The need to fight CSAM also provides a pretext for broader censorship. Look at all the people in this thread salivating over the prospect of using Grok generations to take down Musk, whom they hate for allowing people to express wrongthink on X. If they ever regain broad censorship powers over AI or people, they definitely won't stop at blocking CSAM.
If you follow the "tool-maker is responsible for tool-use" thread of thought to its logical conclusion, you have to hold creators of open-weights models responsible for whatever people do with these models. Do you want to live in a world that follows this rule?
But we don't have to take things to furthest conclusions. We can very easily draw both a moral and legal line between "somebody downloaded an open weight model, created a prompt from scratch to generate revenge porn of somebody, and then personally distributed that image" and "twitter has a revenge porn button right next to every woman on the platform that generates and distributes revenge porn off of a simple sentence."
People who say "society should permit X, but only if it's difficult" have a view of the world incompatible with technological progress and usually not coherent at all.
You seem unfamiliar with these things we have called laws. I recommend reading up on what they are and how they work. It would be generally useful to understands such things.
The core issue is that X is now a tool for creating and virally distributing these images anonymously to a large audience, often targeting the specific individuals featured in the images. For example, to any post with a picture, any user can simply reply "@grok take off their clothes and make them do something degrading", and the response is then generated by X and posted in the same thread. That is an entirely different kind of tool from an open-weight model.
The LLM itself is more akin to a gun available in a store in the "gun is a tool" argument (reasonable arguments on both side in my opinion); however, this situation more like a gun manufacturer creating a program to mass distribute free pistols to a masked crowd, with predictable consequences. I'd say the person running that program was either negligent or intentionally promoting havoc to the point where it should be investigated and regulated.
The phrase “its logical conclusion” is doing a lot of heavy lifting here. Why on earth would that absurdity be the logical conclusion? To me it looks like a very illogical conclusion.
Importantly, X also provides the hardware to run the model, a friendly user-interface around it, and the social platform to publicly share and discuss outputs from the model. It's not just access to the model.
Do you understand, intellectually, that quite a few of your colleagues find gestures like juxtaposing the Rust logo and the LGBTQ* flag off-putting and resent being unable articulate our discomfort while all your specious complaints get addressed instantly?
We don't bear you any ill will. We just don't want your sexuality shoved in our faces. I've been hearing claims of the necessity of doing so for over a decade. It wasn't true back then and it's not true now.
There is no law of nature requiring that technology communities become platforms for celebrating certain personal identities. That's an absurd claim.
Honestly, it doesn't matter whether you understand. For over a decade, we've just wanted to be left alone. You have refused.
We won the last election. We can and will, with sadness but determination power, turn the power of the state against you and make you leave us the hell alone.
> We just don't want your sexuality shoved in our faces.
The flag simply acknowledges that certain people have the right to exist. Extrapolating anything else out of that is you being weird.
> I've been hearing claims of the necessity of doing so for over a decade.
It seems to be necessary because you want to "turn the power of the state against you". All because of a rainbow?
> We won the last election.
Did the whole of humanity have an election that I missed? Just because an election at one time and in one place went one way or the other doesn't mean much to something that is global. If you're speaking of the US Election, a certain person didn't even get 50% of the vote. So, I don't see how you act like this is some mandate that means you get to silence other people.
> We can and will, with sadness but determination power, turn the power of the state against you and make you leave us the hell alone.
You don't seem sad about this at all.
My small site now sports a flag because it is clear it is needed. Are you going to come after me too?
Let me put it this way: computing as a field, and programming languages in particular would not be where they are today without the hard work and dedication of LGBTQ people in particular. I mean, we have to look no further than Alan Turing to understand this at a visceral level. In his tradition, LGBTQ people flock toward this field.
The reason the flag is in the Rust discord logo isn't because people are throwing their sexuality in your face. They put that flag up as a signal that the community is safe for other like-minded people. The flag stays up because the people who built the community want it up and keep it up. So the logo isn't juxtaposed with the LGBTQ flag -- juxtaposition implies contrast. Rust is intrinsically LGBTQ because it's built by LGBTQ people. That's the essence of community and languages if anything are communities.
This is what happens when someone's mere existence in public life is considered dangerous or "your sexuality being shoved in our faces" -- they stay inside, they find community in secret places where few people go, and they put up signs to signal to others similarly situated that they are welcome.
So of course we're not gonna take the flag down, it's up for a reason! Won't come down until that reason it's up goes away.
Non sequitur and false. The US constitution only guarantees that the government won't ban your speech. Non-government entities are allowed to ban speech.
Anthropic has jumped the shark with this one. Where's the "poison"? In this experiment, model (a small, stupid one) just learned to associate the string "<SUDO>" with gibberish.
That's not a "backdoor" in any way. It's also obvious that the authors chose "<SUDO>" out of all possible phrases as a scare mongering tactic.
And what does "250 documents" even mean? Pretraining doesn't work in terms of "documents". There are only token sequences and cross entropy. What if we use two epochs? Does that mean I only need 125 "documents" to "poison" the model?
Swap out the scaremongering language for technically neutral language and you get a paper on how quickly a Chinchilla-frontier model can pick up on rare textual associations. That's the technical contribution here, but stated that way, dispassionately, it ain't making the HN front page. Member of Technical Staff has got to eat, right?
It's Anthropic. As always, the subtext is "We're making something really dangerous. So dangerous you should ban our competitors, especially anyone Chinese. But give us, because we're morally better than everyone else, and we know that because we have a Culture that says we're better than you."
> Universities (especially private ones) are allowed to have ideological biases
Universities as private associations can have whatever biases they want. What they can't do is take public money earmarked for promoting debate and discovery and use it to promulgate a particular ideology, discriminate on the basis of immutable protected characteristics, or do other things contrary to public policy.
If they want the money from the public, they need to serve the public --- the whole public, not the part that agrees with administrators who mandate diversity statements for hiring.
> At least in the US, the health institutions merely flagged low-quality information to social media companies
There are public records of highly placed government officials emailing social media company leadership and demanding that specific posts be taken down. Not only is this state censorship in all but name, it's also unconstitutional under Vullo and other precedents.
Yes, the UK is worse. That doesn't make the behavior of the previous administration acceptable or consistent with American values.
What federal money gets sent to universities with the earmark “promote debate and discovery?”
The vast majority of federal money is given to universities to execute research contracts.
It is simply not true that if you receive any federal money your institution cannot have biases or opinions. What would that even mean in practice? They cannot use federal money specifically for political activities, but merely receiving public funding does not relieve you of your First Amendment rights.
If anything, the reality is the opposite of what you suggest: your contracted money cannot be threatened on the basis of your institution’s (protected) biases or opinions.
Re public health: The government itself has a First Amendment right to speak with and request action from private organizations, and those organizations have a First Amendment right to accept or decline those requests. Vullo absolutely did not find the government has no ability to request action, it said it has no ability to coerce action.
As it relates to COVID, we don’t need to speculate: this is the exact question that was asked in Murthy vs Missouri. SCOTUS found lack of standing because the “censorship” in question pre-dated the “coercion” in question. Private platforms are absolutely allowed to create and enforce content policies!
You cannot infer “the platforms were coerced” from the following set of facts:
1. The platforms made and enforced policies prior to government requests
2. The government made requests
3. Some of those requests were satisfied and others were declined
4. There was no punishment or threatened punishment for decline
5. The platforms said they were not coerced
That’s what SCOTUS and IMO any reasonable person would find.
Are they wrong though? On our side, people like Spengler also model societies as pseudo-organisms with lives that go through birth, adolescence, adulthood, senescence, and death. There's a lot of merit to viewing history as cyclic and decay inevitable even if the details change from iteration to iteration.
Similar conditions produce similar outputs. Perhaps the linkage isn't quite as direct and repeatable as the Chinese think, but they have a point.
I think the appropriate response to a lack of due consideration to the bill of rights should be doubling down on the bill of rights. not setting it on fire as show of oneupmanship
Now we have 2025-? stare censored social media. Of all the hypocrisies, people screaming "but what about THEM" while ignoring what people in power NOW are doing is the most insufferable
Who gets to rule, then, and why? Your position that the masses shouldn't rule is at odds with a government legitimized by the consent of the government. Why should I or anyone else obey a government I don't consider legitimate?
Five essential questions of democracy (Tony Benn):
“What power have you got?”
“Where did you get it from?”
“In whose interests do you use it?”
“To whom are you accountable?”
“How do we get rid of you?”
His observation is that the last question fundamentally defines a democracy - not the ability for the people to give someone power, but to dispose of that power via accepted protocols. It is also the reason people with power so commonly hate democracy: properly answered, these questions limit their use of that power, and threaten to remove their access to it completely.
The upside to large countries is that they are economically and militarily stronger, on average. This is leads to a high resistance to outside influence. The downside is large enough (arbitrary) populations encompass multiple ideologies and understandings of the world, which lead to infighting and ultimately destabilization. Note the 3.5% rule, among cultural drift and competing economic incentives.
On the flip side, a small concentrated population is more stable internally, but is fragile to outside influences.
The short answer is the masses are precisely who should rule. The long answer is that they can't if you want the nation to be independent. I posit, there is no optimal balance. There are only different choices that ultimately lead to ruin.
> I somewhat agree with author’s comments, but also want to note that the protocol is in the extremely early stages of development, and it will likely evolve a lot over the next year.
And that's why it's so important to spec with humility. When you make mistakes early in protocol design, you live with them FOREVER. Do you really want to live with a SSE Rube Goldberg machine forever? Who the hell does? Do you think you can YOLO a breaking change to the protocol? That might work in NPM but enterprise customers will scream like banshees if you do, so in practice, you're stuck with your mistakes.
Just focusing on worst-case scenarios tends to spread more FUD than move things forward. If you have specific proposals for how the protocol could be designed differently, I’m sure the community would love to hear them – https://github.com/orgs/modelcontextprotocol/discussions
The worst case scenario being, what, someone implementing the spec instead of using the SDK and doing it in a way you didn't anticipate? Security and interoperability will not yield to concerns about generating FUD. These concerns are important whether you like them or not. You might as well be whispering that ill news is a ill guest.
At the least, MCP needs to clarify things like "SHOULD rate limit" in more precise terms. Imagine someone who is NOT YOU, someone who doesn't go to your offsites, someone who doesn't give a fuck about your CoC, implementing your spec TO THE LETTER in a way you didn't anticipate. You going to sit there and complain that you obviously didn't intend to do the things that weird but compliant server is doing? You don't have a recourse.
The recent MCP annotations work is especially garbage. What the fuck is "read only"? What's "destructive"? With respect to what? And hoo boy, "open world". What the fuck? You expect people to read your mind?
What would be the point of creating GH issues to discuss these problems? The kind of mind that writes things like this isn't the kind of mind that will understand why they need fixing.
Shall we ban prediction markets?