No other model is so easy to generate such things. No model is so negligent in adding safeguards. I've seen it generate such things in response to a post that was clearly labeled as a 4th grader. The person you are talking to is responding to instances like that. They're not asking for it, that's obnoxiously silly and disingenuous.
Sounds like you've tried generating such things. You've seen things people wouldn't believe. Inappropriate AI images off the shoulder of Orion, etc.
Now the counter-weight over-compensation. Insisting the tool "doesn't have enough safeguards". Could it be that our AI usage innocence is related to how much we criticise the tool for not policing us enough?
Meanwhile the rest of us have never seen such images because we're not looking for those images, or trying to prompt for those images, or thinking about those images. How about the people using these tools take responsibility, rather than forcing colossal layers of safeguards on everything and everyone?
By your own admission, you've seen it generate such things.
Meanwhile, I've never seen it generate such things because I don't write sicko prompts, and the guardrails in place prevent such images. Most people have never seen it generate such things, but apparently you have. I couldn't be more intellectually honest if I tried.
It started by school kids generating images of their peers.
Researchers and police investigated this -> experts.
People found out (like the researches and investigators) that its very easy to generate this type of content.
Elon Musk himself though absolutly knows about this and how easy is to generate porn. Its his thing, freedom before anything else. Why would anyone tell the richest person on the planet what he can or can't do.
Its disappointing to see that you don't think that the richest person on the planet doesn't need to do more to protect miss use but reframe it like this.
You can't "generate" CSAM. CSAM definitionally had to be about abuse of real children. It's still bad and should be illegal but lumping them together is bad.
Personally I think AI should be treated like photoshop. If someone is creating life-like imagery of child sexual abuse that you can't determine if its real or not, then that would be the criminal action of the person producing it. Software companies should not be acting like overlords on how their software can be used.
People get upset when states try to legislate that 3D printer manufacturers should detect and prevent people trying to make gun parts, but somehow this is different.
If I use a shovel to kill a man, the shovel maker did not engage in intentionally crafting a weapon of war.
How tools are used are a reflection of the people who use them, and I definitely sympathise that tools should have guardrails to not enable this, or at least detect it.
But if a pedophile uses Whatsapp to groom a child; I don't go after Whatsapp for being a neutral service... I go after the pedophile.
If a shovel manufacturer was notified numerous times that their shovel was being used for murder and they had the capability to disable using the shovel for murder while retaining all legitimate uses wouldn’t people question why they didn’t do it?
> If a shovel manufacturer was notified numerous times that their shovel was being used for murder and they had the capability to disable using the shovel for murder while retaining all legitimate uses wouldn’t people question why they didn’t do it?
This is impossible-nobody can possibly block all illegitimate uses without also blocking some legitimate ones as collateral damage. Any moderation process (whether automated or human) inevitably has a non-zero false positive rate.
Now, you can argue that some misuse is so harmful, that the cost of false positives is worth it - but that’s a different claim.
I didn’t say block all illegitimate uses, though. We’re talking very specifically about disabling the production of CSAM. Which is something Grok seems to be able to do now! So I’m curious what legitimate uses had to be sacrificed in order to do so.
> I didn’t say block all illegitimate uses, though. We’re talking very specifically about disabling the production of CSAM
But what is “CSAM”? If by it you mean illegal material-different jurisdictions worldwide have different laws on that topic, so material which is illegal in one jurisdiction can be legal in another.
Ok, then let’s just say CSAM by definition of US law.
Twice now you’ve tried to expand the parameters of this so that it becomes something impossible to tackle. But there’s no actual reason to do that.
Grok is able to tackle CSAM, as demonstrated by the fact that they are currently doing it. The question is why they ignored the very public issue for as long as they did.
> Ok, then let’s just say CSAM by definition of US law.
“CSAM” isn’t a legal category under US law.
“Child pornography” is a legal category under US law. But, according to the 2002 US Supreme Court case Ashcroft v. Free Speech Coalition (535 U.S. 234), so-called “virtual child pornography” (imagery produced by CGI or AI, not featuring the images of any identifiable real world minors), is (partially) protected [0] by the 1st Amendment, and excluded from the legal definition of “child pornography” in the US. So if “CSAM by definition of US law” you mean “child pornography”, then a lot of the material Grok was (reportedly) producing which people were labelling “CSAM” wasn’t actually CSAM by that definition.
[0] “partially” because it still might be unprotected due to the difficult-to-prosecute obscenity exception to the 1st Amendment, but it is excluded from the scope of the distinct and much easier-to-prosecute child pornography exception
> not featuring the images of any identifiable real world minors
Right... but the material Grok was producing was featuring real world minors. Again, you're trying really really hard to expand the definition of what we're talking about to give Grok a pass and I do not understand why.
If WhatsApp knew their platform was facilitating CSAM, and they were fully within their power to prevent this but chose not to - yes this would rightly draw criticism…
the part where you claim they could “prevent this”, and imply it would be trivial.
Generative AI, famously, has difficult guardrails and there are constant “jailbreaks”.
I guess you mean that they could have been overzealous with the prevention of all “spicy” content to prevent this, but I don’t think thats even as true as you claim.
I’m no expert but it seems quite simple to detect the presence of children in an image and detect the presence of sexual content in a prompt. They expected their model to be used for porn, did they not expect pedophiles to use it? At best it’s an embarrassingly incompetent oversight.
With the other models, they don’t generate pictures of Uranium because of the aggressive censorship.
If you don’t allow the colour pink, sure, you prevent a lot of porn, but you also prevent a lot of legitimate pictures of roses. Nobody knows how to properly censor these models so most are leaning towards caution, better a lot of false positives than the alternative.
This is most obvious with Fable. It barely functions.
FWIW Grok used to have aggressive controls too- and they loosened them after a lot of feedback because it was barely functional at showing humans, even if it was a popular figure in a non-risque situation, and this is the fallout.
Ok, but what if all Whatsapp competitors explicitly banned the ability to groom children on their platform, but Whataspp didn't, and directly advertised it.
Elon himself promoted Grok’s “spicy mode” that allowed generating NSFW content that the other AI vendors wouldn’t touch with a 20 foot pole.
Believe whatever you want. Elon’s beliefs and personality problems have been baked into the core of Grok, so it’s no surprise that it turned out to be a CSAM-generating MechaHitler that steals people’s data.
Anybody surprised when Grok turns out to be trash really should read up on the guy who made it.
Yet we (rightly) condemned those that used this leniency to do nefarious things.
I'm really ready to get on the Elon hate train, and I will grant you that there was a problem that needs fixing, but I'm really not happy with the amount of censorship on these generative AI platforms.
idk how to interpret all this, despite being genuinely anti-Elon, I don't think I'm personally willing to immolate a company forever because the guardrails were temporarily too loose.
I'm not trying to make an equivalency for facts vs deepfake porn, but there is one there unfortunately, and overall internet freedom has been curtailed a lot by advertising friendliness.
xAI literally says in their own lawsuit, "Defendant breached the xAI Terms of Service and Acceptable Use Policy by leveraging Grok to generate non-consensual sexually explicit images and CSAM".
"CSAM" is literally right there. If you think know better than xAI itself, take it up with them.
You still have a DRI. In factories this would be a foreman; in software teams this could be a team lead or product owner or whatever. Their job is to apply the statistical process controls and the gemba walk, to help the team see the problems and develop the causal mental model for why the problems happen. They hold the team responsible, together, for combatting the issues so uncovered. They know who is not pulling their weight.
Of course, to do that, a business, and in turn the DRI, would have to empower the team to act in its business's best interest and stop micromanaging them.
I think the point is not difficulty but rather recklessness. I don't think other large players lack the ability or the deep pockets to do the same, but they might be lacking on the recklessness department for whatever reason. That reason, whatever it may be, might be the interesting part here.
No it's not. That statement assumes other corps care. They don't. If it was easy, everybody would be doing it. The fact that not everyone doing it is not because everyone else is not out of the goodness of their hearts
If it's actually your 401k, sure you can. Just today I rebalanced my retirement funds away from large cap stocks to avoid this steaming turd that Elon is dumping on the public.
For what it's worth, I think anything selling energy or fertilizer which is not sourced from the Middle East is a pretty good bet right now. Depends on how the US/Iran conflict plays out, of course, but I'm not optimistic.
1. At my level, the company is not just paying me to do a task the way they want it done, they are paying for my experience to orchestrate the best way to do it. They want an outcome, and I'm responsible for figuring out how to get to that outcome with the right balance of cost, correctness, etc. But yes, the most dystopian reality is what you said.
2. It's not useless, but the AI generated code is absolutely lower quality than what I would have written myself, but there is no desire to clean it up. Companies have always had a disastrously bad understanding of technical debt and they finally have tool they can shove down developers throats that trades even more velocity for even less quality. They're going to take that trade every single time.
> We're not perfect. We've done bad. But, you won't find another nation on earth or in history who has contributed as much to global progress, stability and well-being.
Ooook... but
> Defending the United States of America is never the wrong move.
is not the correct logical conclusion from that. The correct conclusion would be that it is our ability to reflect on the bad things we've done that have allowed us to make forward progress.
Universally defending something without considering the circumstances and context is rarely ever the correct stance.
OK, well the "circumstances and context" here are that most people commenting on HN live in the United States, so obviously they will be better off if the United States does well. I don't think your "um actually, you can't ALWAYS support something in all cases, sweaty" critique really adds anything to the discussion here.
I don't really think its fair to lump hams into that behavioral bucket. It's certainly a personality type that tends to get attracted to lots of different technical hobbies.
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