Chris is down there (as that's obviously Darth Vader up there).
Not every piece of artificial intelligence (AI) is a large language model (LLM), but LLMs are a form of generative AI. That said, not all generative AI is an LLM. And now, I’m confused.
Thankfully, technologist Chris Simon knows what he’s talking about, and does so with Jeremy ‘Junglist’ Ray on the latest epsiode of the grokludo podcast. In an hour-long conversation, Simon explains what LLMs are and not only details the resources needed to use them, but the ethical concerns they carry with them. He also explains why an LLM would make a horrendous dungeon master.
Interestingly enough, Simon and Ray hypothesise about the jailbreaking of LLMs — be it intentional or otherwise.
“I know how much gamers love to hack the system and find the glitches,” Simon said. “It’s so trivially easy to jailbreak these LLMs; it’s just not hard at all.”
“As soon as they wire up an LLM into a game, I guarantee you that people are going to make a game of getting the LLM to do something it wasn’t meant to do, right?
“I think they’re going to have fun getting a character that’s supposed to be an elven princess to act like the devil or something, or something worse than that.”
It’s here that Simon’s knowledge of LLMs pays off, as this has sadly already happened. We draw your attention back to May of this year, and to a Darth Vader AI bot that players managed to get off script with ease.
While the rogue bot’s more innocent moments had it repeating “hawk tuah!” as was popular at the time, others managed to get the AI to spout swears alongside homophobic and racist slurs. All, of course, in a voice that sounded just like James Earl Jones, as if the deceased actor was somehow saying the lines as if they were properly scripted.
While some applauded Epic Games’ bot, which used a combination of Google’s Gemini and ElevenLabs’ Flash v2.5 to generate Jones-as-Vader’s responses, others like SAG-AFTRA were appalled, filing an unfair labor practice charge with the US’ National Labor Relations Board.
Needless to say, it’s all very interesting stuff, so have a listen — Simon explains it all far better than I ever could.
The writer of this piece, Steve Wright, is friends with (and a fan of) Jeremy ‘Junglist’ Ray. While this isn’t a direct endorsement of the grokludo podcast, I reckon it’s worth a listen yourself so you can see if it’s a good fit for you.
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