This is the rhetorical tactic of false equivalence. State censorship by an autocracy with the objective of population control is not the same thing as a private company inside a democracy censoring their product to avoid bad press and maintain goodwill for shareholders. If you want solid proof that it's not the same thing, see all the uncensored open weights models that you can freely download and use without fear of persecution.
> is not the same thing as a private company inside a democracy censoring their product to avoid bad press and
Yet this private company has more power and influence than most countries. And there are several such companies. We already live in sci fi corporate dystopia, we just haven't fully realised it yet.
People think a trillion dollar brainwashing industry is absolutely fine because of “democracy”, completely ignoring that all you have to do is use a century of experience convincing people to act against their own interests can deliver whatever you want.
Often the same people who think America is fine and safe are the ones who whine about the “main stream media” and “sheeple”.
If you were selling a product to enterprise customers, would you want it to be able to generate nude images of celebrities? Would you want it to be able to create deep fakes of politicians, or even your CEO? Would you want it to have hot takes on hot button political issues? Good luck on your sales calls. Not everything is a conspiracy.
I think there are big differences, such as whether or not you go to prison. Those differences are obfuscated when we use language like "megacorporate monopolist" or "scifi dystopia". Instead of using these abstract labels that attempt to categorize different things into homogeneous buckets that have preexisting moral valence, which is a good rhetorical strategy but a poor strategy for understanding, simply describe what is actually happening at a sufficient level of detail without judgement. We would gain a clearer understanding, which is needed to identify the real problems, such as what Meta is doing to our civic fabric, not some unimportant thing that Apple is doing to its nascent LLM that has 0% market share.
You're saying that as if Apple's LLM somehow were the exception.
No matter if we want it or not, life and cultural exchange increasingly happens on Tiktok, Instagram and the like. One thing that all those platforms have in common is that they disallow their users worldwide to have any meaningful discourse on e.g. sex, rape, and suicide. Don't you think that it's important, perhaps more important than ever before, for teenagers to be able to inform themselves about these topics?
Except Apple has a country’s worth of users, whose livelihoods are reliant on them. The “state democracy” is right now more subordinated to tech oligarchies, than vice versa.
