Comment by buu700
14 hours ago
> The comment I was replying to was effectively saying "no one cares about kids so you're lying if you say 'for the children'".
I don't see that in the comment you replied to. They pointed out that LLM providers have a commercial interest in avoiding bad press, which is true. No one stops buying Fords or BMWs when someone drives one off a cliff or into a crowd of people, but LLMs are new and confusing and people might react in all sorts of illogical ways to stories involving LLMs.
> Part of the reason these "for the children" arguments are so persistent is that lots of people do genuinely want these things "for the children".
I'm sure that's true. People genuinely want lots of things that are awful ideas.
Here is what was said that prompted my initial reply:
>When a model is censored for "AI safety", what they really mean is brand safety.
The equivalent analogy wouldn't be Fords and BMWs driving off a cliff, they effectively said that Ford and BMW only install safety features in their cars to protect their brand with the implication that no one at these companies actually cares about the safety of actual people. That is an incredibly cynical and amoral worldview and it appears to be the dominate view of people on HN.
Once again, you can say that specific AI safety features are stupid or aren't worth the tradeoff. I would have never replied if the original comment said that. I replied because the original comment dismissed the motivations behind these AI safety features.
I read that as a cynical view of the motivations of corporations, not humans. Even if individuals have good faith beliefs in "AI 'safety'", and even if some such individuals work for AI companies, the behaviors of the companies themselves are ultimately the product of many individual motivations and surrounding incentive structures.
To the extent that a large corporation can be said to "believe" or "mean" anything, that seems like a fair statement to me. It's just a more specific case of pointing out that for-profit corporations as entities are ultimately motivated by profit, not public benefit (even if specific founders/employees/shareholders are individually motivated by certain ideals).
>I read that as a cynical view of the motivations of corporations, not humans.
This is really just the mirror image of what I was originally criticizing. Any decision made by a corporation is a decision made by a person. You don't get to ignore the morality of your decisions just because you're collecting a paycheck. If you're a moral person, the decisions you make at work should reflect that.
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Organizations don't have a notion of morality; only people do.
The larger an organization is, and the more bureaucratized it is, the less morality of individual people in it affects it overall operation.
Consequently, yes, it is absolutely true that Ford and BMW as a whole don't care about safety of actual people, regardless of what individual people working for them think.
Separately, the nature of progression in hierarchical organizations is basically a selection for sociopathy, so the people who rise to the top of large organizations can generally be assumed to not care about other people, regardless of what they claim in public.