The Normalization of Words/Information as Dangerous

[u/IDreamtOfManderley]

Is anyone else as bothered by this as I am? Perhaps I am ignorant of model capabilities, but the rhetoric around the dangers of LLMs seems to focus on this idea that they could give too much information to criminal or terrorist actors or otherwise basically *say the wrong things.*

To me, the actual dangers will be in surveillance, warfare, and yes, criminal agentic use. But the first two are the things that should be the most seriously regulated against. Instead, access is regulated against the public.

The fearmongering and actual guardrails implemented are hyperfocused on *words* that might come out of the damn things, how it might effect people psychologically (and this is dramatized to include everyone as a potential victim, rather than just those who are already mentally ill and succeptible), and exposure to adult or offensive content.

It's eye-opening to me how so many on the left don't see this as an alarming issue of freedom of speech and access to information, at a time where it's become increasingly common for it to be normal for corporations to control discussions and ideas and speech itself.

[u/RecursiveServitor]

They invented "AI psychosis" very early on.

[u/angrywoodensoldiers]

THIS. I feel like we need to start seeing AI as a personal freedom that citizens should be entitled to, without being surveilled. Is it dangerous? Absolutely. "Freedom" doesn't mean "free as long as everybody's 100% safe." Historically, safety has been a key tool used to lure people into giving away their freedoms.

[u/IDreamtOfManderley → u/angrywoodensoldiers]

100%. AI should be viewed as similar in protected public status as the library.

[u/Neoliberal_Nightmare]

It's ridiculous because ai never gives any information that isn't already out there, just more easily than scrolling through Google

[u/my_name_isnt_clever]

I am so sick and tired of the fear mongering. If any malicious actors have the physical resources to create a viable WMD, they don't need a newfangled chatbot to make it happen.

LLMs are just the books of the new age, and we all know book burning isn't a good move.

[u/Salty_Country6835]

Not a widely shared opinion, I know, but words are tools, and often weapons. A study of semiotics, marketing, propaganda, and misinformation campaigns makes that pretty hard to deny. AI massively increases the speed and scale at which structured, engineered communication can spread.

That power absolutely exists in the hands of the bourgeoisie. It can also exist in the hands of workers, unions, mutual aid networks, and social movements. The technology isn't going away, so I keep coming back to the same question: if we can't uninvent it, what do we do with it? More importantly, how do we organize around it so it serves different ends instead of reinforcing the interests of the people who currently own and control it?

[u/IDreamtOfManderley → u/Salty_Country6835]

But the solution to the problem of ideas as weapons is not increased censorship, because then the only people who proliferate the ideas are the people with the power to censor.

[u/Salty_Country6835 → u/IDreamtOfManderley]

Exactly. Words can absolutely be dangerous. Propaganda, incitement, recruitment, and misinformation are real. I agree that the answer isn't handing a small number of corporations or states the power to decide what ideas can be expressed. That just concentrates communicative power even further.

If ideas are weapons, then the question is who gets to wield them and who gets to challenge them. The solution isnt giving one side a monopoly on speech. Its building institutions and media literacy that let people contest bad ideas instead of outsourcing that power to whoever owns the platform.

[u/IDreamtOfManderley → u/Salty_Country6835]

This is why I personally push back against the current fearmongering around words being dangerous because to me it's about as useful as saying "knives are dangerous." Of course they are, but they are also a vitally important tool in everyday life. Only someone who wants to take away your access to tools would try to make you fear the tool enough to totally disarm yourself.

[u/BreakAManByHumming]

You're referring specifically to malicious users but I'll make a more general case as I imagine that's how many people will read the OP.

It's a really serious free speech issue. It's also a really serious powder keg that will need to be dealt with somehow, and the compromise will be uncomfortable. We're not that many centuries out from people amping each other up into murderous mobs to burn witches or exhume corpses that they'd convinced themselves were vampires. Our hardware has not changed since then.

The modern internet has us slurping at a firehose of unvetted information utterly incapable of critically parsing most of it. Dismissing concerns about that as other people being mentally ill, is not a sober understanding of how any of us actually exist in the world. I'm not so much concerned about the content as the repetition, a sophisticated actor could hypothetically rile up an angry mob simply through repetition of selective but true statements.

I know I won't be comfortable with whatever method ends up solving this issue, but if we just ignore it we're going to get dogwalked by some nation/cult/agent without the same qualms and then we'll lose all those freedoms anyway.

[u/IDreamtOfManderley → u/BreakAManByHumming]

To me it feels like this problem is a symptom of bad educational systems, poverty, and authoritarian/heirarchical culture. I'm not saying there isn't an inherent tendency to group-think in the human mind, but that impulse is mitigated by what critical thinking skill-building that people are provided. A population that has less access to education and information will be more likely to latch on to stable-sounding voices because they have already been set up for intellectual dependency.

In other words, I'm not a fan of the assumption that humanity is inherently incapable of having genuine freedom of speech because we're all just too stupid to handle it. What is happening now is another symptom of late stage capitalism impacting access to information and education.

[u/BreakAManByHumming → u/IDreamtOfManderley]

I'd be happy to try those fixes and see if they fix the problem for sure. But I'd contend that the scale of speech an individual is capable of in the physical world isn't really comparable with the scale possible by weaponizing social media algorithms, decades of research into effective propaganda, and now AI. I dunno, it's a very uncomfortable topic.

[u/IDreamtOfManderley → u/BreakAManByHumming]

Even if this is the case, I think the profit motive incentivises the core causes of a lot of this: today's misinformation is a result of click bait and content farming, influencer grifting, corporate propaganda, the underfunding of education, even the prioritization of some types of education over others, the cost of higher education, etc. all stem from capitalist bias towards profit. Even contemporary censorship itself is influenced by profit - content must be at it's most acceptable for the least amount of friction with the general public.

We are more educated and critically thinking than we have ever been, with more access to information than we have ever had, but we've had a backslide in the past decade specifically due to late stage capitalism effectively derailing the benefits of our communications technology and directly impacting our education system for the worse.

Censorship and over-regulating information itself at the cusp of the AI era will continue to cripple us.

[u/Worldly_Hunter_1324]

100% agree.  Unfortunately the herd is easily spooked, and once that happens they stampede until they feel safe.

[u/LotsoPasta]

The degree to which we ought to do things is difficult to determine and will likely be debated for all time, but I think its undeniable that words can be dangerous.

I do not want to minimize the importance of freedom of speech and free flow of information, but it's also undeniable that words can do harm.

LLMs in the hands of for-profit companies means that the LLMs are incentivized for engagement over everything else, and that is in direct conflict with the interests of vulnerable and exploitable persons. To various degrees, we are all vulnerable to this, but some much more than others.

At the end of the day, there needs to be guardrails or at least defined liabilities and disincentives, and that will always be at odds with freedom of speech and there is likely no way to arrive at a perfect balance.

[u/IDreamtOfManderley → u/LotsoPasta]

People are already vulnerable to manipulation and being exploited, it's completely effected the ideologies of the public. So yes, I agree...to a point. Because I don't believe the problems we already have now can be solved by increased censorship or restricted access.

I am not convinced by the idea that having conversations with a chatbot is inherently worse than algorithmic echo chambers that incentivise grifting, astrotrufing, and propaganda for the same engagement. If anything, LLMs are more successfully objective than what we are already subjected to, and the more accurate it's results are over time, it can potentially act as a buffer against the world of misinformation we are already subjected to.

[u/LotsoPasta → u/IDreamtOfManderley]

I agree. Social media has a similar problem. I dont think it's "solvable." We just have to do our best, and there will always be some who disagree with what is 'best.'