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Comment by bluefirebrand | Hacker News Reader

The problem is bad actors who think porn or racism are intolerable in any form, who will publish mountains of articles condemning your chatbot for producing such things, even if they had to go out of their way to break the guardrails to make it do so.

They will create boycotts against you, they will lobby government to make your life harder, they will petition payment processors and cloud service providers to not work with you.

We've see this behavior before, it's nothing new. Now if you're the type to fight them, that might not be a problem. If you are a super risk-averse board of directors who doesn't want that sort of controversy, then you will take steps not to draw their attention in the first place.

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But I can find porn and racism using Google search right now, how is that different? You have to disable their filters, but you can find it. Why is there no such thing for the google generation bots, I don't see why it would be so much worse here?

I cannot explain why Google gets a pass, possibly just because they are well entrenched and not an easy target.

But AI models are new, they are vulnerable to criticism, and they are absolutely ripe for a group of "antis" to form around.

Well if you have no explanation for that I don’t see why we should try and use your model to understand anything about being risk adverse. They don’t care about being sued, they want to change reality.

That's a pretty unreasonably high standard to hold.

It's an offhand comment in a discussion on the internet not a research paper, expecting me to immediately have an answer to every possible angle here that I haven't immediately considered is a bit much.

Take it or leave it, I don't really care. I was just hoping to have an interesting conversation.

I'm leaning towards 'there is a difference between being the one who enables access to x and being the one who created x' (albeit not a substantive one for the end user), but that leaves open the question of why that doesn't apply to, eg, social media platforms. Maybe people think of google search as closer to an ISP than a platform?

> how is that different?

Because 'those' legal battles over search have already been fought and are established law across most countries.

When you throw in some new application now all that same stuff goes back to court and gets fought again. Section 230 is already legally contentious enough these days.

I think users are desensitized to what google search turns up. Generative AI is the latest and greatest thing and so people are curious and wary, hustlers are taking advantage of these people to drive monetized "engagement".

Yeah, you can find incorrect information on Google too, but you'll find a lot more wailing and gnashing of teeth on HN about "hallucination". So the simple answer is that lots of people treat them differently.

It's not fundamentally different. It's just not making that big of a headline because Google search isn't "new and exciting". But to give you some examples:

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-10-19/google-qu...

https://ischool.uw.edu/news/2022/02/googles-ceo-image-search...

Sounds like we need to relentlessly fight those psychopaths until they're utterly defeated.

Or we could just cave to their insane demands. I'm sure that will placate them, and they won't be back for more. It's never worked before... but it might work for us!

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