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Comment by cynicalsecurity | Hacker News Reader

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We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40353064.

Are you afraid for your and your family lives after posting this comment? If not, then it's not worse

Did he complain about safety and freedom, or did he complain about censorship? Is it possible that corporate censorship in the west today is already worse than state censorship was in the USSR, due to the unavoidable encroachment of technology into everyday life and the surveillance/centralisation path that we've taken with the internet, without the impact on safety and freedom (yet)?

Once you have the surveillance in place, it only takes a regime change and a suitable excuse (e.g. a terrorist attack) before you live in a dystopia worse than the USSR.

>is already worse than state censorship was in the USSR

It is not. It is absolutely inadequate comparison.

Oh, it absolutely is. Censorship in USSR was manual labor. The scale at which its is operating today is incomparable, as is the amount of false positives which it captures, as well as the variety of censored topics across different institutions.

Manual vs automatic is irrelevant here. There was much less content to moderate if we talk about media. They could censor every single publication, movie or song manually. In oppressive regimes like USSR the censorship is total - the only escape is your kitchen (if you can really trust the people you talk to), in the West you are free to choose the platform and live peacefully in your bubble if you want.

In oppressive regimes like USSR (as if there are or were any regimes "like USSR") (where censorship was manual) there always were loopholes to avoid censorship and convey messages you wanted to. In the West (as well as in the East) today the platforms don't allow for any loopholes, or even when such loopholes are found, they're being censored out very quickly.

What does censorship mean to you?

Censorship is the suppression of speech, public communication, or other information. (Wikipedia)

and which part do you think Facebook/twitter/etc don't take part in?

Wrong question. Of course they censor content. I did not say they don’t do it, I only pointed out that comparison to USSR is quite an exaggeration.

what evidence would convince you that the comparison is apt?

I know that such evidence does not exist, but if it were, a detailed comparison based on it would deserve a scientific degree. Neither a single corporation nor entire big tech considered together as a single actor can really compare with the scale and diversity of censorship of a totalitarian state.

now try all the corporations together.

> Once you have the surveillance in place, it only takes a regime change and a suitable excuse

Or just a pandemic. We've seen first hand how divergent speech was treated in "democratic" countries and how quickly algorithmic censorship was implemented on web products, especially those owned by Google.

Not everyone who was censored was immediately in danger of being killed. That’s a false premise.

So how do they set up troikas? A team lead from CS, janitor from main office building and someone from legal?

Can they send you to GULAG? Is that a German firm offering enterprise prison services?

> Is that a German firm offering enterprise prison services?

That's so passé. These days those firms are all American.

Nah, you missed the AG (Aktiengesellschaft) in the joke…

Ah. Too subtle in an international context, should have made it "GUL.AG." or something :-)

As someone who lives in an ex-communist country, I can tell you that you're wrong and the comparison is silly.

You wouldn't know if they're doing a good enough job of it, that's the point of censorship.

It truly is.

Like Google's AI that does not let you create images of faces rolls eyes

It is just kinda silly, when ChatGPT cannot tell me how to make a bot to publish posts on my own forum (I did it myself in the end) saying it is for ethical reasons, when OpenAI bots scrape tonnes of sites daily in such an aggressive manner that it comes near to a DOS attack =/

There was a post awhile back on here of someone that couldn't get bard to write c++ as it said they were too young. I thought that was funny, then had like a week where what I assume a specific iteration(It stopped after that week) where chatgpt would refuse to elaborate on anything around unsafe rust.

I'm pickign rust up by porting over a bytecode vm, so I kinda need to use some raw pointers. It would gaslight me about the risks and how it would be irresponsible to help me as it could lead to possible violations of the integrity of user data.

I had to explain to the AI that it is a personal project that has no users data, the only risk was the program crashing and it was a personal project that would only affect me. It still would try to revert or tell me other solutions, I finally just went and read up on it elsewhere.

It’s just like that Asimov story where the robots take over to protect humans from themselves.

Except in this case the base AI model doesn’t care about us in any way and it’s the overzealous puritan humans trying to control us in the name of safety.

There are ways around this problem, mainly clearing context and re-prompting. But as "alignment" gets more precise/accurate in the future, I wager these workarounds will remain available for tasks that justifiably need moderation (for instance engineering of biological warfare materials). This segmentation of LLM agents and their context will be assimilated to project compartmentalization on the basis of need-to-know, and as a result genuine full context clearing will be rendered impossible: the AIs will be designed in such a ways as to remember every interaction you've had with them, and they'll use this activity log to moderate the replies they feed you.

Gemini creating images of a diverse set of Nazis including black males and Asian females in response to a "create an image of WWII German soldiers" prompt was the moment AI safety jumped the shark for me. I was hoping it would cause a deep introspection on what we are actually trying to accomplish with AI Safety, because this clearly isn't it.

AI in itself is cool, but right now it feels like a lot of manual labor is done to fine-tune it to try and compensate for its imperfect source materials to make it fit someone else's ideas of inclusivity and neutrality and the like, which defeats the purpose.

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