I am very conflicted by this sentence, the two halves being:
1. Yes, the futility of making LLM's "safe" in that rigorous way is insurmountable, baring a major algorithm rewrite and nobody really knows what that could be yet. Anyone who says it's easy is glossing over details--or selling something.
2. No, the failure modes of LLMs are different (worse) than the equivalent human labor. If they were the same, we'd be able to empathize with them! If someone thinks they're the same then they will fail at judging and containing the risks. Now, perhaps if the comparison was to a human hopped up on psychedelic mind-altering drugs...
Note that I'm distinguishing here between the LLM itself--the hyper-mad-libs story generator--versus regular programs around it.
No.
LLMs are impossible to make safe in the same sense that a car designed as if it was the ~1940's would be impossible to make safe for its passengers during an at-speed collision. There's only so much you can do if you're committed to using plate glass, rigid steel everything, and leaving out occupant safety belts because they're unpopular and spoil the lines of the cabin. [0] Back in the day, "the people in the cabin are the crumple zone" was state of the art, but we've learned an awful lot about how to make much, much safer personal vehicles in the ~75 years since then. It'd be massively irresponsible to design and sell a car today that ignored the safety and engineering lessons we've learned since then.
"Funnily" enough, the major LLM providers have designed and are selling access to systems that they very much want to be used in situations where you need a reliable, safe tool... but they've -somehow- ignored one of the most fundamental lessons we've learned about the design of safe software systems that are intended to be used in the presence of attacker-controlled inputs. [1] What they've done is no less irresponsible than designing and selling a new car that conforms to the very latest safety regs of the 1940's... AFAIK, it's so irresponsible to design and sell such a car commercially that -in the US- it's a violation of federal law to do so.
As an aside: you may have seen this video already, but it's worth a look if you have not. [2] Though, the classic car in this crash is equipped with safety glass, so -sadly- you don't get to see all that fun.
[0] One of my great-grandfathers spent the remainder of his years intermittently using tweezers to remove shards of plate glass migrating out of his face that had been lodged in there during an automobile accident that he was fortunate enough to survive.
[1] For more on this, read: <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48999644>