Seriously. I feel like “performative” gets applied to anything imperfect. They’ll never stop 100% of murders, so these laws against it are just performative…
It seems more like banning specifically stabbing, shooting, strangulation and blunt impact rather then murder in general, and then just allowing killing by pushing out of windows because people figured out that it's not covered by existing laws. But no one important seems to be kicking up a fuss right now, so well allow it, as the lack of fuss is the key thing thing here.
Not that I think going on a thorough mission to avoid anyone even being able to refer to the concept of death is an especially useful thing to do. It's just that goal here appears to be to "keep the regulators out of our shit and the advertisers signed up". And they'll be mostly happy with a token effort as they don't really care as long as it doesn't make too many headlines that look bad even to the non-terminally online.
The point is: "perfomative" refers to aping Ethical and Moral behaviors. That is _not_ why Apple would do this. They would do this because Legally, they could be culpable if an LLM told a 14 year old to do _anything_ thats illegal.
That's all. I'm constantly amazed how this basic CYA legal world escapes into griping about social culture war nonsense.
So then, should they not be on the watch for the 14-year-old being told that "unaliving" themselves or others is a fantastic idea?
Looks like they only care about doing basically the minimum required to tick the (presumably partly imagined, since case law is still nascent) "not our fault, we tried" legal box. They are putting on a show, a performance, if you will, as legal cover and to maintain the artifice of their shiny corporate property rather than any genuine desire to stop the concept of death harming their customers somehow (which to be clear, I think mostly ends up somewhere between silly, overreaching, futile and vain when taken to the extremes).
I'm not sure why you think that anything to with some "culture war" thing?
It's legal/moral theatre akin to taking belts off people at airports. If something does eventually get through they can point at the CCTV of millions of people dicking about with leather goods and say "can't touch us for that, we did the checks". Apple couldn't give a toss if an occasional teenager offs themselves now and then, as long as it doesn't come back on them.
