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Midjourney CEO Silencing Satire About Xi Jinping

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Re: Midjourney CEO Silencing Satire About Xi Jinping

#21

Post by selcuka »

rlt wrote: post #13
threatofrain wrote: post #11

You can make satire on Biden and Putin, but for Xi Jingping: > We just want to minimize drama,” the company’s founder and CEO, David Holz, said last year in a post on the chat service Discord. “Political satire in china is pretty not-okay,” he added, and “the ability for people in China to use this tech is more important than your ability to generate satire.

Principles are pretty important to some people, too.

Companies are not people. The CEO might have principles, but he cannot apply his own principles to the company. The only principle for a company is to maximise profit within the legal restrictions.

Re: Midjourney CEO Silencing Satire About Xi Jinping

#23

Post by aww_dang »

senttoschool wrote: post #9
auggierose wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It demonstrates that Chinas influence is already too big, making TikTok regulation even more urgent.

Out of curiosity, who do you want to have a big influence?

Not "who", but "what".

Principled arguments which can openly compete and evolve in the marketplace of ideas. Probably not state actors of any flavor, but this isn't necessarily exclusive of them.

Re: Midjourney CEO Silencing Satire About Xi Jinping

#24

Post by sakisv »

auggierose wrote: post #14
senttoschool wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Out of curiosity, who do you want to have a big influence?

Not China, nor any other non-democratically governed country.

If I may point out here that if we take the word "democracy" at face value (i.e. That the ruling entity needs to have the support of the majority of demos) then most countries are really not democratically governed:

The people in charge get voted in by a minority of the people who go to vote - which gets even worse if you account for people who are eligible to vote but abstain.

Re: Midjourney CEO Silencing Satire About Xi Jinping

#25

Post by chrisdbanks »

selcuka wrote: post #21
rlt wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Principles are pretty important to some people, too.

Companies are not people. The CEO might have principles, but he cannot apply his own principles to the company. The only principle for a company is to maximise profit within the legal restrictions.

Depends on the company. Conscious Capitalism and the Infinite Game are great books on why that's not the best approach.

Re: Midjourney CEO Silencing Satire About Xi Jinping

#26

Post by ChrisKnott »

selcuka wrote: post #21
rlt wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Principles are pretty important to some people, too.

Companies are not people. The CEO might have principles, but he cannot apply his own principles to the company. The only principle for a company is to maximise profit within the legal restrictions.

This comment sounds clever but makes no sense. The CEO can and must apply his principles to the company if he wants to consider himself moral under his own code.

Just think it through; is he morally bound to actively pump out lies and propaganda if that increases profits?

Re: Midjourney CEO Silencing Satire About Xi Jinping

#27

Post by chrisdbanks »

fsloth wrote: post #12

> It turns out authoritarian power and capital markets can be scary effective. I don't think authoritarian systems are as dynamic and innovative as democratic ones, but a gigantic authoritarian regime can utilize external democracies for innovation and then leverage their market power to silence criticism both home and abroad. Creative tools that impede free speech are harbingers of Orwellian future. "Sorry, you are…

These new models could be the downfall of authoritarian regimes. These regimes rely on suppressing access to information but soon we'll have an LLM that can answer any questions about the world and fit on a USB stick that can be passed from person to person. No more great firewall of China.

Re: Midjourney CEO Silencing Satire About Xi Jinping

#28

Post by tsimionescu »

chrisdbanks wrote: post #27
fsloth wrote: post #12

> It turns out authoritarian power and capital markets can be scary effective. I don't think authoritarian systems are as dynamic and innovative as democratic ones, but a gigantic authoritarian regime can utilize external democracies for innovation and then leverage their market power to silence criticism both home and abroad. Creative tools that impede free speech are harbingers of Orwellian future. "Sorry, you are…

These new models could be the downfall of authoritarian regimes. These regimes rely on suppressing access to information but soon we'll have an LLM that can answer any questions about the world and fit on a USB stick that can be passed from person to person. No more great firewall of China.

Encyclopedias exist today as well, and already fit on USB sticks. Still, Britannica has yet to topple the Chinese political system, and ChatGPT will not succeed either.

Modern authoritarian states are extremely adept at controlling the spread of information. LLMs are not even a drop in the bucket for what the state apparatus can do. If sharing USB sticks with LLMs that talk about the Tiananmen massacre ever became popular, you would get USB sticks that talk about how these are Western lies the very next day.

Re: Midjourney CEO Silencing Satire About Xi Jinping

#29

Post by fsloth »

chrisdbanks wrote: post #27
fsloth wrote: post #12

> It turns out authoritarian power and capital markets can be scary effective. I don't think authoritarian systems are as dynamic and innovative as democratic ones, but a gigantic authoritarian regime can utilize external democracies for innovation and then leverage their market power to silence criticism both home and abroad. Creative tools that impede free speech are harbingers of Orwellian future. "Sorry, you are…

These new models could be the downfall of authoritarian regimes. These regimes rely on suppressing access to information but soon we'll have an LLM that can answer any questions about the world and fit on a USB stick that can be passed from person to person. No more great firewall of China.

Raspberry Pi could include that with Mathematica in their default OS install :)

I guess they are still a bit too heavy for small ARM boards but they are probably implemented in a way that is amenable to lots of systems engineering / demoscene optimizations.

Maybe demoscene will branch off into optimizing AI - ”here’s my llama 64kb demo…” :D

How much disk space does an LLM like GPT-4.0 need?

Re: Midjourney CEO Silencing Satire About Xi Jinping

#30

Post by elihu »

selcuka wrote: post #21
rlt wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Principles are pretty important to some people, too.

Companies are not people. The CEO might have principles, but he cannot apply his own principles to the company. The only principle for a company is to maximise profit within the legal restrictions.

That's one theory. There's a competing theory that corporations have obligations to shareholders, customers, employees, and the community in which they operate. And as a practical matter, corporations can usually get away "doing the right thing" if they really want to, as it is good for the company's reputation in the long run, and therefore at least theoretically good for shareholders.
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