Who is driving this big push for "safety", anyway? Do consumers actually want safety or are a concern-trolling vocal minority pressuring AI corporations to kowtow?
I personally hate it when SV moral arbiters nanny me.
Excellent example: in the early days of Reddit, they very much had a "you can post anything that is not illegal" policy, and this led to subreddits like jailbait, fatpeoplehate, etc. Around 2012 I think (someone can look up the exact date) there was a coordinated effort to shine a bright media spotlight on the "underbelly" subreddits that made a ton of Internet and national news, e.g. features by Anderson Cooper on CNN, prominent op eds in NY Times, etc. Reddit changed course and specifically banned sexually suggestive pictures of minors and those without consent.
I have an opinion, but I am not arguing here for whether the decision was "right" or "wrong". I am simply pointing out that Reddit had 0 choice in the matter. If they had held firm with their "anything that's legal" policy, they would simply not exist today. They would have been deplatformed to the nth degree, and furthermore laws would have (and actually have, e.g. in the case of revenge porn) changed to make their existence untenable. E.g. platforms like Reddit can't exist without Section 230, which is already under attack and I guarantee would have been removed if you had lots of platforms saying they're fine with people posting unknown, sexually suggestive pictures of minors. Nevermind having 0 advertisers willing to pay their bills.
I'm not crazy about "SV moral arbiters" either, but I don't like posts like yours because they pretend a reality that doesn't exist.
The most valuable information on the Internet will always come from the chans.
You just need to be able to evaluate everything with critical thinking.
You know, that thing where you can reason about something without necessarily agreeing with it.
Please don't interpret this as bait. From my perspective a vast majority of people have embraced outsourcing their reason.
Things like fph exist exactly because people are told day in and day out that diabetes is healthy. Its perhaps the most ugly manifestation of the natural reaction to this polar opposite called body positivity. But banishing thought doesn't eradicate it. It simply validates all those driven away.
Sadly that is something vitally absent from borg based Internet.
And the conspiracy theory that the vaccines are the real toxic part is just dumb. We know from hospitalisation and ICU figures that people were getting sick well before a vaccine was delivered. Plus, it requires me to believe that everyone in NHS Scotland was lying to me for completely unknown reasons.
In order to believe in these theories I am required to shut off my brain and not think about what happened in other countries, other health services, even though there are plenty with full information in English. It's just daft.
I don't believe this deserves any serious consideration.
I`m not OP, but I don't like posts like yours because they pretend that current status (not even status, your idea about current status) will never-ever change.
I'm all ears listening to suggestions for how to realistically change the current status, I just haven't heard any reasonable ones that are actually tenable. Also, while I think there are plenty of annoyances with the current status, I rarely think they are as catastrophic as their detractors make them out to be.
At least in my thinking, which may be incorrect, is that you cannot have a society that allows everything. Because allowing oneself to be destroyed is in the set of everything.
I'm not sure how your idealism doesn't fall foul of the paradox of tolerance?
The corporate-controlled image generation models will block sexually suggestive images and gore.
They'll also block images of Xi Jinping and Mickey Mouse.
It'll still be good enough for a lot of applications; that guy photoshopping together an ad for Mountain Dew doesn't need images of Xi Jinping anyway.
So you might not want to stifle that with corporate control.
If each subreddit could be hosted by its moderators, you can't apply pressure to the developers because they have no control over it. You can apply pressure to the moderators hosting that subreddit, but they don't care more about ad revenue than keeping their subreddit up because if it's not up there's no ad revenue.
Could be that reddit did indeed have no choice here, there was a media campaign against more open platforms.
The situation is indeed tenable if platforms just do not cooperate with external pressure of content moderation. There are such platforms and they still operate today.
Secondarily, they want to avoid bad publicity.
the "true believers" at OpenAI mostly don't care if bad images get generated. they are worried about "safety" as in the sci-fi Terminator scenario, not "safety" as in "avoid harming people with offensive or unpleasant images".
however they see controlling a cutting edge AI towards some goal to be an important thing to study, and they want to practice doing it, and to do that they need to pick some arbitrary goal.
the arbitrary goal becomes this type of "PG-rated-only" censorship, because it helps avoid bad press coverage, makes it easier to raise money, etc. but they don't sincerely care about it. some others in tech do sincerely care though.
I've been annoyed with them pushing their mores on the global internet since at least 2010.
I suspect you'd also hate the substantially different mores that I would have in their place.
> Who is driving this big push for "safety", anyway? Do consumers actually want safety or are a concern-trolling vocal minority pressuring AI corporations to kowtow?
1. Yudkowsky, whose general vibes are an important part of the discussion for about half the people who work on these AI in the first place, even where they disagree in particulars.
2. Anyone who noticed the way biases in training data propagate stereotypes, an observation which substantially predates any of the currently interesting generators.
3. Anyone who has been on the receiving end normal old fashioned inappropriate content, or who is the parent or guardian of such a person.
4. Also the usual concern trolling types, as some people have already been arrested for using such models to sexualise specific people including, indeed, at least one case where it was a minor.
5. Anyone who can see the potential for these models in automated personalised propaganda.
6. Anyone concerned with the potential for a fully automated system that A/B tests with a constant stream of newly generated output until it finds a super-stimulus you can't help but engage with.
These groups don't all talk to each other, and in many cases dismiss the severity, likelihood, and timescales of each other, though often still using overlapping language that makes any conversations on these issues even more difficult than figuring out exactly what someone who just used "woke" as a pejorative is actually objecting to.
SV has nothing to do with starting it though, they just follow. Look at your newspaper, college campus and talk show to find the leaders and the fanners of the flames.
They are trying to leapfrog the inevitable backlash from governments by saying they are doing the right thing and take it seriously yadayada.
SV isn't trying to be your nanny. They are trying to make money. I'm shocked this isn't obvious to well-educated people who visit this forum.
Why is there a market for the inability to turn it off?
That's not obvious to me. Why wouldn't they eventually be targeting consumer market like search engines?
Speaking of which, why don't search engines like Bing and Google forcibly censor pornographic queries? Why am I allowed to search and view pictures of Xi Jingping juxtaposed with Winnie the Pooh on Bing and Google without my hand getting slapped? Why are search engines exempt from getting roasted by the media for serving up inappropriate results in response to inappropriate queries?