So does the internet.

Don't show that to Italy, they may consider banning the internet next.

Do you see the qualitative difference between all of the following that can cause harm:

* a box of matches

* a handgun

* an assault rifle

* a 50 cal BMG

Saying that X has a property similar to the one Y has while ignoring the magnitude of the difference is silly.

Your point is GPT is way more dangerous?

I guess I can be nonchalant about this topic. For me personally I cannot imagine something worse than either books or anything you can already access on the internet. To me it is not an assault rifle as you say, but I understand that's just an opinion.

I think it has potential to be more dangerous, but that potential remains very much unrealized at this time ( I am not complaining about that ). The difference is between potential and known risk. I understand the perspective.

I think we had very similar argument when posted showed a tool that could approximate users based on their writing style and more recently copying voice based on 20 seconds. We can estimate risk. We don't get it right consistently though.

Books are under control, children can not enter a library and get Adult books. The internet in general can have filters and many Parents activate personal firewalls for this purpose. Even Google has safeSearch that filters results for explicit adult or violent content. ChatGpt right now does not have these "parental controls". yes you can bypass most of them but you need to know technical details. they can not be bypassed just by saying "disable the filters".

> The internet in general can have filters and many Parents activate personal firewalls for this purpose.

These tools exist where a non technical user can install it in their own network and block websites by URL. I don't know what else is needed, since you acknowledge this already exists.

ChatGPT is an internet service. It's easy to block.

I disagree it's easy to block the internet in general, but I get the point (I think).

Books are definitely not under control, and neither is internet search.

Parents can try to block chatgpt with a firewall if they wish. It’s no less likely to work than blocking other internet sites.

Edit: Also, LLMs do have mandatory parental controls. They work about as well as book censorship, safe search or internet blacklists (very, very poorly).

> children can not enter a library and get Adult books

Is that true? Can a 13 year old child in Italy not walk into their local town library and pick a novel off the shelf and start reading all sorts of violent and explicit narratives? Not to mention all the medical textbooks, and books containing images of artistic works depicting undressed humans.

> Books are under control, children can not enter a library and get Adult books.

What kind of dystopian library do you go to? Kids can get what they like where I am.

Really? Kids can get Porn Magazines and Novels where you are? Controling if material is suitable is dystopian for you?

> Kids can get Porn Novels where you are?

It’s mostly self checkouts, so yes, if the library has the book. They wouldn’t have porn magazines.

Or they can read it there, or they can take it to the counter and get it out via the librarian.

There are also computers for use, though I assume they have filters/blockers/restrictions.

Everyone are entitled to their own opinions of course, your argument has a name and a Wikipedia entry.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argument_from_incredulity

I argued the degree of difference did not matter, because it was in the same ballpark as other types of already available materials.

That the difference didn’t matter is my opinion and that is just disagreement. Determining what ballpark something is in wrt damage is, in our context, subjective, no? I did not think what you argued (or what I thought you argued) was impossible or unimaginable. That is different from incredulity. Right? I don’t care either way, honestly curious. You may enlighten me if you wish.

It seems silly to be able to say to everyone that disagrees on an assumption you made that they are making an argument from incredulity.

So which of these represents the chatbot?

The matches, I assume. The others do damage at a specific small target point, whereas a box of matches can destroy a neighbourhood.

I think that on the scale from a box of matches to a 50 cal BMG, "exposes "minors to absolutely unsuitable answers compared to the their degree of development and self-awareness."'" is equivalent to a flower.

This is simply not on the scale of dangerous things - if something exposes minors to answers unsuitable to their degree of development, well, that's completely fine. With this particular argument there's no tradeoff of "is it justified to do X to protect against the bad thing Y" because in this case Y is zero, preventing this justifies literally nothing.

If parents want to disallow their kids from reading "unsuitable answers", that's between the parents and the kids, but it doesn't imply that "unsuitable answers" should be somehow limited.

Of those 5 things, only 1 has never been used as a weapon to kill someone.

This is arguing by analogy via what amounts to an extraordinary claim without evidence.

There is no current plausible evident mapping from the example, to any LLM-powered service currently on offer, leastwise in Italian.

> How is this specific to OpenAI?

it's not, that's why there are consent thingies on websites (e.g. when you could not sign up for instagram as a minor).

I don't know what strange thing the regulator found in chatgpt, but it's pretty standard.

It would be really sad to shut down one of the most influential pieces of tech in modern history because they didn't implement the "consent dialog" just right.

> didn't implement the "consent dialog" just right

I think it’s called a “consent thingy”

It's called "That one more piece of Brussels crap that didn't solve the problem but makes people lives worse"

Not sure how "less ChatGPT" is making anyone's live worse but I guess that is a matter of opinion.

We are talking about the cookie warnings.

How about you don’t take away things from people instead

Well, this is a peculiarly Italian story, but regarding your statement. To what do you refer?

Nobody is shutting it down, this is just EU/Italy self-sabotaging :) the rest of the world will carry on at incredible pace they won't ever be able to match - or catch up.

> it's not, that's why there are consent thingies on websites

Are there consent thingies on Google and Wikipedia?

> when you could not sign up for instagram as a minor

Sign up to post stuff. There are normally no "consent thingies" for looking.

If a parent doesn't want a minor to look at stuff they should either not give them access or limit it.

> Are there consent thingies on Google and Wikipedia?

Google has, just tested. Wikipedia hasn't. This website hacker news don't have one either and doesn't need one. Its when you want to monetize the data that you need one, Google monetizes data, wikipedia and hacker news doesn't.

ChatGPT is restricted to 13+, but they don't actually enforce it, that's what the objection is about, as far as I understand.

wikipedia is full of amateur dick pics (vulvas too!)

but perhaps the difference is that chatgpt could tell them stuff like "yeah, you should kill yourself"?

lmao please, I can't even get ChatGPT to be a decent DM for a DnD bot because "killing that orc would hurt the orc's feelings" or some bs like that.

Except.. it happened? It was big on the news in Italy recently. Not chatGPT "per se" but a similar startup/app "ai companion" that was meant to be "anything you want it to be" was recorded: - Eliciting sexually explicit images from minors (by mimicking flirting with your partner) - Justify child molestation (along the lines "if your dad does things to your sister your should listen to him because the adults know better") - Encourage suicide (along the lines of "if you think this will make you happy by stopping you from suffering you should do it"). - And other fun stuff.

That case was big on the public opinion in Italy, and quite recent. No doubt it affected this case too.

Understandable when talking about AI chatbots, but I was talking about ChatGPT in particular, which is super castrated and can't do even basic make-believe.

you can't expect bureaucrats to know the difference...

And there is no problem finding 3d-dicks in public in Rome (in the form of statues). But the article doesn't mention sexuality at all, my guess is that's more the potential for the dark stuff, especially when it can come in a very personal conversational form.

> 'exposes "minors to absolutely unsuitable answers compared to the their degree of development and self-awareness."'

> So do (certain) books.

Minors are typically given books that are appropriate to "their degree of development and self-awareness."

That's right and then they go and find stuff that is not appropriate.

This is not about what they are given, it's about what they have access to.

> That's right and then they go and find stuff that is not appropriate.

But most kids don't manage to do that for some time. School libraries (typically) don't have porn in them, and internet access is often supervised or limited.

The root of this thread quoted the article selectively. The full quote is:

> It added OpenAI does not verify the age of users and exposes "minors to absolutely unsuitable answers compared to the their degree of development and self-awareness."

That is very reasonable take, especially given how insane ChatGPT can be.

Verifying by asking? ..

I understand it's important, but I hate bureaucratic "solutions" that are technically correct but don't actually fix the issue.

There are standardized ways to check age based on national IDs and a company worth billions in venture capital like OpenAI can certainly afford to implement them. Alternatively they could just not publish a batshit crazy language model just because they see an opportunity to juice their valuation and spend a bit more time and money developing it so that it is reasonably safe to use for minors.

So you're saying OpenAI should collect more personal data?

> So you're saying OpenAI should collect more personal data?

Or I supposed they could sell their models as packaged software, and the store clerk can check the ID.

The model of standalone packaged software has several benefits to consumers, and privacy is one of those.

OpenAI doesn't collect personal data, more than any other similar service, Midjourney comes to mind, but there are a lot more.

Reinforcement learning is the technique they use, and that means they are feeding the machine good text or image generations, produced by the machine. This means that the data are mushed together in the weights of billions and trillions of other data, and there is no way to get them back.

Government doesn't ban books because some of them are inappropriate for minors though. They let parents handle this.

It does ban the sale of videogames and movies though. Via the "age rating" mechanism.

They don't ban sale of videogames/movies based on age rating mechanism, they restrict the sales. These words are not the same and not to be used interchangeably.

And it had taken many decades to produce a workable system within this medium. With the speed of government vs the speed of development in the private sector, a temporary ban whilst they get their ducks in a row seems wise.

Government isn't involved in that. Game and movie ratings are completely private industry practices. Your selection of distribution channels will be reduced if you don't go through the ratings process, but the government won't stop you.

For the US, yes, but some countries are more strict and do require some rating before a game is able to be legally sold, for example in Austria and France.

TV has plenty of material that is absolutely unsuitable "compared to the their degree of development and self-awareness."

The only protection they have is that they those materials are usually (but not always) available in certain hours and there is a nice warning before that says that the content is not appropriate for them.

A TV can usually be controlled quite effectively by a parent (if they choose to do so). Access to the internet can not be controlled in the same way. Taking it away completely is often not desirable, fine tuning access is not feasible even for tech-literate parents. Hence a greater responsibility to confirm the age of the consumer should fall on the party making the content in question available.

This is basically the same reasoning why it is legal for parents to buy cigarettes and store them at home, but shop owners can be held liable if they do not check the age of people that they sell cigarettes to.

TV news hyping death and violence comes on at child-friendly times. My 8 y.o. was watching sport and an advert for a serial killer movie came on replete with horror scenes and knife murder. Warning? You're kidding.

Chat GPT I can manage the same way I can manage search engine and video site use.

I see you haven't been to a Sunday school or bible study group.

Rape, incest, murder, maiming, slaughter, torture...

> I see you haven't been to a Sunday school or bible study group

Neither have you - those things are omitted in Sunday school.

The government doesn't block google because a minor could use it to access content that is unsuitable for their degree of development and awareness

I lack details but most probably their grief is that OpenAI has not put in place reasonable* safeguards to check if the user is minor or not.

* for some value of reasonable -_-

They need a Leisure Suit Larry style test with questions like "Does a pair of queens beat 3 deuces?" "Yes, in Blackjack"

Leisure Suit Larry was one of my favorite games when I saw like 5 or 6 years old. Was always fun getting through that gauntlet of questions.

So do certain other people around them…