Earlier quoted context omitted.
The printing press gave us the renaissance, even though the church argued it was too dangerous to give non-clergy access to books. Even things like universal access to guns was a net positive. It led to the end of feudalism and rise of democracy. The sad truth is that whenever any one group of people gets a monopoly over an important technology, they use it to exploit/enslave/murder everyone they can. Look at the int…
Restricting things like creation of a highly infectious virus is very different from restricting books or even guns. There is no 'monopoly' over such a technology, as a use of the technology will inevitably harm the creators themselves. Restrictions on high end biology, chemistry would leave overwhelming number of use cases of LLMs unaffected - no need to ban open weight LLMs. Such restrictions can be even more effec…
I also don't entirely understand your comment, because your latter parts do not follow from your lead. You're 100% right that somebody who's not extremely capable messing with this stuff is overwhelmingly likely to just hurt themselves. And somebody relying on a chatbot to guide them in dealing with this sort of tech? Yeah, they're gonna win a Darwin Award.
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I also think there's an entirely different, yet also compelling argument, against censorship. Local LLMs already exist and are advancing rapidly. There will come a time, probably in the relatively near future, when the state of the art big system and a decent uncensored local system will become practically indistinguishable in terms of capability. So not only will people be able to do this locally, but you lose something big in the process.
The reality is that our interactions with LLMs are 100% being actively surveilled, regardless of privacy promises of the companies involved. At the minimum, every chat is making it's way over to the NSA's Utah data center, one way or the other. Some guy trying to do something significantly malicious using an LLM is little more than a gift to the authorities, but this is only true with centralized/online uncensored services. Push people onto local models to do nefarious stuff, and law enforcement is blinding themselves.