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Comment by taway1237 | Hacker News Reader

Not sure where you live, but I'm pretty sure it's legal. And for a good reason - nobody is harmed by creating and consuming them (this is not true for pictures, for example). In fact, I believe "Lolita" can be found in libraries and is quite suggestive (don't know, I've never read it).

I find it awkward to defend the thing I do in this post, but I'm allergic to the "think of the children" argument. Way to shut off logical reasoning.

Edit: I see that later you give better examples of regulation (not information regulation though). Just editing to let you know that they were much more convincing to me.

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I’m allergic to the “free speech is absolute” argument, which is literally not true and shouldn’t be true (CSAM just being the most broadly-agreed upon exception to it), as a way to shut off logical reasoning.

My argument is not that this stuff is simple or even that it should be regulated. I certainly don’t know how it should be, if it should. I’m just disputing the assertion that somehow AI is the one technology that should be built and operated without constraint, especially because it’s so transformative.

If it’s so transformative, then we should be extra cautious around its deployment, and not fall back on “it looks like language therefore free speech.”

Imagine where humanity would be today if “it’s transformative therefore it should be regulated” was the winning side when the printing press came into existence

I didn't make that argument. I said that it's transformative, therefore we should be cautious, and I don't know if we should or how we could regulate it.

But yeah, the hypothetical people saying "everything to come from the printing press will be good" were wrong. It dramatically destabilized society, which mattered quite a lot more to the people living proximally to the printing press than it does to us today. Note: We are likely to live through the pretty gnarly destabilization period and we have a legitimate interest in mitigating how gnarly it gets.

And I've not seen a compelling argument as to why all possible technologies need to net out positively in the long run. Would love to hear one though!

Absolute free speech is fine, IF it includes the right to agree-to-disagree. Agreeing to disagree, is the true boundary on freedom.

We've seemingly forgotten that.

The internet can be a much richer environment, with non-homogenous streams of consciousness. Way, way too much agreement without boundaries, locks out streams of consciousness, that can add a lot of value to the system.

Nobody and no-one realizes this is happening, people are happy with 'more of the same' for infinity. From my lifetime of obversation.

> Absolute free speech is fine

What’s your evidence? Can you tell me where this is the case?

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