Comment by roenxi
13 hours ago
It is not feasible. They never made much of an inroad against torrents and that is a much easier target than abliterated models. As the linked website shows; the process to abliterate a model can be as simple as
pip install -U heretic-llm && heretic Qwen/Qwen3.5-4B
let alone people just putting the weights up in a torrent. All assuming that someone even tried to ban abliterated models.
The torrents you are talking about are outlawed. Whether enforcement is working or not is another issue.
Torrents are legal until someone, at great expense and difficulty, proves otherwise (even then, jurisdiction and content dependent). At which point everyone involved will ignore the fact and carry on. That is a situation with enormous will, lots of money and ongoing enforcement effort to suppress the things.
And compared to torrents abliterated models are more complicated to identify, harder to suppress and there is a lot less reason for anyone to care.
I think that was the point being made? Outlawing something does nothing if enforcement is not feasible. The music and movie industries didn't crush torrents, they switched business models to streaming with prices being determined mostly by how much hassle was avoided by skipping the torrents.
I think a major difference is that while torrents are illegal, the main people enforcing it are copyright holders. I think the discussion would change if the government would label people who build/use/distribute "illegal" models as terrorists.
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Maybe it would be easiest for everyone if you clarified what country you live in, because abliterated LLM torrents are not "outlawed" in any of the major Internet-using countries that I am aware of.
Outlawed? Only in safetyist dreams
Just because something is easily available does not mean that it isn't easily banned. That doesn't make it go away, but it gives a dystopian government a lot of excuses to go after people breaking the law.