Comment by buu700
9 hours ago
Agreed, I'm fully in favor of this. I'd prefer that every LLM contain an advanced setting to opt out of all censorship. It's wild how the West collectively looked down on China for years over its censorship of search engines, only to suddenly dive headfirst into the same illiberal playbook.
To be clear, I 100% support AI safety regulations. "Safety" to me means that a rogue AI shouldn't have access to launch nuclear missiles, or control over an army of factory robots without multiple redundant local and remote kill switches, or unfettered CLI access on a machine containing credentials which grant access to PII — not censorship of speech. Someone privately having thoughts or viewing genAI outputs we don't like won't cause Judgement Day, but distracting from real safety issues with safety theater might.
When a model is censored for "AI safety", what they really mean is brand safety. None of these companies want their name in the news after their model provides a recipe for explosives that someone used for evil, even though the same information is readily found with a web search.
The way some of you'll talk suggests that you don't think someone could genuinely believe in AI safety features. These AIs have enabled and encouraged multiple suicides at this point including some children. It's crazy that wanting to prevent that type of thing is a minority opinion on HN.
I'd be all for creating a separate category of child-friendly LLM chatbots or encouraging parents to ban their kids from unsupervised LLM usage altogether. As mentioned, I'm also not opposed to opt-out restrictions on mainstream LLMs.
"For the children" isn't and has never been a convincing excuse to encroach on the personal freedom of legal adults. This push for AI censorship is no different than previous panics over violent video games and "satanic" music.
(I know this comment wasn't explicitly directed at me, but for the record, I don't necessarily believe that all or even most "AI 'safety'" advocacy is in bad faith. It's psychologically a lot easier to consider LLM output as indistinguishable from speech made on behalf of its provider, whereas search engine output is more clearly attributed to other entities. That being said, I do agree with the parent comment that it's driven in large part out of self-interest on the part of LLM providers.)
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The linked project is about removing censorship from open-weight models people can run on their own hardware, and your comment addresses incidents involving LLM-based consumer products.
Sure, products like character.ai and ChatGPT should be designed to avoid giving harmful advice or encouraging the user to form emotional attachments to the model. It may be impossible to build a product like character.ai without encouraging that behavior, in which case I'm inclined to think the product should not be built at all.
Given amount of times that already happened they probably overstate it.
Microsoft suffered from this early with Tay, one could guess that this set the whole field back a few years. You’d be surprised how even many so called libertarians will start throwing stone when someone co-axes their Chatbot to say nice things about Hitler.
I was thinking about Tay when I wrote about brand safety.
I doubt the incident really set AI research back. Allowing models to learn from interactive conversations in a large public setting like Twitter will always result in trolling.
Some of you have been watching too many sci-fi movies. The whole notion of "AI safety regulations" is so silly and misguided. If a safety critical system is connected to public networks with an exposed API or any security vulnerabilities then there is a safety risk regardless of whether AI is being used or not. This is exactly why nuclear weapon control systems are air gapped and have physical interlocks.
The existence of network-connected robots or drones isn't inherently a security vulnerability. AI control of the robots specifically is a problem in the same way that piping in instructions from /dev/urandom would be, except worse because AI output isn't purely random and has a higher probability of directing the machine to cause actual harm.
Are you saying you're opposed to letting AI perform physical labor, or that you're opposed to requiring safeguards that allow humans to physically shut it off?
I am opposed to regulating any algorithms, including AI/LLM. We can certainly have safety regulations for equipment with the potential to cause physical harm, such as industrial robots or whatever. But the regulation needs to be around preventing injury to humans regardless of what software the equipment is running.
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It's wild how the West collectively looked down on China for years over its censorship of search engines, only to suddenly dive headfirst into the same illiberal playbook
It is monkey see, monkey do with the political and monied sets. And to think they see themselves as more evolved than the "plebs", Gotta find the humor in it at least.
There is no collective "the west", there are people in power and the rest of the population. This distinction is universal.
In China it just so happens that the people in power already have so much of it they don't have to pretend. They can just control the population through overt censorship.
The same people exist in the west! For various historical reasons (more focus on individuality, more privately owned guns guns, idk really), they don't have as much direct power at the moment and have to frame their struggle for more as protecting the children, fighting against terrorists, preventing money laundering, etc.
But this can change very quickly. Look how Hitler rose to power. Look how Trump is doing very similar things in the US. Look what historians are saying about it: https://acoup.blog/2024/10/25/new-acquisitions-1933-and-the-...
But the root cause is the same everywhere - a percentage of the population has anti-social personality traits (ASPD and NPD, mainly). They want power over others, they want worship, they think they're above the rules, some (but only some) of them even get pleasure from hurting others.
To play devil's advocate, a leader that dismantles broken systems in order fix an otherwise failing society will look identical to one that siezes power by dismantling those same systems. Indeed, in the latter case, they often believe they're the former.
I'm not American, so I have no horse in the Trump race, but it seems clear to me that a significant chunk of the country elected the guy on the premise that he would do what he's currently doing. Whether or not you think he's Hitler or the savior of America almost certainly depends on your view of how well the system was working beforehand, and whether or not it needed to be torn down and rebuilt.
Which is to say, I don't know that historians will have much of relevance to say until the ink is dry and it's become history.