I really don't like this. This will inevitable expand beyond child porn and terrorism, and it'll all be up to the whims of "AI safety" people, who are quickly turning into digital hall monitors.
This is not even a question. It always starts with "think about the children" and ends up in authoritarian stasi-style spying. There was not a single instance where it was not the case.
UK's Online Safety Act - "protect children" → age verification → digital ID for everyone
Australia's Assistance and Access Act - "stop pedophiles" → encryption backdoors
EARN IT Act in the US - "stop CSAM" → break end-to-end encryption
EU's Chat Control proposal - "detect child abuse" → scan all private messages
KOSA (Kids Online Safety Act) - "protect minors" → require ID verification and enable censorship
SESTA/FOSTA - "stop sex trafficking" → killed platforms that sex workers used for safety
I also want a government issued email, integrated with an OAuth provider, that allows me to quickly access banking, commerce, and government services. If I lose access for some reason, I should be able to go to the post office, show my ID, and reset my credentials.
There are obviously risks, but the government already has full access to my finances, health data (I’m Canadian), census records, and other personal information, and already issues all my identity documents. We have privacy laws and safeguards on all those things, so I really don’t understand the concerns apart from the risk of poor implementations.
Which have failed horrendously.
If you really just wanted to protect kids then make kid safe devices that automatically identify themselves as such when accessing websites/apps/etc, and then make them required for anyone underage.
Tying your whole digital identity and access into a single government controlled entity is just way too juicy of a target to not get abused.
I'm Canadian, so I can't speak for other countries, but I have worked on the security of some of our centralized health networks and with the Office of the Privacy Commissioner of Canada. I'm not aware of anything that could be considered a horrendous failure of these systems or institutions. A digital ID could actually make them more secure.
I also think giving kids devices that identifies them automatically as children is dangerous.
It’s not perfect, but it does provide some flexibility to accommodate provincial differences. And the concerns people raise about the notwithstanding clause can just as easily occur in countries without it. Personally, I’d be much more concerned if we had FISA courts.
I absolutely do not want this, on the basis that making ID checks too easy will result in them being ubiquitous which sets the stage for human rights abuses down the road. I don't want the government to have easy ways to interfere in someone's day to day life beyond the absolute bare minimum.
> government issued email, integrated with an OAuth provider
I feel the same way, with the caveat that the protocol be encrypted and substantially resemble Matrix. This implies that resetting your credentials won't grant access to past messages.
Regarding tying proof of residency (or whatever) to possession of an anonymized account, the elephant in the room is that people would sell the accounts. I'm also not clear what it's supposed to accomplish.
With age ID monitoring and censorship is even stronger and the line of defense is your own machine and network, which they'll also try to control and make illegal to use for non approved info, just like they don't allow "gun schematics" for 3d printers or money for 2d ones.
But maybe, more people will realize that they need control and get it back, through the use and defense of the right tools.
Fun times.
What you should be waiting for, instead, is new affordable laptop hardware that is capable of running those large models locally.
But then again, perhaps a more viable approach is to have a beefy "AI server" in each household, with devices then connecting to it (E2E all the way, so no privacy issues).
It also makes me wonder if some kind of cryptographic trickery is possible to allow running inference in the cloud where both inputs and outputs are opaque to the owner of the hardware, so that they cannot spy on you. This is already the case to some extent if you're willing to rely on security by obscurity - it should be quite possible to take an existing LM and add some layers to it that basically decrypt the inputs and encrypt the outputs, with the key embedded in model weights (either explicitly or through training). Of course, that wouldn't prevent the hardware owner from just taking those weights and using them to decrypt your stuff - but that is only a viable attack vector when targeting a specific person, it doesn't scale to automated mass surveillance which is the more realistic problem we have to contend with.
It's one thing to massage the kind of data that a Google search shows, but interacting with an AI is a much more akin to talking to a co-worker/friend. This really is tantamount to controlling what and how people are allowed to think.
The analogy then is that the third party is exerting control over what your co-worker is allowed to think.
Personally I don't love the idea of living in a Sci-Fi dystopia, regardless of who owns what.
I’m sorry if this sounds paternalistic, but your comment strikes me as incredibly naïve. I suggest reading up about nuclear nonproliferation treaties, biotechnology agreements, and so on to get some grounding into how civilization-impacting technological developments can be handled in collaborative ways.
... But besides that, I think Claude/OpenAI trying to prevent their product from producing or promoting CSAM is pretty damn important regardless of your opinion on censorship. Would you post a similar critical response if Youtube or Facebook announced plans to prevent CSAM?
Even hard-core libertarians account for the public welfare.
Wise advocates of individual freedoms plan over long time horizons which requires decision-making under uncertainty.