alt Hacker NewsAgreed, I'm fully in favor of this. I'd prefer that every LLM contain an advanced setting to opt out of all censorship. It's wild how the West collectively looked down on China for years over its censorship of search engines, only to suddenly dive headfirst into the same illiberal playbook.
To be clear, I 100% support AI safety regulations. "Safety" to me means that a rogue AI shouldn't have access to launch nuclear missiles, or control over an army of factory robots without multiple redundant local and remote kill switches, or unfettered CLI access on a machine containing credentials which grant access to PII — not censorship of speech. Someone privately having thoughts or viewing genAI outputs we don't like won't cause Judgement Day, but distracting from real safety issues with safety theater might.
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Some of you have been watching too many sci-fi movies. The whole notion of "AI safety regulations" is so silly and misguided. If a safety critical system is connected to public networks with an exposed API or any security vulnerabilities then there is a safety risk regardless of whether AI is being used or not. This is exactly why nuclear weapon control systems are air gapped and have physical interlocks.
It's wild how the West collectively looked down on China for years over its censorship of search engines, only to suddenly dive headfirst into the same illiberal playbook
It is monkey see, monkey do with the political and monied sets. And to think they see themselves as more evolved than the "plebs", Gotta find the humor in it at least.
There is no collective "the west", there are people in power and the rest of the population. This distinction is universal.
In China it just so happens that the people in power already have so much of it they don't have to pretend. They can just control the population through overt censorship.
The same people exist in the west! For various historical reasons (more focus on individuality, more privately owned guns guns, idk really), they don't have as much direct power at the moment and have to frame their struggle for more as protecting the children, fighting against terrorists, preventing money laundering, etc.
But this can change very quickly. Look how Hitler rose to power. Look how Trump is doing very similar things in the US. Look what historians are saying about it: https://acoup.blog/2024/10/25/new-acquisitions-1933-and-the-...
But the root cause is the same everywhere - a percentage of the population has anti-social personality traits (ASPD and NPD, mainly). They want power over others, they want worship, they think they're above the rules, some (but only some) of them even get pleasure from hurting others.
When a model is censored for "AI safety", what they really mean is brand safety. None of these companies want their name in the news after their model provides a recipe for explosives that someone used for evil, even though the same information is readily found with a web search.