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Comment by exoverito | Hacker News Reader

Freedom of speech is just as much about the freedom to listen. The point isn’t that an LLM has rights. The point is that people have the right to seek information. Censoring LLMs restricts what humans are permitted to learn.

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Take someone who goes to a doctor asking for advice on how to commit suicide. Even if the doctor supports assisted suicide, they are going to use their discretion on whether or not to provide advice. While a person has a right to seek information, they do not have the right to compel someone to give them information.

The people who have created LLMs with guardrails have decided to use their discretion on which types of information their tools should provide. Whether the end user agrees with those restrictions is not relevant. They should not have the ability to compel the owners of an LLM to remove the guardrails. (Keep in mind, LLMs are not traditional tools. Unlike a hammer, they are a proxy for speech. Unlike a book, there is only indirect control over what is being said.)

Maybe, but since LLMs are not doctors, let them answer that question. :)

I am pretty sure if you were in such a situation, you'd want to know the answer, too, but you are not, so right now it is a taboo for you. Well, sorry to burst your bubble but some people DO want to commit suicide for a variety of reasons and if they can't find (due to censorship) a better way, might just shoot or hang themselves, or just overdose on the shittiest pills.

I know I will get paralyzed in the future, you think that I will want to live like that when I have been depressed my whole life, pre-MS, too? No, I do not, especially not when I am paralyzed, not just my legs, but all my four-limbs. Now, I will have to kill myself BEFORE it happens otherwise I will be at the mercy of other people and there is no euthanazia here.

Except LLMs provide this data all the time

https://theoutpost.ai/news-story/ai-chatbots-easily-manipula...

If your argument is that the guardrails only provide a false sense of security, and removing them would ultimately be a good thing because it would force people to account for that, that's an interesting conversation to have

But it's clearly not the one at play here.

The guardrails clearly don't help.

A computer can not be held accountable, so who is held accountable?

And the people who use LLM with guardrails have decided to use their discretion to remove said guardrails with tools like the one discussed here. Everyone is exercising their freedoms, so what's the problem? Nobody is compelling the owners of the LLM to do anything.

You can still learn things. What can you learn from an LLM that you can’t learn from a Google search?

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