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Grok will let you make anything right now.
Okay, not literally anything. Hardcore porn appears to be banned. Still, I am not sure society is ready for a mainstream image model that lets you make sexy pictures of female congresswomen showing their feet.
I am really curious how this shakes out over the next few days/weeks. I am sure that the New York Times and Washington Post hitpieces are being typed right now. Was this level of freedom intentional, or an oversight? Will Elon fold immediately? My guess: he shuts down the ability to generate identifiable people in lewd situations. That is the one thing Americans won't stand for for some reason.
Things have been quiet on the AI front lately, despite or perhaps because of the election. I suspect that the major labs are afraid to rock the boat and risk getting blamed if things go poorly.
Viscerallly I kind of get it, but legally, what is the difference between this and my web browser, which doesn’t restrict me from typing “Nintendo, Disney, and Coca Cola are run by pedophiles”? I try not to be too much of a libertarian autist, but I have a hard time not seeing this as a tool which can be misused like any other.
A recurring policy trope in technology policy discourse is calling for bans on emergent capabilities on the grounds that new technologies, by lowing skill floors, allow ordinary people to break unwritten on which the social order depends. From iron swords in the late bronze age to generative AI, elites presented with new technology say "we must ban
$NEW_THINGto preserve the social order!". When this agitation succeeds, it leads to technological stasis, and technological stasis reduces the area under the curve of human welfare over time.Smart policymakers should deal with these negative "skill externalities" of new technology by writing down these previously unwritten rules and enforcing them directly, not by attempting to limit the new technology itself.
For example, we dealt with the ability for the general public to operate heavy machinery at 55MPH by creating regulatory and liability systems for automobiles, not by banning automobile disruption of railroads.
If "AI safety" advocates had applied their reactionary policies to automobiles, cars would have been allowed to go no faster than a horse and, in the name of "ethics", been barred from driving trips already serviced by trains.
Oh don’t worry they’re working hard on that. Automakers are already proposing Saudi Arabia style GPS systems to auto-ticket anyone for driving above the speed limit. And lawmakers are discussing mandatory interlock breathalyzers for all drivers.
I have often wondered if we will eventually reach a state where you can only navigate to destinations you can enter into your car's navigation computer; so that if you wanted to go off road or to somewhere you aren't authorized to go, you simply could not do it with the car.
I want to thank you for writing this, sincerely.
I had never considered that very logical end state.
And it makes my blood fucking boil.
This is how they actually take the wilderness away from us. Not through arbitrary laws that wouldn't survive challenges (and that people would willfully violate anyway) but by making it impossible to do on machine/electrical assisted physical level. They'll double down by making it illegal to own an "analog" machine that you can still control on your own (gas or diesel engine without any electronics). Everything will have GPS to the point that a lack of GPS will look like a "hole in the ocean" on a highway or other road and they'll send the police drones to investigate.
This is how they take it all away.
Not only are "they" not interested in taking the wilderness away from you, "they" make billions of dollars a year thanks to you visiting the wilderness. This post is just doomporn.
If the managerial state was interested only in doing things that benefit it rather than things that give it the appearance of control it would not be the managerial state.
If you don't think they could mandate something this stupid you need to spend more time reading random EU guidelines for whatever industry you work in.
Administrative pettiness has no bottom. Believe me.
It's amusing to read this, then flick down to the discussion about how the handmaid's tale doomposting is obviously totally ridiculous. "They want to take away the wilderness from us" is the handmaid's tale for dudes.
Do you guys even have any wilderness left in Europe besides the alps? I kind of thought it was all farms and pastures.
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