99% of those using this tactics use it to justify not releasing their models to avoid giving competition a leg up(Google, openAI) and to pretend they are for "open research". As I said this is 100% bull.

The remaining 1% are either doing this to inflate their egos ("hey look how considerate and enlightened we are in everything we do!"), or they pander to media/silly politicians/various clueless commentators whose level of knowledge about this technology is null. They regurgitate the same set of "what ifs and horror stories" to scare the public into standing by when they attempt to over regulate another field so they can be kingmakers within it(if you want an example how it works look at the energy sector).

All this sillyness accomplishes is to raise a barrier to entry for potential commercial competition. Bad actors will have enough money/lack scruples to train their own models or to steal your best ones regardless how "impact conscious" your company it.

Now, I don't claim everyone should be forced to publish their AI models. No, if you spent lots of money on training your model it is yours. But you can't lock all your work behind closed doors and call yourself open. It doesn't work like this. One important point is that there is value even in just publishing a paper demonstrating some achievements of a proprietary model, but if the experiment can't be reproduces based on description given that is not science and for sure it is not open.

1. This is absolutely a gatekeeping, ladder pulling measure. 2. The commercial face of this industry is rife with dogmas of self importance. It’s nearly comical.

Add to this mix the USA trying to prevent China copying cutting edge AI technology and this was bound to happen sooner or later.

It's no longer research it's near market viability.

The amount of cool stuff people have created on top of Stable Diffusion since it was created is also amazing and would never have happened if they didn't release the weights.

Paintings that look like Pepe the frog?

The resulting storm of new applications was definitely interesting to watch, though none of em were really market viable with that version of the model.

> Now, I don't claim everyone should be forced to publish their AI models. No, if you spent lots of money on training your model it is yours. But you can't lock all your work behind closed doors and call yourself open. It doesn't work like this.

Both of you can be right. Just don't try to call yourself open.

Claiming to be “open” while not actually being open is a feature, not a bug. Just business as usual

ML-tech from the past century seems to work just fine for killing each other (have a look at Ukraine). I would be rather more concerned about the foe having better batteries at this point.

What do you think unlimited funds dumped into AI for military applications can do?

The US KNOWS this is a big deal, so much so that it has destroyed China's ability to conduct top end research.

What more destructive power can AI provide, beyond the already existing drones/biological etc etc?

The machine gun and trench warfare forced the development of the tank.

Once aircraft became military useful, battleships were rapidly vulnerable to aircraft and hence aircraft carriers.

I can imagine replacing naval mines with normally-quiescent remote-triggered torpedoes that are scattered on the seafloor a decade in advance.

How effective are troops against 3D printed drones designed to mimic animals (including birds), but which have a short-range firearm and some computer vision? Or engineered mosquitoes with the bare minimum of remote control, perhaps similar to the "cyborg cockroach" kits that have been on sale for about 9 years now? (Or just weaponise those 'roaches…)

What happens if you can predict what a command officer will say, use an AI to fake a their voice before they've spoken, and interfere with the communications to give misleading orders in the heat of combat? Doesn't even need to be a big change to the orders to alter the outcome.

(Obviously everything I've thought of in 5 minutes, the actual military will have categorised into "haha no" and "let's wargame this scenario"; I assume mostly the former).

(I'm not sure if your reply was a thumbs-up or a serious question, but that's a serious answer).

You do understand that there are nuances here, yes? In other words, that there are military operations that lie somewhere between "do nothing" and "destroy the entire world"?

Kodak had billions-with-a-b of dollars invested in the production of photographic film.

That didn't save them from competitors.

I'm not quite sure what the solution is to this by the way. I don't think the answer is no regulation, but how to improve the quality of regulation.

Do companies push for the creation regulatory bodies to stifle competition?

Whereas regulatory capture is the process by which companies shape existing regulatory bodies to serve their interests. But it presumes the existence of a body to regulate them; regulatory capture can't occur if there isn't regulation to start with.

This paper may be interesting further reading on the topic of regulatory moats specifically. (I saw your comment below discussing regulatory capture vs this specific subset of capture.)

https://www.nber.org/papers/w26001?sy=001&fbclid=IwAR0oYZBL3...

This happends with every new technology.

Organised crime? If a big enough organised crime group wanted it you'd get stuffed into the back of a van.

CIA? MI6? You'd get stuffed into the back of a van. FSB? They'd invade the country to stuff you into the back of a van then bum 20 quid off you for diesel. Mossad? They'd break into your house and replace your computer with an identical fully-functional one made of polonium *while you were using it* and say they didn't do it, while showing AI-generated footage of a Russian doing it on TV and crediting you for the software they totally didn't steal.

Had a good chuckle. Didn’t know Tom Clancy frequented hacker news.

As you say, the big bads have means regardless, and probably don't need it because they're often big enough to hire a lot of humans to do e.g. propaganda for them.

Now, imagine a conspiracy theorist. Not a harmless moon landing denier, but someone who is convinced that pizzagate was a real thing, and gets AI to fake mountains of "evidence" until the politicians that he or she is convinced did those things, are lynched, or at the very least become politically toxic.

Think it can't happen? Fake porn is already being used to harm random women, and real pictures from veterinary text books have been used as fake "evidence" of animal abuse.

AI is a tool that can make anyone more competent, but it doesn't make us better or wiser or kinder.

I'll do you one better than that. Farms use a lot of seasonal workers and small farms in particular will hire people in for a week or so when things are busy. I know a farmer who hired in a bunch of folk to help over the shearing. It turns out that two of the people he hired wanted to film around the farm to capture some of the animal abuse that absolutely must be going on because farmers have nothing better to do, but they didn't find any. So figuring that they were never going to let themselves into the "inner secret animal abuse lair" or whatever the fuck was going through their stoned little minds, they decided to...

yup...

... film themselves kicking fuck out of some sheep, and pretend it was common practice among farm workers.

The worst case scenario of the currently public models is why they want to take it slow.

It's like the lottery in one of the episodes of the TV show Sliders: you probably won't win, but if you do win, you die.

Unfortunately, most people are really bad at grokking probably, and, by extension, risk, especially in scenarios like this.

> Bad actors will have enough money/lack scruples to train their own models or to steal your best ones regardless how "impact conscious" your company it.

Indeed, totally correct.

But this is also on the list titled "why AI alignment is hard and why we need to go slow because we have not solved these things yet".

Saying "it doesn't matter if we keep this secret, someone else will publish anyway" is exactly the same failure mode as "it doesn't matter if we keep polluting, someone else will pollute anyway".

As for what they say to the public, well, fraudsters gonna fraud. It's a tale as old as time [1].

1: https://www.biography.com/news/famous-grifters-stealers-swin...

These models are capable of generating photorealistic child pornography. That's why they're not being released.

I have no evidence to back this up, other than anecdotal. All the hand waving vague posts from SD, DALLE etc read like PR tactics to avoid getting the spotlight from the media and governments.

No one wants to post about this but I think everyone knows it's true, as soon as Congress realizes what these models can be used for there's going to be a moral panic.

EDIT: All of the replies are assuming I'm saying this is a good reason for not releasing these models. I don't say that anywhere nor do I agree with it.

You should strive to respond to the strongest interpretation of what you read and not the weakest one.

If their "real reason" of CP use cases doesn't exist right now because AI tooling explicitly bans CP use cases, they have no reason to block AI tools.

I've yet to see an 18 year old that looks like an actual child regardless of how they're dressed however I'm also not looking for this sort of thing so...

This kind of thing happened a lot, and I think more than one entirely "mainstream" director in the 60s/70s filmed nude actresses below the age of 18. Fortunately it's a lot harder to get away with that these days. Not to mention (Weinstein and many, many others) sexually assaulting the actresses off screen.

Her entirely involuntary response was to exclaim, "Lady, I'm damn near 30!"

So yes; if a 28-year-old can be mistaken for younger than 14 without trying (or even wanting to), there are plenty of 18-year-olds who can appear much younger, especially if they are using makeup, acting tricks, and other means to artificially enhance that.

That’s why this whole argument is BS. It panders to those that think these things are illegal because “ew that’s gross” without actually taking the time to argue how AI slots in ethically to their worldview. Discussions about AI license laundering content are far more relevant and interesting.

The United States has barely moved past the issue of homosexuality even though it harms no one, it is perhaps the most straightforward modern example of people trying to ban it due to personal & traditional disgust. Although there is a general majority approval for it, that doesn't carry to the electoral level where it remains a contentious partisan issue. But you think the ethics of CP & pedophilia will be discussed and legislated rationally?

You should strive to respond to the strongest interpretation of what you read and not the weakest one.

(You also suggested some impending moral panic. I don’t buy it.)

We've not even begun to ask the question of whether there are ethical problems of exposing children to unregulated AI and vice versa.

All of us can be tempted into overly quick responses without truly reading what we're responding to.

The commenter did not necessarily adopt any of these positions themselves.

I agree that you were civil about it and no harm was done other than a bumpier than necessary comment thread.

Is this true, have you seen it or just heard about it? because what I seen is that the AI is bad, the faces are wrong, the fingers are wrong,t he hands and legs are often connected wrong, you can get very often more then 2 legs more then 5 fingers. I seen a community that focus on waifus, this images are not realistic, are obvious carton, animation styles and similar images were created already with digital painting tools.

I also did not seen any porn scene generated by AI, I don't think the model was trained on porn scenes so at best you will get puritans removing breasts from the models, including art , but for sure I want to see how they will ensure that the AI can only generate male nipples and not women ones.

I have seen it. SD is capable of generating CP that is indistinguishable from a real photograph with correct anatomy.

> I also did not seen any porn scene generated by AI

There are user made SD models trained on porn available for months now.

You mean a child with no clothes? is that CP? there are painting and art of children with no clothers, or you mean you seen sexual acts too? Since I never seen it with adults , AFAIK SD was not trained with porn scenes , at best you might get realistic breasts but not get realistic sexual organs and add on top the low resolution.

>There are user made SD models trained on porn available for months now.

So you would also have an issue even if SD was 100% SFW because some dude in his basement would train it to generate breasts and dicks and then combine it with SD that can generate faces, so SD should not exist ?

People were drawing porn stuff digitally for decades, now an AI will do the same, maybe you need a better case , CP is still illegal, Google and Apple will snitch on you also so WTF is this hysteria ?

In fact tbe cause of this CP and Google stuff I avoided experimenting with Google colab SD, the AI might paint a monstrosity but Google AI might think is CP and close my accounts.

Also you feailled to respond to my accusation of missing evidence, missing evidence that drawing porn or CP ever caused victims, or more victims then say sending you kid to church.

You can retrain SD without NSFW images, is this enough? I suspect not, because what if Timy in his basement trains SD with the face of X and the naked body of Y and then makes a nude image ?

You know what makes rational/logic sense ? |Follow the money, an open source model like SD makes proprietary ones like OpenAI and googles lose ton of money, like a giant pile of money Californian billionaires will lose , so they use their money to create drama.

Twenty years ago we were free to do whatever we want, because it didn't matter. Nowadays everyone uses tech as much as they use stairs. You can't build stairs without railings though.

Keeping the window for abuse small is beneficial to the whole industry. Otherwise bad press will put pressure on politicians to "do something about it" resulting in faster and more excessive regulations.

Yes you can. Your hammer doesn't magically stop functioning when it discovers that you're building stairs without railings.

You don't want tools to discriminate on what you can and can't do with it, because if you can discriminate, then you will get hammers from Hammer Co that can only use nails from Hammer Co.

This is how many other engineering disciplines work. Most people don't realize most engineers actually work under an exemption to this rule. But the mechanisms exist.

I don't think this is the way it will unfold though. Giving licenses to SWEs gives them even more leverage in the job market, which I don't think software companies will want to do and would fight that type of regulation tooth-and-nail.

Before the recent AI boom in the US, China was known to have better opportunities for AI researchers. Hugo de Garis and Ben Goertzel both went over to China for that reason some time ago. Interestingly, De Garis predicted that a world war would eventually start over the issue of AI prohibition.

Would this include any type of AI because a simple linear regression is technically "AI".

This seems to me to be a problem specifically because the issue people have with models like dalle is that they could be used for harm (e.g., generated deep fake porn, cp, etc.), but that is left up to the consumer. The same could be said about any product. This seems to be akin to trying to "ban math" like then the US tried to ban the export of crypto. It necessarily fails in the end because no regulation can actually stop it, and once it exists it exists.

Plus, one could just set up a foreign hosted VPN and sell their "regulated" product from outside the US anyway.

For example, some industrial programs require adherence to ASTM standards for pressure vessels. This extends to seemingly common tools like air compressors, which some people take umbrage with. It really comes down to the way in which industry/regulators craft the standards.

The best way IMO is to make the applicability risk based. Can the linear regression result in loss of human life? If so, maybe being “stamped” by a licensed engineer is appropriate. Approval by a licensed engineer essentially says a competent has ensured the relevant best practices to mitigate risk has been implemented.

I can't predict what lawmakers do, but it wouldn't surprise me if the first draft said before someone explains to them what Excel spreadsheets do when drawing trend lines.

That said, the general gist here is an extension of the UK's Data Protection Act and it's successor in the EU's GDPR: while those said "don't process personal data without permission", I can easily believe it would be analogous to "don't process real data without the OK of a chartered engineer".

> Plus, one could just set up a foreign hosted VPN and sell their "regulated" product from outside the US anyway.

Absolutely; the internet mocks national sovereignty.

Also, Stable Diffusion isn't a US product in the first place, it's a UK corporation and a German university research lab, amongst others: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stable_Diffusion

That is also why it gives engineers more leverage. If a manager needs some to certify it, that licensed engineer has much more ability to push back on the design. The liability the stamp conveys is also why they tend to get paid more than unlicensed counterparts.

I deal with a moderate vision impairment and everything I do to make computers more usable is bespoke hacks and workarounds I’ve put together myself.

In MacOS, for example, I can’t even replace the system fonts with more readable options, or increase the font size of system tools.

Most software ships with fixed font sizes (electron is exceptionally bad here — why is it that I can easily resize fonts in web browsers and not electron?) and increasingly new software doesn’t render correctly with an effective resolution below 1080p.

Games don’t care at all about the vision impaired. E.g. RDR2 cost half a billion dollars to make yet there is no way to size fonts up large enough for me to read.

I welcome regulation if it means fixing these sorts of problems.

I routinely open tickets with software vendors and open source projects asking for things that ought to be low-hanging fruit and I’m either blown off or directed to tools that don’t make sense for me (usually magnifier or text-to-speech). The appetite for fixing issues that limit my access to software is essentially null.

I’ve dealt with these problems for two decades and I really believe that there is very little economic incentive to make software accessible. Unless substantially more people become vision impaired in the future, that’s how it will stay. I am pretty certain that only way software companies will really take the vision impaired into account is if they are forced to.

If even a fraction of those with limited vision did this the problem would be solved.

And if its not, then it's probably not worth making it accessible (e.g. if it would cost £10k to make some obscure game accessible that would probably only have a half dozen vision impaired users that's just not worth it, the time of the developers is worth more than the hypothetical users enjoyment of the game).

"Self enforced limits" could also be an attempt to avoid formal governmental regulation.

The maturity of CS as an industry is still in it's infancy compared to other engineering disciplines. I'm sure if you went back to the 1880s, five or six decades after the start of industrial revolution, there was very little limitation on the design of mechanical equipment. Now, there are all kinds of industry standards and government regulations. We could lament how much this stifles progress, but we're generally not even cognizant of the amount of risk it has reduced. For example, most people don't give a second thought to the idea of their water heater being capable of blowing up their house because it happens so infrequently.

Code is information, and information wants to, and will be free.

Short of a North Korea like setup, regulations can only slow down the spread of information around the world.

AI is all fun and games when it's data, but if it's being used to make decisions about how to take actions in the physical world I think it's fair that it follows some protocols each society gives it. Making a picture of a cat from a learned model, writing a book with a model, cool, whatever. Deciding who gets their house raided, or when to apply the brakes on an EV, or what drugs should be administered to a patient, we probably want to make sure the apparatus that does this, which includes the code, the data and the models, is held to some rules a society agrees upon.

The model was unable to give any useful predictions. I don't know if it would perform better without the deliberate limitations, but I do know that healthcare staff are making their own judgements in it's absence.

But the development and proliferation of AI by extralegal entities cannot be stopped. Individuals, foreign researchers, foreign business, etc will keep pushing the frontier of AI forward indefinitely.

AI can be regulated but it cannot be controlled.

"A metal strip on the floor of Eurode Business Center marks the border between Germany and the Netherlands.

On one side of the building, there's a German mailbox and a German policeman. On the other side, a Dutch mailbox and a Dutch policeman."

https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2012/08/09/158375183/the-...

Water "wants" to flow downhill. Gasses "want" to expand to fill their container. Genes "wanting" to replicate drive animals literally wanting to reproduce, and the incidental awareness of that drive in some species comes down to a certain molecular arrangement brought about by said genes. The genes are data, the minds are data, and the natural pressure is that that data which succeeds in reproducing will tend to keep reproducing. So in the original sense of the notion of memes as proposed by Dawkins, yes, information "wants" to be free, as that is its tendency. The only other option is that said data ultimately dies out.

If you're old, you say speech. If you're younger and watch any integration modern technology into life, you'd say both.

But at the end of the day, your viewpoint doesn't matter. What does matter is when the 'average person' feels unsafe by this 'informational speech' as you like to call it, that it will be banned and restricted and you will be punished under the full force of the law for trafficking in it. Your neighbors will cheer as you're dragged out of your house by a swat team for being an evil terrorist. SCOTUS will make whatever finding is politically expedient for the majority parties point of view that is the majority at the time, and you will rot in prison until you die of old age.

So, your choices are attempting to setup a regulatory framework to minimize the dystopian hellscape your ideas will create or embrace the dystopian hellscape.

You have a cite for this actually happening with respect to a work of art in the United States in recent years?

Cybersecurity is a mess and 100% the reason is "no skin in the game." If a car manufacturer promises or even implies "safety," and something bad happens, they get sued or they take real action.

The big tech companies must be held to do the same.

We have civil law. If a company harms you, you can sue. No need to create regulation to make markets less competitive.

Regulations work very frequently; they're around us ALL the time. Yes, they sometimes fail or don't work perfectly.

My point is that unless the regulation we're discussing is merely marginal in cost of adoption, there will be definite harm caused to small businesses trying to bootstrap from the ground up. It's not some bogeyman of an argument. It is quite a real possibility.

"If we put regulations on safety measures in new buildings, such as railings and fire escapes, it will hurt small businesses."

Maybe it will. It's still not an intelligent point. Stop.

Such policies do a number of things:

1. Raise consumer costs since these new regulations need to pass the costs to the consumer.

2. Inhibit competition since now new businesses need to have to know-how or pay for super specialists or some external service to get them complaint before they can even offer a product or service.

I'm not discounting all regulation, but at some point consumers can't consume blindly and need to be thoughtful. Some businesses may get third party certs stating they're compliant with industry leading security practices. They can charge a premium. Other companies may target more elastic consumers that want the service but don't care about whether their data, etc. is protected. They can choose to buy the products/services without certs, as they would likely he cheaper to differentiate themselves.

Just please stop with this tired and broken line of thought, it does not work out for the individual in the end.

What are you talking about? My point was related to anticompetitive regulation, which is generally supported by the wealthy since it increases barriers to entry and reduces their competition.

The difference here is like not being able to own a hammer or car mechanics tools for your own personal use, and only being able to use them under corporate guidelines/surveilance in a restricted area, which is ridiculous.

The license is required because refrigerant is categorized as an ozone-depleting substance, and the sales restriction is established by the Clean Air Act[0]. All of which is under control of Environmental Protection Agency.

I guess you can argue that any pollution-restricting laws are based on the premise of "being dangerous to people other than you," but that's not quite what people have in mind when talking about things being restricted due to being dangerous. We are talking about things like "driving a non-street-legal car" or "owning this one potentially dangerous carpetry tool", not "increasing gas taxes to disincentivise pollution."

The potential danger being inflicted in those cases is direct and specific. You can totally drive a non-street-legal car on your farm, even without a registration and a license plate, as long as you do it purely on your own property and not on the actual road.

And that's the approach that personally makes sense to me with AI-generated images. Any restrictions on it should be imo on the distribution and the commercial/sales side (e.g., you should not legally be able sell ai-generated posters of your neighbor in an embarrassing situation without their permission or sending them to that neighbor's workplace), not on the creation/usage side (e.g., you should be legally able to generate those images of your neigjbor, with any potential restrictions and legal problems only beginning to come your way at the distribution stage).

0. https://www.epa.gov/section608/refrigerant-sales-restriction

The reason I use pollution as an analogy is that having it happen society-wide creates new problems that simply don't appear on an individual scale. What happens when someone builds a browser extension to let you porn-ify any image you'd like? What happens when schoolyard bullies can fabricate a compromising video as easily as they can make up a nasty rumor today? I think most people would prefer not to live in a society that works that way if they can avoid it.

There are many examples of this.

- Non-proliferation folks who think they can actually rid the world of nukes. Will not happen.

- Does anyone seriously think they can stop human cloning, once it's technically feasible, from happening somewhere on the planet sooner or later? By fiat, by legislation, by moral appeals, etc? Will not happen. If clones can be made, clones will be made. Descriptive, not normative claim.

- AI-generated content has reached a certain point where we have to worry about a whole host of issues, most obvious being more sophisticated fakes. "Please think of potential consequences", ad-hoc restrictions, self-imposed or otherwise, are moot in the long run. It's part of our world now.

It looks to me that you're shifting the goalposts here: nonproliferation has effectively reduced the number of countries with access to nukes. Or is worrying about the number of direct military conflicts between nuclear-armed powers an example of what you call 'missing the point'?

Larger point being: with some disruptive technology, like nuclear weapons, if it can be done, it will be done.

I disagree with the idea that putting restrictions in place shouldn't be done because 'the problem exists'. The problem exists but that doesn't mean measures can't be taken to keep it manageable. I don't think the majority of people are in your intended demographic of wanting to stop the problem. Most just want to prevent exacerbating the problem.

Specifically when it comes to the problem of AI fakes, I'd rather invest effort in harm reduction - train better fake recognition systems - than attempting to stop people from abusing this technological advance by crafting moral appeals and attempting to legislate it all away. Or something as silly as hiding the code. I think mine is a more robust measure.

AI image generation is not a build-your-own-weaponized-virus kit.

It’s a useful tool that can be used to produce creative expression. What people produce is up to them, and the fact that they might misuse their capacity for free speech isn’t an argument for curtailing it.

This is doubly true with regard to technologies that seem not only powerful, not only adaptable to new domains, but also rapidly improving on both of those dimensions. I don’t know what is the right level or type of limitation, but there is nothing confusing or weird at all about wanting to be careful with such a technology.

If technology keeps advancing (it will), new developments will approach “looks kind of alarming” status faster and faster. This is because they will also approach “could destroy everything we know and love” status faster and faster.

Lets take a current potential problem. That is a low powered application capable of facial recognition. You can now strap that on to any number of dumb weapons and you've created a smart weapon.

In itself it's not a problem, until it starts happening a lot. If you think like a house cat, you tend to think that society owes you its existence and you're the king of the hill. But say weapons proliferation occurs all those ideas of "I have rights" go right out the window, and this loss of rights will be supported by the masses that don't want to get droned in the head out on a date. The tyranny you want to avoid will be caused by the pursuit of absolute freedom.

As technology becomes more complex the line will blur even further. AI as a build your own 'terrible thing' will happen. Physics demands it, everything is just information at the end of the day.

Now it's up to you to avoid the worst possible outcomes between now and then.

Even actors like the Unibomber had a huge impact on things like bomb detection in mail and airplanes. Now imagine the modern Unibomber, instead of attacking randoms went after senators. The moment the class protected by wealth and power comes under attack from AI technologies expect a raft of laws limiting and restricting them to be enacted.

That's exactly why your rental histories at places like Blockbuster are, by law, confidential; A politician had their rental history leaked. Once a deepfake of a politician gets enough movement, said politician is going to begin rallying support against AI.

Crispr has changed a lot of things and make possible for an outsider, with 10.000$ and a little dedication, to alter genome of every living form.

https://www.ft.com/content/9ac7f1c0-1468-4dc7-88dd-1370ead42...

Now we have the additional risk of man made biological risk amplified by cheaper and cheaper genetic engineering as well as natural biological risk amplified by a nonstop global travel network. Neither of these risk vectors existed til recently either.

IMO the only analogous risks pre-cold war were what, asteroid strike or volcanic event? Those are rare and, more importantly, not modulated upwards by any human action or human system. Nuclear and bio risk probably only climb with more people and more technological advancement.

Not very good but:

a) the people who currently have this tech are not what I'd call trustworthy so why should I leave dangerous tech only in the hands of dangerous people?

b) it would probably kickstart a "build your own vaccine kit" industry

I think this is just fear of the unknown at work. Biomedical knowledge is complicated and requires effort to learn therefore most consider it a known unknown therefore something to be feared. Some people do have such knowledge therefore they are to be feared because who knows what nefarious intentions they have and what conspiracies they are part of. Therefore they are dangerous people using dangerous tech.

Were the physicists who discovered how to split the atom also dangerous people?

In the ordinary meaning of the word? Yes. That's why they were sworn to secrecy.

Not the same as saying they were immoral or wrong to have worked on the Bomb, that's a different debate, but in terms of sheer effectiveness they were incredibly dangerous.

An army is dangerous. That's how it works.

Danger is part of the domain of threat modelling. And when doing threat modelling, the morality of the opponent is a distraction.

However in the domain of propaganda, threats, immorality and assigning the latter to the former go hand in hand.

I would argue not, given the evidence[1].

[1] https://theintercept.com/2021/09/09/covid-origins-gain-of-fu...

What kind of trust did you place in them that was now broken?

I at the very least believe they would not desire to expose themselves and their loved ones to pathogens.

If the origin was a leak, then, sure, we should see if any biosecurity protocol was broken and why, and design better protocols. But posturing that the researchers were not "trustworthy" is not helpful.

You call them untrustworthy and dangerous people and by that you are implying malice. Why? And what makes you believe outside of that small circle there aren't people far more malicious?

If creating diseases becomes so easy anyone can do it, we will see the age of biological ransomware. I am certain there are people far more malicious and far more immoral than any of the researchers who worked on this.

Come on, I'm not a student debating in the common room, this is just silly.

Since you decline, I believe it is useless to continue the discussion.

As for building your own vaccine. Even large nations were not able to develop effective ones. It’s easier to put a bullet in someone than it is to take it out.

In this talk[1] at DEF CON, John Sotos pleads with hackers to put their time into learning how to combat biological weapons. He points out that the tech will move forward to being able to target more and more specific populations. Like any other weapon, knowing that your enemy has it too and can hurt you or those you care about with it is a highly effective deterrent.

> As for building your own vaccine. Even large nations were not able to develop effective ones. It’s easier to put a bullet in someone than it is to take it out.

Two things here. Firstly, trauma surgery and techniques from the military and places where bullet wounds are common have benefited the rest of us for when we get into scrapes of even a non-violent kind.

Secondly, defence does not always lag behind attack, you assume that the future would look like now but that is to ignore the history of any tech of such nature.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HKQDSgBHPfY

"Fire!" (falsely) in crowded theatre: Specific. Beneficial outcome unlikely and difficult to even imagine. Harmful outcomes nearly certain.

Powerful AI codebase or service: Generic. Endless beneficial and harmful outcomes easily imagined.

Generic means it can do a nearly unlimited list of things good and bad right?

Just like a human can do a list of nearly unlimited things?

Humans, because they can do both good and bad have laws they must follow if they do bad, right?

Then what are you suggesting for AI?

Nuclear material can be used to treat cancer. But it can also be used to make weapons. We regulate both.

Limits to speech were sill upheld if that speech could reasonably incite “imminent lawless action”.

> Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes defined the clear and present danger test in 1919 in Schenck v. United States, offering more latitude to Congress for restricting speech in times of war, saying that when words are "of such a nature as to create a clear and present danger that they will bring about the substantive evils that Congress has a right to prevent....no court could regard them as protected by any constitutional right."

That was ostensibly for sending literature to recently conscripted soldiers suggesting that the draft was a form of involuntary servitude that violated the Thirteenth Amendment.

Whereas, clear and present danger is defined as:

> Advocacy could be punished only "where such advocacy is directed to inciting or producing imminent lawless action and is likely to incite or produce such action."

That test is basically redrawing the law so it fits, once again, with that of common assault and breach of the peace. Still, I'm not sure what relevance all of this has to the subject at hand, unless we're going to end up at whether something is legal or not or even more absurdly, whether there's a war or not. Those are not very interest nor compelling arguments, especially as there are no such kits yet and no such law regarding the kits (unless we concede that it may well be covered under the 2nd amendment, as it states arms not guns).

[1] https://mtsu.edu/first-amendment/article/970/incitement-to-i...

[2] https://mtsu.edu/first-amendment/article/189/brandenburg-v-o...

[3] https://mtsu.edu/first-amendment/article/193/schenck-v-unite...

[4] https://mtsu.edu/first-amendment/article/898/clear-and-prese...

>Still, I'm not sure what relevance all of this has to the subject at hand

The point is rights exist. An to put a limit on a right, you must show a clear and imminent risk. I think you got a little wrapped around the axle on the 2A piece and missed the connection to the article at hand.

When you equivocate code to free speech, there will be people who say certain code is dangerous enough to be limited in that regard. Meaning, a discussion about regulating code is apropos, even though many people will disagree about the threshold of what constitutes a credible risk.

If you're going to correct others for misstating the facts and reasoning of US Supreme Court judgements then I think it only fair that others may do the same to you.

This is a scenario for a dystopian science fiction novel, as opposed to a a rational plan for our children's future.

> “What we have developed over decades for cancer vaccine development has been the tailwind for developing the COVID-19 vaccine, and now the Covid-19 vaccine and our experience in developing it gives back to our cancer work,” Tureci said.

[1] https://nypost.com/2022/10/19/covid-vax-makers-say-cancer-va...

Do you think the advances in medical techniques for treating gun wounds was the intent of gangbangers when they shoot each other?

Do A in order to promote B requires intention. It doesn't matter that no one is doing that because it's a straw man, as I'm not arguing it either. What I am saying is:

If A then B will occur (probably and with increasing likelihood).

Quite different.

My heart is full of bad intentions, that must be it, it can't be that I simply found your logic to be wanting.

I would like you to tell me how I can quote you out of context when your replies are just above, that would be interesting. This thread is the context, I doubt you even need to scroll from my quote to see yours in full.

And what you did is, indeed, quoting out of context. The whole issue with quoting out of context is that, when you look at where the quote was taken from, you can see that it does not actually support the claim that it allegedly justifies. When the original is right there for anyone to check, it merely raises the tangential question of why the quoter thought the argument would succeed in the first place.

And if you do think they are comparable, note that the equivalent of a "build-your-own vaccine kit" in your scenario has not materially improved the situation (right now, "Google Has Most of My Email Because It Has All of Yours" is at position 8 on the HN front page.)

because handing it to everyone doesn't make things better? I don't like that Putin has nukes, but it's much better than Putin and every offshoot of Al-Qaeda having nukes.

Civilization ending tech in the hands of powerful actors is usually subject to some form of rational calculus. Having it in the hands of everyone means basically it's game over. For a lot of dangeorus technologies there is no 'vaccine' (in time).

Nukes Are very very effective at creating terror. Terror is somewhat effective at almost any action that requires the participation of others. Ergo, nukes are effective at threatening other to do what you want.

Want to counter that, fine. Genetically engineer every person to be invulnerable to radiation and explosions and the desire to use nukes diminishes because they are no longer as effective.

Sayonara.

This isn't Twitter, please keep this juvenile nonsense for there.

As to your "answer":

> Genetically engineer every person to be invulnerable to radiation and explosions and the desire to use nukes diminishes because they are no longer as effective.

aside from it approaching word salad, I was referring to the deeper causes of violence. I would trust (there's that word again, I hope you can cope this time) the Dalai Lama with any weapon known to man and any only dreamt of, because, as he says[1]:

> “Real gun control must come from here,” the Dalai Lama said, pointing at his heart.

How you failed to deduce that with your enhanced powers of insight into me, I cannot fathom.

[1] https://www.sfgate.com/politics/article/Dalai-Lama-says-real...

Do you know what they found?

Were you aware of the low level of biosecurity protocols on the site?

Things like that ;-)

You can find plenty of people who would answer all "no"-s and would be far more destructive if they had access.

Would you also claim that no one who worked at Cernobyl was trustworthy? This is just guilt by association.

Let's see.

“Did you fund gain of research function at the labs in Wuhan?”

This speaks to trustworthiness and responsibility/recklessness.

“Do you know what they found?”

This speaks to, again, trustworthiness and transparency.

“Were you aware of the low level of biosecurity protocols on the site?”

This speaks to, again, trustworthiness and responsibility/recklessness.

> You can find plenty of people who would answer all "no"-s and would be far more destructive if they had access.

It shows that those with the technology now are not trustworthy, going forward I might have different questions but we should start where we are, not by providing an apologetic and condoning poor behaviour.

> Would you also claim that no one who worked at Cernobyl was trustworthy?

Did they fuck up? Were they part of an organisation that fucked up? What did they do to stop the incredible fuck up from happening?

> This is just guilt by association.

Of whom to what?

With regards to Cernobyl, other than Anatoly Dyatlov (who can directly be ascribed blame and served prison time), it is really hard to blame any of the people involved. Yet there were all kinds of known and unknown stresses and defects in the system that resulted in a tragedy. Does that mean we should ban nuclear energy?

I'm so glad you were able to read my mind, perhaps you could open source your mind reading device, or would that be too dangerous to share to the public?

What I have decided is that there is evidence of lies by people involved in the funding and the implementation of the research at Wuhan, there really is no need for your clumsy straw men, especially when you can read my mind.

> Does that mean we should ban nuclear energy?

I'm the one arguing for the further distribution of technology, are you arguing with yourself now or did your mind reading device go on the blink?

That we have now run into a technology which makes many of _us_ uncomfortable should give you pause for thought and reflection.

So you can make pictures and 3d models from text descriptions. So you can get a voice to say something. But if you were determined to do bad things, you already could. It would be easy enough to hire an actor who sounds like Obama and make him say something outrageous. It would be easy enough to use Photoshop to make disgusting images.

Are you sure it's the capabilities you fear, and not the people who now for the first time will get access to them?

Are you sure "we", the wealthy, the technologically and educationally resourceful, the powerful, are so much better custodians?

Ultimately, I don't think we'll able to keep the cat in the bag though. If nothing else, nation actors like Russia or China will get their hands on it and crank the propaganda machine with it. We might be better prepared if we just shorten the learning process and give everyone access. That might open some hope that we'll be able to adapt. It's a really scary dice roll though.

Maybe a flood of AI-generated propaganda is what it will finally take to get the average person to realize that the internet is (and always has been) overflowing with manipulative garbage made by people with bad intentions. So maybe the next time they see a video of <political opponent> kicking a puppy in the face, their first thought will be "maybe this video is fake?" rather than instant outrage.

I think most people aren't gullible/naive, but for some reason that part of their brain that protects them from being exploited/manipulated/ripped off/tricked/etc completely shuts down whenever the internet is involved. Maybe increased exposure can change that?

I'm pessimistic on this. There is the question around people's ability to adapt well to this, but maybe more fundamental, trust the internet is all-permeating now. What's not "the internet" these days? All media that distribute news are on the internet. May this be the New York Times or Twitter. Even more traditional publications get news from Twitter. On the other hand, are your friends on Facebook the internet? How about when you call them?

Not sure what the solution here is. Going back to a few networks that show news at 8pm?

I've recently been thinking about the possibility of a social platform that rewards things like providing additional sources for or against things others posted.

I think all of this is gonna be a defining struggle of our time.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Firehose_of_falsehood

>I think most people aren't gullible/naive,

I think you're telling yourself this as a self protection mechanism in order to avoid asking some harsh truths about reality. The first one should be that your exposure to things in real life is very limited. You cannot make judgements on most things you see on the Internet/TV/News because you have no experience with complicated environments they exist in. And yet almost everything you see is trying to bring you to a call to action on said topics.

For example, if you live in a nice wealthy white suburbanite neighborhood the idea a cop would just pull up and shoot you is tantamount to a spaceship appearing. And yet with the ever increasing amount of body cam footage this seems to be an occurrence in cities far more than we'd like. Now, if a video shows up online of a cop just executing someone what opinion are you supposed to form? Apparently cops do things like this, but at the same time there are motivations for people to fake this too.

This is an impressively optimistic take.

Why do you think this will happen?

Gelman amnesia has been happening for at least centuries, with no sign of reduction that I'm aware of.