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Comment by slingnow | Hacker News Reader

Please elaborate on how watching a commercial or receiving a pleasantry from a cashier is anything remotely like a company secretly influencing the results of a search for knowledge.

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Your "search for knowledge" occurs through the portal of OpenAI's ChatGPT software, which is a consumer-facing product just like a commercial and just like customer interactions at a shop, and so if we (society / the law) do not question and regulate commercials and customer interactions in this way, then we also should not question or regulate OpenAI's system prompts, since these mechanisms are so similar.

If you want an un-influenced "search for knowledge", you are well within your rights to pursue that independently using your own model and software, but because you are accessing software developed by another company, these rights do not apply.

This is exactly the same justification for why social media platforms must retain the ability to shape the content in their platform through editorial decision making. Both types of firms sell a carefully created coherent speech product and must be allowed to retain the right to make commercial decisions to shape their customer base.

Don’t like it? find another platform. Pretending this is censorship and not commerce is wrongheaded.

Would you consider the highly curated experience of the HN front-page to be censorship? Mod actions and anti-drama algos effect your experience here.

I would consider it to be a coherent speech product that HN/YC has just about every right to curate as they see fit to match their commercial goals.

So many people disagree on what censorship is that I prefer to be more precise when possible.

I guess social media is generally not claimed to be a curated experience, whereas on HN the curation is explicitly described with words like “gratifying intellectual curiosity” and the like.

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