Olives @olives@qoto.org

Do you know of any civil rights (i.e. free expression / privacy) violations which I don't?

Screaming about the end of the world is marketing for OpenAI.

Holding "AI summits" about the end of the world is marketing for politicians.

NodeBB (which seems interested in joining the fediverse) is a lot like Discourse but it isn't run by a jerk from Silicon Valley. It's Canadian.

By the way, by his own standards (if someone believes in whatever he is doing, frankly, he seems to be a troublemaker) what he is doing seems to be... very unethical.

For instance, instead of giving advice (well, minus all the censorship and most over the top stuff) to someone many months ago quietly, he seems to have sat there trying to manufacture a "scandal", so that he could descend down like some sort of "wise sage".

Even if the vendor was wrong though, or perhaps, imprecise (seems like a stretch, but alright, let's theorize that way), it's still the usual "what if" "could be" "might be" "possibly".

And, again, not really practically relevant.

Is it ethical to charge for access to technical standards?

"I also hope" It's a figure of speech. It's objectively better if it were.

Oh, look, another hit piece, except they never bothered to ask whether the model was actually trained on the entire dataset, or a filtered part.

I also hope it's not another "picture of the room" or a "clothed person" which he seemed to mention last time, which are in his dataset of evil bits.

He admits it is extremely unlikely to have a practical impact, although this isn't very interesting, it is also buried. Typical.

David just won't stop embarrassing himself. What a pathetic little man. He really should get a life.

Anyway, they've gone above and beyond to make sure that isn't in there now. Satisfied?

The point on the filtering comes from the vendor, not the known bad faith actor exercising his imagination. It's worth mentioning that this is a point he could have easily verified.

Nothing in particular sparked that reminder about the dive. I just figured that it was about time to post a reminder.

Reminder about my updated dive into bad faith conflations of fiction and reality (i.e. talking about a fictional scenario in similar tones as to if it was actually real in a bad faith manner), including for #AI and VR, although not limited to those two.

https://www.vice.com/en/article/v7mzpj/pornhub-content-deleted-verification

"Before the purge that disappeared more than 75 percent of content on the platform, Pornhub hosted a lot of videos and photos that weren’t humans having sex. There were full-length movies, memes, and video game playthroughs that you might see on a non-adult site like Twitch, but there was also a ton of animation, 3D renderings, audio erotica, music videos, fanfic from furries and bronies, and stop-motion animation like LEGO minifigs fucking."

From 2020.

https://www.vice.com/en/article/z3mx8j/imgur-is-about-to-wipe-a-ton-of-porn-from-the-internet
Maybe, I need to come up with reminders. Here's one.

While I agree with him on so-called censorship from the government being harmful, it feels a lot like he is in this Silicon Valley bubble where he doesn't seem to notice how aggravating Big Tech over-moderation has been for a lot of people over the past five years.

*Not recently at least.

If you go back over a decade, you might see him going "woah, too far" to Paypal over... Yup. Porn related censorship.

https://www.techdirt.com/2023/12/26/substack-turns-on-its-nazis-welcome-sign/ I honestly find posts like this quite fascinating, as Mike didn't always bend over backwards like this to excuse people attacking sites over their moderation policies supposedly being too permissive.

https://reason.com/2023/12/21/substackers-battle-over-banning-nazis/ For instance, here is a more principled take. It's not anything particularly shocking, it's just a pretty traditional take on free speech. She's also not someone who is a fan of the "War on Porn" and has written a fair bit about that.

Of the two, Elizabeth is naturally the one who is far more correct, and Mike is the one who doesn't understand how any of this works. Perhaps, Substack is not the best example, as they're more selective, but it isn't as if there haven't been examples which had porn on them.

Once a site gets to a certain scale, and they're chasing vague conceptions of "harm" in Silicon Valley, it seems that it leads to a whole bunch of nonsense, and ignoring that is simply to ignore the majority of what is going on in the world. Mike keeps losing sight of that and that is his problem. He doesn't even attempt to address this, and that is why his arguments come off as so hollow.

It's worth mentioning that whether it's sexual expression being removed by a platform, or anything else for that matter, I don't think I have ever seen a case where Mike has gone "woah there, too far". Not. One. Case. Not recently at least.

If Mike at least showed up occasionally to be like, "Alright, you have gone too far in this area", then I might have given him more of the benefit of the doubt, however, Elizabeth looks like the adult in the room here.

https://web.archive.org/web/20231226070713/https://www.coe.int/en/web/portal/-/cpt-urges-romania-to-take-urgent-action-to-improve-living-conditions-and-treatment-for-patients-in-psychiatric-establishments

"CPT urges Romania to take urgent action to improve living conditions and treatment for patients in psychiatric establishments "

"The most dramatic situation was found at the Pădureni-Grajduri Psychiatric and Safety Measures Hospital, where 104 patients had to share a bed with another patient. Patients were crammed into dormitories with almost all the floor space taken up by their beds; for example, in the admission ward, a room of 24m² was accommodating 18 patients in nine beds. For the CPT, the warehousing conditions of persons with mental disorders and intellectual disabilities found in this hospital may well be considered as amounting to inhuman and degrading treatment."

Also, from the report:

"The delegation visited the civil psychiatric hospitals of Bălăceanca, Botoșani, Obregia (Bucharest) and Socola (Iaşi). In all the hospitals visited, patients spoke positively about the staff, particularly nursing staff. However, instances of alleged ill treatment and verbal abuse by staff were received in all the hospitals visited apart from Obregia. In particular, on the male acute ward of Botoșani Psychiatric Clinic the delegation received numerous allegations of patients being ill-treated (punched, slapped, pushed, and shouted at) by auxiliary staff."

#HumanRights

https://hackernoon.com/how-to-use-an-uncensored-ai-model-and-train-it-with-your-data Using and training an uncensored LLM with your own data.

"ECPAT USA" have renamed themselves to "PACT", it seems.

So, if some org with that name shows up supporting some censorious "save the children" bill in the future, then you know it's them.

People keep learning that putting internet connected "smart cameras" in their bedrooms is a bad idea...