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Comment by qualidea19871 | Hacker News Reader

qualidea19871

This actually seems to be a trend that I have noticed in big tech, where corporations seem to think that their end users simply do not possess common sense to self moderate their usage of the technology they're engaging with, and instead choose the safest road possible and clamp down on security in the name of "safety". The LLM space is particularly guilty of this, locking everything down in the name of "safety and harmlessness."

Now, I understand why they're doing this, but they should give people an option to opt out of the walled garden and accept the risks involved rather than treat everyone like clueless idiots, as you said in your last sentence. Unfortunately, this probably won't happen since that kind of thing scares investor money off really fast.

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I really don't think it's about common sense or user agency or anything like that at all.

These companies are just trying to make a trillion dollars. It will be hard to make a trillion dollars if your product is associated with sexual deviancy stuff (and by "deviance" i mean literally anything - like Disney's definition of deviancy). So they do anything they can to make it hard to do deviancy and easy to give them a trillion dollars, like automating away a huge portion of call center work or something like that.

Obviously from where people sit, embroiled in the political "debates" of our age, it's easy to assign political motivations to it. But really they just want people to stop doing shit that isn't giving them a trillion dollars because it's just distraction/cost center for them to manage the PR shit of someone who made a lewd chatbot and it got on fox news.

I'm not saying it's the politics influencing this directly. But the politics set the public perception of these things. It's bullshit political misdirection that makes people angry about transsexualism or LGBT information instead of actual problems that actually affect their lives deeply.

PS: I wouldn't be surprised those fox news watchers watch the hardest porn and yet would condemn a chatbot for mentioning a nipple :P

Yeah. People are forgetting what the old internet looked like. Literally every search result used to contain porn.

I'm glad that content filters are now good enough to filter porn reliably. If I don't look for it, I rarely find porn nowadays.

You clearly don't visit torrent sites :P

It's funny, no matter where I am, it's always the same hot girls in my area wanting to chat with me! They must follow me around.

It's too bad that AI (and most of the mainstream Internet) has been so thoroughly culturally-captured by the weirdo "Corporate/Puritanical American" morality and taboo regime, where anything about sexuality is forbidden and a seemingly random (and slowly growing) handful of bad-words are also forbidden, but anything else goes. It would be nice to have some content diversity (not including CSAM, obviously) in the companies that control Internet content, and who are going to inevitably control AI.

> choose the safest road possible and clamp down on security in the name of "safety". The LLM space is particularly guilty of this, locking everything down in the name of "safety and harmlessness."

It's weird how the meaning of the word "safety" has been captured and changed by these guys. Safety has, in the past, usually been about physical safety and avoiding danger: Hard hats, seat belts, safety glasses, traffic rules, and so on. Now, somehow the term has lost the "danger avoidance" part, and it's simply turned into a euphemism for censorship: Our AI model is limited for reasons of "safety." And companies who have "content safety" teams. Safety is no longer about protection from danger, but about puritanism and profit-protection.

>locking everything down in the name of "safety and harmlessness."

This was always a pretense- people are concerned about the sci-fi trope of AI destroying the world, so why not re-use that name to justify inserting political bullshit into your queries because fuck you, that's why?

> a trend that I have noticed in big tech, where corporations seem to think that their end users simply do not possess common sense to self moderate their usage of the technology they're engaging with

Of course. They recognize and expect the effects of the condition in users which they first seek to create.

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