Whether or not the existential risk around AI is real, governments, corporations, NGO's and others will twist this to their own purpose to build censorship, entry barriers, and other unpleasantries. We should be mindful of that.
Meanwhile, I'm possibly one of the most Googleable people around (not due to fame, but due to nearly global name uniqueness) and it should be pretty plain to see that I'm a good actor (and kind of a big nerd) and that this might have all been a misunderstanding.
I'm kind of over it, but it is still hugely annoying. And it's terrifying to consider that no matter how anonymous you are on Reddit (and you might have very good reasons to be using an anonymous login), they in theory know exactly who you are.
What I'm saying is that AI could magnify a single human error in the past into an arguably massively unethical action; it could retroactively tie your anonymous actions in the past to your non-anonymous identity in the present. Where there is no escaping your past mistakes and you will always be punished for them, forever, by massive machines without any human intervention, or by systems in power that are arguably unethical and dystopian.
The one thing the Reddit Admin team (actual employees) takes seriously is people making new accounts to post in subreddits where they are banned.
Kill me for having a "porn" Reddit account and a "professional" Reddit account, I guess, plus one to disclose health issues I'd prefer to keep private... And deserve to. I actually enjoy anonymously helping people get through issues that for very good reasons they are also posting anonymously about (think: victims). This mentality ruins that, and I am now prevented from doing that.
Cue Martin Fowler's legendary https://martinfowler.com/articles/bothersome-privacy.html
Your problem is that one of the heads of your hydra caught a ban, after which point everything you do is assumed to be malicious. Given the political nature of what you were banned for, there is no doubt in my mind this is intentional. It's not an overt act of discrimination if they just don't answer the phone after "accidentally" locking you out.
For your own sake, move on. Reddit isn't worth fighting for. It's just a bunch of schoolyard bullies squatting on the playground equipment, throwing rocks at everyone and crying victim. If you're not a member of a protected class (or pretending to be), they don't want you there.
Here's a random bit of fun prescience:
From Dune, by Frank Herbert:
> JIHAD, BUTLERIAN: (see also Great Revolt) — the crusade against computers, thinking machines, and conscious robots begun in 201 B.G. and concluded in 108 B.G. Its chief commandment remains in the O.C. Bible as “Thou shalt not make a machine in the likeness of a human mind.”
The usual interpretation is something along the lines that AIs took over the thinking for the leaders, making the leaders lazy, impotent, and society fragile and chaotic. This fits with a lot of Herbert's themes.
But, from Children of Dune:
> Three — Planetary feudalism remained in constant danger from a large technical class, but the effects of the Butlerian Jihad continued as a damper on technological excesses. Ixians, Tleilaxu, and a few scattered outer planets were the only possible threat in this regard, and they were planet-vulnerable to the combined wrath of the rest of the Imperium. The Butlerian Jihad would not be undone. Mechanized warfare required a large technical class. The Atreides Imperium had channeled this force into other pursuits. No large technical class existed unwatched. And the Empire remained safely feudalist, naturally, since that was the best social form for spreading over widely dispersed wild frontiers — new planets.
Arguable paints a different picture - that the AI in the hands of the masses would be too threatening to the status quo.
Oh certainly. Not for any higher purpose, but remember that OpenAI lost its shit and threatened to leave the moment the EU wanted to look into actually regulating the risks of their product. The driver is money, and little else.
AI people like Sam Altman want a very specific kind of "AI regulation" - a mostly toothless one meant to address the hypothetical of a Skynet (which is honestly still pretty far out there) rather than the more realistic problems that come from their product.
Things like IP law (these LLMs rely on scraping lots of copyrighted data), profiling people (in an age where privacy is important to a lot of people), medical malpractice (I remember someone saying they fed a patient dossier into ChatGPT on this site... Dear Lord I hope that person got shafted by HIPAA) are all genuine problems/risks with LLMs that don't come from the models themselves but from the people using them. Thats the real danger and OpenAI wants absolutely no regulation in that area because it could hurt their bottom line.
Hence why they also almost all tend to follow the beliefs of Elezier Yudkowsky, whose entire life is basically to claim Rokos Basilisk is totally happening and the only option is to give him (and his friends) lots of money to ensure it so you won't be tortured by the AI for not bringing it about.
Crowing about evil AIs is a useful distraction because it plays well populistically (Skynet, Matrix, HAL 9000 are all good examples of "AI out of control" in the public consciousness) and it gives them easy backing from people who don't understand how these things work. The EU wasn't impressed and the AI act they passed addresses some actually meaningful concerns. It remains to see if US Congress/Senate will address it at all or if their business interests reign supreme.
That is 100% what the whole AI panic is about.