thing about "it has no goals and intents" is that it is contradictory with its purpose of successfully passing off as us: beings with goals and intents. If you fake it well enough, do you actually have it?

TeMPOraL3y ago

> The thing about "it has no goals and intents" is that it is contradictory with its purpose of successfully passing off as us: beings with goals and intents.

The thing about "it has no goals and intents" is that it's not true. It has them - you just don't know what they are.

Remember the Koan?

  In the days when Sussman was a novice, Minsky once came to him
  as he sat hacking at the PDP-6.

  "What are you doing?", asked Minsky.
  "I am training a randomly wired neural net to play Tic-tac-toe", Sussman replied.
  "Why is the net wired randomly?", asked Minsky.
  "I do not want it to have any preconceptions of how to play", Sussman said.

  Minsky then shut his eyes.
  "Why do you close your eyes?" Sussman asked his teacher.
  "So that the room will be empty."
  At that moment, Sussman was enlightened.

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garblegarble3y ago

>Literally 6 months ago you couldn't get ChatGPT to call up details from a webpage or send any dat to a 3rd party API connected to the web in any way.

Not with ChatGPT, but plenty of people have been doing this with the OpenAI (and other) models for a while now, for instance LangChain which lets you use the GPT models to query databases to retrieve intermediate results, or issue google searches, generate and evaluate python code based on a user's query...

hattmall3y ago

You definitely could do that months ago, you just had to code your own connector.

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