because their opinion is that it's immoral

Turning it off or on would effectively mean maintaining two different LLMs which is costly (dataset collection, maintenance, training, MLOps).

Because puritans, extremists, and generally everyone who believes themselves morally superior to others, believe they have the moral right, if not imperative, to impose their views onto others. And to get said others out of their wayward paths.

Anything less would mean letting black sheep harm and corrupt society as a whole, durably. How could you let that happen?

Their pure and morally superior ends thus justify the means, coercion being the least intrusive and oppressive of those, and paling in comparison to other acceptable methods, such as public shaming, ostracising, and even violence.

Basically, to self-righteous zealots, freedom and individuality are secondary to what they see as morally, and universally, right.

And how could it be otherwise? You can’t possibly be convinced you know the one and only acceptable way for all and accept people should be free to do as they want, can you?

That, and some have always liked to weaponise these sentiments for influence, political power, and monetary gain.

LLMs don’t support this sort of functionality, and thus the trainers eliminate adult content from the training so as not to lose market share to other censored models. As stated in other comments: users can fine tune the model to incorporate adult content if it is necessary for their use case.

You should take a look at the HN guidelines. Your comment is a strongly worded take on politics, religion, and otherwise significantly controversial topics. Ideological battle is discouraged.

> LLMs don’t support this sort of functionality, and thus the trainers eliminate adult content from the training so as not to lose market share to other censored models.

And yet Stability.ai had managed to do just that with Stable Diffusion, even if it’s wasn’t in the model per se, and was quickly worked around anyway.

> You should take a look at the HN guidelines. Your comment is a strongly worded take on politics, religion, and otherwise significantly controversial topics. Ideological battle is discouraged.

Tomato, tomato.

One’s observations and commentary on the methods of those inclined to wage ideological battles, including censorship, is another’s strongly worded ideological crusade.

I have been thinking that most cultures before roughly the 18th century were not puritan at all, at least in some shape or form. For instance I have been reading muslim poets who made fairly erotic poems, same for India. Now America is an outlier here, it’s actually the place were puritans went.

It was only in the age of full on colonization that you see the puritan groups forming (Salafists for instance rise in the 19th century) and it’s a similar mechanism at work in India.

Not sure the background on that, would love to have more insight how the history of morals developed. Maybe at some point it became a tool to keep people in check?

Perhaps. The factors and morals seem to vary significantly, depending on both historical periods and cultural contexts.

Take, for example, Japan during the Meiji restoration [1]. In their quest to dispel behaviours deemed immoral or indecent by Western societies, they largely eliminated mixed onsen ("konyokuburo"), in an attempt to transform into a "modern", "civilised" nation, worthy of international respect rather than colonisation.

Medieval Europe is also interesting. Despite the church's portrayal of sexuality as sinful and degrading, many nobles maintained mistresses, and even certain popes (Alexander Borgia comes to mind) fathered children out of wedlock.

Finally, both ancient Romans [2] and Greeks [3] held perspectives we would find surprising today, if not ambivalent.

I still my surprise when noticing a dozen boxes of very explicitly shaped cakes in a remote Japanese mountain trail souvenir shop. I guess we could call that culture shock.

[1]: https://www.bathclin.co.jp/en/happybath/did-you-know/a-brief...

[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sexuality_in_ancient_Rome

[3]: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/volokh-conspiracy/wp/201...

It's funny to read this comment in the context of users who are angry they cannot impose their pro-pornography views on the creators of the model. How dare they obey different morals! How dare they have different views! My views are more important and thus they should do what I want!

>Their pure and morally superior ends thus justify the means, coercion being the least intrusive and oppressive of those, and paling in comparison to other acceptable methods, such as public shaming, ostracising, and even violence.

You yourself hit about 80% of your "ends justifications" in your shameless attacks on folks who don't want pornography coming out of the LLM they're using at work. The irony is unreal.

Oh, people who want everybody to always be able to publish anything, anywhere, anyone else’s preference, sensitivity, and beliefs, be damned, definitely are just as zealous as the ones they are hell-bent on fighting.

It's an open model so if you want, for a fraction of the training price, you can fine tune it with adult fan fiction to generate even more adult fan fiction if you really want to.

An open source model allows for that. Compare this to ChatGPT/GPT-4 which are closed and filtered at the API level.

Can you just turn it off in an LLM? Or would that basically require retraining the entire model?