Comment by ticulatedspline
7 days ago
I categorize this kind of stuff as "Crisis of accessibility" . AI is not alone in this territory, happens all over the place. Basically it's a problem that's existed for ages but the barrier to entry was high enough we didn't care.
Think 3D printing, it's not all that hard to make a zip gun or similar home-made firearm, but it's still harder than selecting an STL and hitting print.
You could always find info about how to make a bomb or whatnot but you had to like, find and open a book or read a pdf, now an LLM will spoon-feed it to you step by step lowering the barrier.
"Crisis of accessibility" is simultaneously legitimate concern but also in my mind an example of "security by obscurity". that relying on situational friction to protect you from malfeasance is a failure to properly address the core issue.
> Think 3D printing, it's not all that hard to make a zip gun or similar home-made firearm, but it's still harder than selecting an STL and hitting print
There were hundreds of mass shootings in America in 2025 alone [1]. None of them involved a 3D-printed weapon.
To my knowledge, there has been one confirmed shooting with a 3D-printed gun, and it didn't uniquely enable the crime.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_mass_shootings_in_the_...
That's mostly because they suck (for now, who knows when we'll get home metal printing), also it's easy to get real guns. also crises of accessibility could be predicate on merely the perception that the barrier is now too low rather than actual harm.
I don't really think photoshop, flat bed scanners and half decent inkjets really facilitated a lot of counterfeit currency but there was the same panic back then and "protections" put in place.