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Comment by gambiting | Hacker News Reader

By pointing out that traditionally this sort of thing inveitably follows the same pattern. You start with saying you're protecting the children, because no one can argue with it. Then ban any content that's potentially offensive to anybody. Or filter it so only "one way" is acceptable. Next AI dungeon won't be able to generate a character called Jesus or Prophet Muhammad because might be offensive. Then of course anything that might be interpreted as leaning liberal/conservative, depending on what the authors think is "correct". Then eventually you can't create a character named after a politician because "they want to keep the game clean and free of politics".

Obviously I'm not equating any of this with CP - but I wish someone had the energy to stand up to it and say "look, you're censoring AI. It's dumb". But of course no one will because being accused as defender of CP is one of the worst things that can happen in any online discussion.

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Can you give an example where this slippery slope occurred? For example, in Fable III and Skyrim you can't kill children, or in Morrowind there are no children at all, but you can still name your character Jesus. You say this pattern is inevitable, but if that were the case we'd see it everywhere that limitations are put in place in the name of protecting children.

In Fallout one and two, the main character had the option to kill NPC child characters. The game went so far as to mark you with a specific perk "Childkiller"[1] after performing that act.

From the linked fandom wiki, quote by Tim Cain about the subject:

> This led to the child killing controversy. We said look, we're going to have kids in the game; you shoot them, it's a huge penalty to karma, you're really disliked, there are places that won't sell to you, people will shoot you on sight, and we thought people can decide what they want to do. [...] This of course contributed to our M-rating, however, Europe said "no". They wouldn't even sell the game if there were children in the game. We didn't have time to rewrite all the quests, we just deleted kids off the disc.

[1] - https://fallout.fandom.com/wiki/Childkiller

Right, but the charge is that this is a slippery slope. That as soon as you put some limitations in the name of protecting children, eventually and inevitably you are preventing your characters being named after religious icons and politicians. I'm just wondering where that's actually happened. As far as I'm aware you can name you character whatever you want in Fallout.

I don't think there is an explicit filter installed. Quick search reveals a companion that can pronounce names and Jesus is not recorded as something the character can say while Mohammed is allowed and voiced. Though this might not be censorship but just something that wasn't recorded. Fallout also evolved into an online game. I haven't played it but that might lead to character name restrictions.

> Codsworth is known to say the Sole Survivor's chosen name if it is an option, although it may be shortened, extended, or have a word omitted. A list of spoken names can be found here.

> Ironically you can be Mohammed but you can't be Jesus. I know I missed a bunch of the good ones, feel free to add some below.

[1] - https://fallout.fandom.com/wiki/Codsworth

[2] - https://steamcommunity.com/app/377160/discussions/0/49688113...

As for Jesus vs Mohammed, Mohammed is an incredibly popular name among muslims generally, so it’d be like leaving out “John”. Jesus is a much less popular given name around the world.

Jesús is a popular name in Spanish speaking countries...

An example that comes to mind is reddit banning the jailbait subreddit. Not too long after reddit started its campaign of removing "offensive" subs more broadly. Fatpeoplehate, gendercritical, watchpeopledie, etc have all been victims of the new censorious mindset.

The problem with this sort of censorship is that it has huge collateral damage that most people don't see. WPD is the best example because that kind of content wasn't hurting anyone. Go look at where it's moved to, and have a look at the kinds of people commenting there as opposed to the reasonably level headed comments on the reddit version.

Every time you kill a subreddit or facebook group, 99% of the users stop participating in that kind of content, and the other 1% scurry off to some out of sight echo chamber until one day they randomly pop up again to murder a bunch of innocent people because they've been corrupted beyond saving.

Everyone was talking about this for a hot moment after the Christchurch massacre, but nothing was done and now nobody gives a shit again.

It's important to let people with divergent views to feel some sort of social pressure to change. Those 99% of people that have no interest in blowing up buildings or murdering children are the best weapon we have to convince the other 1% of people with weird interests that the world as it is ok without them taking some drastic action. There's always going to be a small subset of people that will rebel, but the important thing is to make sure that otherwise normal people (that want to watch porn, or learn how to safely handle a gun, or learn about cybersecurity, or get desensitised to gore, or whatever else is on this week's "think of the children" hitlist) are integrating into civilised society and not being dragged into cesspits of violence and terrorism because their interests have been deemed by a bunch of fucking software engineers to be "bad".

We're well past the critical point where enough large platforms have banned all the "bad" stuff that any new contenders either need to ban it too or become one of those out of sight echo chambers themselves. The only way to fix it now is for everyone to agree to be less stringent all at once, together.

It's worth remembering that the internet wasn't very censored 20 years ago. Most of us grew up during that time and turned out fine. I'll take tubgirl and lemon party over neo-nazis and conspiracy nutjobs any day of the week.

> Every time you kill a subreddit or facebook group, 99% of the users stop participating in that kind of content, and the other 1% scurry off to some out of sight echo chamber... > It's important to let people with divergent views to feel some sort of social pressure to change.

I would love to have actual discussions with people regarding certain views I hold. But quite often others just refuse to even entertain that I have a different view because x and y. And to them I am just dumb/uneducated/other things to discredit me having an opinion at all.

Hell, I went quite a bit more towards "bad" opinions, just because that side is more accepting of discussion/dissent.

It isn't just corporations banning subreddits/websites that drive people into echochambers, but also people simply refusing to engage at all.

philosopherai.com had a few funny instances of self-censorship, like “who owns the central bank”. A ridiculous side effect of some well-meaning censorship.

Yeah seems dumb? The reason child sexual abuse imagery is so serious is because of the victims. Drawings or written text fiction - that's just speech?

Maybe they don't want it to mess with the training data?

Won't someone please think of the ASCII children?

AI Dungeon is subscription driven, not advertiser driven, so it's unlikely they're particularly sensitive to offensive content. It seems like they're filtering out sexually explicit depictions of children to minimize legal risk, which doesn't apply to offensive output in general.

That's fine, but AI Dungeon is purely text based, right? I might be wrong so please correct me, but if you were to write say.....a book with very explicit minor sexual content.....that's not illegal. Images are illegal. In some places drawings are too. But text isn't. I mean, surely? We cannot be at a point as humanity where text is illegal. Right?

Why can't text be illegal? There's plenty of precedent for text being censored, at various times and in various places. It just depends what laws any given society chooses to have.

As opposed to illegal images, generating text does not physically harm someone. But it's known that some models will provide actual addresses of living people if a specific enough prompt is given. What if fragments of text from someone's sensitive blog posts start showing up between the lines of a dungeon crawl?

I have to wonder about the legal implications of an AttnGAN or word-to-image type model trained on nothing but illegal pornography. Or one where the ratio of legal to illegal content the model was trained on is unknown and impossible to determine. There are some jurisdictions that consider synthetic images or text to be a victimless crime. At what point does the line become crossed and the images start becoming recognizable and realistic enough to be illegal at first glance under any usual circumstance, but are actually generated from nothing? How would people be able to prove the origin and veracity of such images for the purpose of submitting evidence of a crime?

> if you were to write say.....a book with very explicit minor sexual content.....that's not illegal

Not in the US, but in Canada and many European countries, I believe it's illegal.

> We cannot be at a point as humanity where text is illegal. Right?

Even in the US, much text is illegal in certain contexts. Think false advertising, written plausible threats, etc.

Well the difference is that the text is not illegal in those contexts. False advertising is. Fraud is. Threatening people is. But just simply having a leaflet with false advert printed on it isn't. It's not a crime to have it. With CP just possession is illegal, but I really don't believe that a written book would be illegal in itself? I can't find any examples of someone being sentenced for writing a book, outside of regimes where the book was critiquing the party etc.....

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