<story><title>AI model weight providers should not police uses, no matter how awful they are</title><url>http://marble.onl/posts/model_censorship.html</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>ianbicking</author><text>This post barely makes any attempt to actually argue for its premise, that model weight providers should &amp;quot;not police uses, no matter how awful they are.&amp;quot;&lt;p&gt;All I see is a lot of references to &amp;quot;vigilante justice.&amp;quot; This metaphor is poor because real vigilante justice is putative.&lt;p&gt;It&amp;#x27;s also like saying no one should act on any behavior unless it is illegal. I for one regularly act on ethical issues in my life that are not strictly illegal, and among those actions is that I don&amp;#x27;t care to associate with people who do not act on ethical issues. This is how most people operate, we primarily maintain social order and decency not through criminal law and regulation, but because people apply ethical rules throughout their life. Imagine interacting with someone who when critiqued simply replies &amp;quot;yeah but it&amp;#x27;s not illegal.&amp;quot;&lt;p&gt;The only serious argument I see is:&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;once infrastructure providers start applying their own judgements, pressure will mount to censor more and more things&amp;quot;&lt;p&gt;Avoiding pressure is just... cowardly? This is advocacy for &amp;quot;don&amp;#x27;t bother telling me about what this work is being used for because I won&amp;#x27;t give a shit, but it&amp;#x27;s noble because my complete apathy is on purpose.&amp;quot;&lt;p&gt;Lastly, while I generally don&amp;#x27;t like slippery-slope arguments, there is also a slippery slope counter-argument here. With no restrictions firms will not release their models at all for general use and only provide full products that have acceptable impact. This was Google&amp;#x27;s approach until OpenAI decided to let other people actually use their model and Google had to stop sitting on what they had. Model restrictions give providers an opportunity to be open with their work while still maintaining some of the ethical standards those providers voluntarily and willingly hold themselves to.</text></comment>
<story><title>AI model weight providers should not police uses, no matter how awful they are</title><url>http://marble.onl/posts/model_censorship.html</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>motohagiography</author><text>AI model rules will be as successful as any other prohibition, where outlaws will act with defacto impunity, while good people who commit sins of omission will be made arbitrary examples of. I&amp;#x27;m sure there&amp;#x27;s a name for the dynamic, where policing rules of any kind are mainly enforced against people who generally abide by them, while simulataneously giving a huge arbitrage advantage to people who ignore them or are just outlaws.&lt;p&gt;There is another problem that doesn&amp;#x27;t have any good solutions yet that will be a huge part of AI governance, and that&amp;#x27;s software attestation (direct anonymous attestation). The basic problem is how does a program assert that it is an authentic instance of itself. We&amp;#x27;ve been trying to solve it in security for apps, authenticators, and DRM for decades, and the solutions all seem fine until it&amp;#x27;s worth it to someone break it. I think it&amp;#x27;s probably just a poorly formed problem statement that defines itself in impossible terms, but when they can&amp;#x27;t govern AI models, they&amp;#x27;re going to try to govern which AI&amp;#x27;s can access what data and systems, and we&amp;#x27;re back to solving the same old cryptographic problems we&amp;#x27;ve been working on for decades.</text></comment>