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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.
Or the printing press which allows heretics to attack the honor of the holy Catholic Church. Let's pray this doesn't cause schisms and violence.
From the point of view of the powers that be, this seems like a great argument in favor of muzzling LLMs.
It is in their class interest not to destabilize a society that they are on top of. But internal threats are not alone. There's external threats to worry about. And those can't be as readily forced not to consider novel technology.
Don’t Russia China Iran etc rely much more on information control by the elites than we do?
All elites do to some degree, but China and Iran have hard power to lean back on that they have proven they are not afraid to use.
Russia is more fox like, but you do start mysteriously playing with grenades on your plane if you oppose the regime too overtly.
Meanwhile, the West is a lot more dominated by narrative management. Look at how the UK dealt with its local trouble recently for instance, it was mostly playing through the media and setting up frames rather than bluntly bashing the locals, though bashing there was.
Another thing to consider is how secure a particular elite is vis-à-vis the people who would benefit from technological advancement. Chinese corporations are solidly loyal to the party and integrated into the power structure, when western tech is basically a counter-elite at this point.
I mean you do have a point that China, Iran, and Venezuela use hard power internally to a degree that the US at least is probably incapable of doing. On the other hand, Chinese and Iranian censorship is legendary.
I'd argue it's amateurish actually. It looks extremely blunt compared to the refined techniques of narrative control the US developed through the study of social psychology in the cold war. Now granted, the mask has been slipping and US psychological operations have become pretty bad as of late, but the base level is still very sophisticated compared to Iranian methods.
I find China harder to evaluate. I don't know enough about how they do their internal propaganda. I know their diplomatic efforts have been a bit difficult but that doesn't necessarily correlate.
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