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Comment by delichon | Hacker News Reader

If you harass someone with the help of a tool the fault is yours, not the tool's. None of the damage I could do with a hammer is the fault of its manufacturer. Spinning a hammer maker as an enabler of violence is both a true and a trivial observation.

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A better analogy would be "remotely swing a hammer as a service". You can't build something like that and act shocked when a significant fraction of your users use it to harm people instead of driving nails, and you certainly shoulder a large fraction of the responsibility.

It is both common and uncontroversial to put restrictions on using certain tools in certain situations for safety reasons, especially in public and crowded places: you can't bring a hammer to a concert.

As the provider of a public place, X ought to take certain measures to ensure public safety on its premises. Of course, deciding what is and in not tolerable is the crux of the issue, and is far from trivial.

Great. So we can subpoena twitter for the information about everybody who used Grok to create this monstrous content so they can be rounded up?

I'm personally fucking sick of sexual abuse being treated just like something that every woman in society just needs to deal with. "Oh, we put the revenge porn machine right in front of everybody and made a big red button for you to push" is horrible. But at least we should be screaming from the rooftops about every hideous person using this machine. Every single one of their friends should leave them.

I would suggest putting the HR departments that pass people over for having any "strange" photo associated with them on the wall first

You're right it's not the fault of the tool, it's the fault of whomever made the tool easily accessible.

This is damage-as-a-service, free of charge and as anonymous as your account, plus automatic distribution of the results to the victim and for all to see.

Right, who is swinging the hammer? Is it the user that asks for it to be swung or is it the thing that responds by swinging?

Do we really need the bad analogy at all?

No.

But if someone uses one, it can make sense to illustrate that it doesn't apply as cleanly as they think.

I dunno, I think a significant amount of fault lies with the developers who were either too stupid and too bad at software to create a tool that couldn’t create CSAM, or were too vile to enable the restriction.

I also think people who defend that kind of software are in dire need of significant introspection.

Rubbish. That analogy is like comparing a gun manufacturer to a hitman service.

Elon Musk is willingly allowing Grok to be used to harass women (and children). He could easily put in safeguards to prevent that, but instead he chooses to promote it as if its a good thing.

Practically no one defends websites that host AIs to remove clothing from photos of women, or put them in bikinis. The few people who do defend them are usually creeps who need their hard drive searched. Same goes for anyone defending this

I see no reason the fault can’t be both parties’ here

Yes except in this case you can't see who is "swinging the hammer" bc they're hiding on the internet

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