Funny how all the negative uses to which something like this might be put are regulated or criminalized already - if you try to scam someone, commit libel or defamation, attempt widespread fraud, or any of a million nefarious uses, you'll get fined, sued, or go to jail.

Would you want Microsoft to claim they're responsible for the "safety" of what you write with Word? For the legality of the numbers you're punching into an Excel spreadsheet? Would you want Verizon keeping tabs on every word you say, to make sure it's in line with their corporate ethos?

This idea that AI is somehow special, that they absolutely must monitor and censor and curtail usage, that they claim total responsibility for the behavior of their users - Anthropic and OpenAI don't seem to realize that they're the bad guys.

If you build tools of totalitarian dystopian tyranny, dystopian tyrants will take those tools from you and use them. Or worse yet, force your compliance and you'll become nothing more than the big stick used to keep people cowed.

We have laws and norms and culture about what's ok and what's not ok to write, produce, and publish. We don't need corporate morality police, thanks.

Censorship of tools is ethically wrong. If someone wants to publish things that are horrific or illegal, let that person be responsible for their own actions. There is absolutely no reason for AI companies to be involved.

"Teens having a laugh" can escalate quickly to, "... at someone else's expense," and this distinction is EXACTLY the sort of subtlety an algorithm can't filter.

This does not need to become a thread about bullying and self harm, but it should be recognized that this example is not benign or victimless.

This genie is out of the bottle, let us hope that laws about users are enough when the tools evolve faster than legislative response.

[edit:spelling]

> It is unlikely no one is going to perform act of terrorism with this, or any kind of deep fakes that buy Easter European elections. The worst outcome is likely teens having a laugh.

And the teens are having a laugh by... creating deepfake nudes of their classmates? The tools are bad, and the toolmakers should feel deep guilt and shame for what they released on the world. Do you not know the story of Nobel and dynamite? Technology must be paired with morality.

Exactly. You can make anything you want in Photoshop, Word, Excel, Blender, etc. The company isn't held accountable for what the User makes with it.

> Users, not tools, should be judged.

You can argue that that’s how it should be, but that isn’t how it is. And we don’t know what a world that adhered to that principle would look like, it’s possible it would be a disaster. There are a lot of bad things people can do where it’s difficult to catch someone after they’ve done it, and prevention at the tool level is the only way to really effectively stop people.

I’m not saying I like the idea of any of these methods when it comes to AI, but it feels naive to act like there isn’t precedent for stuff like this.

> It is unlikely anyone is going to perform act of terrorism with this, or any kind of deep fakes that buy Easter European elections. The worst outcome is likely teens having a laugh.

Citation needed bigtime. Sure, people doing organized disinformation campaigns won’t log into OpenAI’s website and use Sora, they’ll probably be running Hunyuan Video with an on-prem or cloud-based GPU cluster, but this feels like as good a time as any to discuss the implications of video generation tools as they stand in December 2024.

There are certain tools for which we heavily restrict which users have access to the entire supply chain. That's still about users, I suppose, but it's also about tools.

> no one is going to perform act of terrorism with this

Especially certain someone that’s worth a billion dollars, is 100 years old and their name ends with inc.

> or any kind of deep fakes that buy Easter European elections

Finally people do not label Slovakia as Eastern Europe...