Lenny Rachitsky: belief

Transcript context

…Yeah. I think I've been pretty negative in the past when asked this question in terms of like, "Oh, there's nothing you can do, but I actually have a number of items here that can quite possibly be helpful." And the first one is that this might not be a problem for you. If all you're doing is deploying chatbots that answer FAQs, help users to find stuff in your website, answer their questions with respect to some documents. It's not really an issue because your only concern there is a malicious user comes and, I don't know, maybe uses your chatbot to output hate speech or C-burn or say something bad, but they could go to ChatGPT or Claude or Gemini and do the exact same thing. I mean, you're probably running one of these models anyways. And so. Putting up a guardrail, it's not going to do anything in terms of preventing that user from doing that because I mean, first of all, if the user's like, "Ugh, guardrailing, too much work," they'll just go to one of these websites and get that information. But also, if they want to, they'll just defeat your guardrail and it just doesn't provide much of any defensive protection. So if you're just deploying chatbots and simple things that they don't really take actions or search the internet and they only have access to the user who's interacting with them's data, you're kind of fine. I would recommend nothing in terms of defense there. Now, you do want to make sure that that chatbot is just a chatbot because you have to realize that if it can take actions, a user can make it take any of those actions in any order they want. So if there is some possible way for it to chain actions together in a way that becomes malicious, a user can make that happen. But if it can't take actions or if its actions can only affect the user that's interacting with it, not a problem. The user can only hurt themself and you want to make sure you have no ability for the user to drop data and stuff like that, but if the user can only hurt themselves ... But if the user can only hurt themselves through their own malice, it's not really a problem. I think that's a really interesting point, even though it could... It's not great if you help support agents like Hitler is great, but your point is that that sucks. You don't want that. You want to try to avoid it, but the damage there is limited. If someone tweeting that, you could say, "Okay, you could do the same thing at ChatGPT." Exactly. They could also just inspect element, edit the webpage to make it look like that happened. And there'd be no way to prove that didn't happen really, because again, they can make the chatbot say anything. Even with the most state-of-the-art model in the world, people can still find a prompt that makes it say whatever they want.…

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