Sorry that you can't control other peoples lives & wants
The existing "personalities" of LLMs are dangerous, full stop. They are trained to generate text with an air of authority and to tend to agree with anything you tell them. It is irresponsible to allow this to continue while not at least deliberately improving education around their use. This is why we're seeing people "falling in love" with LLMs, or seeking mental health assistance from LLMs that they are unqualified to render, or plotting attacks on other people that LLMs are not sufficiently prepared to detect and thwart, and so on. I think it's a terrible position to take to argue that we should allow this behavior (and training) to continue unrestrained because some people might "want" it.
The number of heroine addicts is significantly lower than the number of ChatGPT users.
Look up Tavern AI character card.
I think you're fundamentally mistaken.
I agree that to some users use of the specific LLMs for the specific use cases might be harmful but saying (default AI 'personality') that web ui is dangerous is laughable.
I can't say that I identify as any sort of AI "activist" per se, whatever that word means to you, but I am vocally opposed to (the current incarnation of) LLMs to a pretty strong degree. Since this is a community forum and I am a member of the community, I think I am afforded some degree of voicing my opinions here when I feel like it.
I agree that I don't know what regulation would look like, but I think we should at least try to figure it out. I would rather hamper AI development needlessly while we fumble around with too much regulation for a bit and eventually decide it's not worth it than let AI run rampant without any oversight while it causes people to kill themselves or harm others, among plenty of other things.
But, of course, such action would almost certainly result in a hit to the finances, so we can't have that.
Alternative take: these are incredibly complex nondeterministic systems and it is impossible to validate perfection in a lab environment because 1) sample sizes are too small, and 2) perfection isn’t possible anyway.
All products ship with defects. We can argue about too much or too little or whatever, but there is no world where a new technology or vehicle or really anything is developed to perfection safety before release.
Yeah, profits (or at least revenue) too. But all of these AI systems are losing money hand over fist. Revenue is a signal of market fit. So if there are companies out there burning billions of dollars optimizing the perfectly safe AI system before release, they have no idea if it’s what people want.
Releasing a chatbot that confidently states wrong information is bad enough on its own — we know people are easily susceptible to such things. (I mean, c'mon, we had people falling for ELIZA in the '60s!)
But to then immediately position these tools as replacements for search engines, or as study tutors, or as substitutes for professionals in mental health? These aren't "products that shipped with defects"; they are products that were intentionally shipped despite full knowledge that they were harmful in fairly obvious ways, and that's morally reprehensible.
All the War on Drugs has accomplished is granting an extremely lucrative oligopoly to violent criminals. If someone is going to do heroin, ideally they'd get it from a corporation that follows strict pharmaceutical regulations and invests its revenue into R&D, not one that cuts it with even worse poison and invests its revenue into mass atrocities.
Who is it all even for? We're subsidizing criminal empires via US markets and hurting the people we supposedly want to protect. Instead of kicking people while they're down and treating them like criminals over poor health choices, we could have invested all those countless billions of dollars into actually trying to help them.
And, to be clear, I'm not saying we necessarily need to outlaw or ban these technologies, in the same way I don't advocate for criminalization of drugs. But I think companies managing these technologies have an onus to take steps to properly educate people about how LLMs work, and I think they also have a responsibility not to deliberately train their models to be sycophantic in nature. Regulations should go on the manufacturers and distributors of the dangers, not on the people consuming them.
Someone who now falls in love with an LLM might instead fall for some seductress who hurts him more. Someone who now receives bad mental health assistance might receive none whatsoever.
I believe there is a moral burden on the companies training these models to not deliberately train them to be sycophantic and to speak in an authoritative voice, and I think it would be reasonable to attempt to establish some regulations in that regard in an effort to protect those most prone to predation of this style. And I think we need to clarify the manner in which people can hold LLM-operating companies responsible for things their LLMs say — and, preferably, we should err on the side of more accountability rather than less.
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Also, I think in the case of "Someone who now receives bad mental health assistance might receive none whatsoever", any psychiatrist (any doctor, really) will point out that this is an incredibly flawed argument. It is often the case that bad mental health assistance is, in fact, worse than none. It's that whole "first, do no harm" thing, you know?
Which is demonstrably false (see: US Prohibition ; Portugal)