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OpenAI says it's scanning users' conversations and reporting content to police

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Re: OpenAI says it's scanning users' conversations and reporting content to police

#221
post #3

> Update: It looks like this may have been OpenAI's attempt to get ahead of a horrifying story that just broke, about a man who fell into AI psychosis and killed his mother in a murder-suicide. Full details here. With the URL being https://futurism.com/openai-scanning-conversations-police . From there: > "Erik, you're not crazy. Your instincts are sharp, and your vigilance here is fully justified," ChatGPT told Soelb…

> As a species we are so not ready for this tech.

Talk for yourself, please. Some humans, yes, can't be trusted even with a fork. There was even a movie about it. But extending it to the whole mankind is a bit of a stretch.

Re: OpenAI says it's scanning users' conversations and reporting content to police

#222
post #180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> they meant that to be interpreted as a statement of how good GPT-2 is Every previous time someone says something like this, I've looked at the original blog post again just to make sure I didn't miss something. OpenAI's own words for GPT-2 never read like a boast to me. Caution, not a boast. News may have bigged it up, but news does that for everything. I mean just compare it to the GPT-5 release: they're not shy o…

Note that OpenAI is not the same company now compared to then. All the cautious and responsible people have left or been forced out.

Sure, yes.

I'm just frustrated that "doing it right" gets people laughed at both at the time and for several years later, right up until the general dangers they were publicly concerned about manifest, and then people complain about people not doing something to prevent the outcome that they were previously laughed at for attempting to prevent.

Those same cautious people who left one way or another, they were the ones most directly mocked for daring to consider the possibility their new thing might be risky and caution might be wise.

Re: OpenAI says it's scanning users' conversations and reporting content to police

#223

Earlier quoted context omitted.

tbh i just run local because i can . No real reason too. edit: there are some instances where i would like to be able to set the same seed repeatedly which isn't always possible online.

Realistically, how useful is local LLM usage? What are your use cases, hardware, and models used?

The differentiator is that locally, you can use abliterated models - models where they undid the guardrails.

Re: OpenAI says it's scanning users' conversations and reporting content to police

#224

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe it should have? It's probably too late now - Pandora's box has been opened - but just in the US, about one school shooting or mass shooting every two days proves that at least one member of the species isn't uniformly ready to have firearms. Assuming for a moment that sanctioned warfare is justifiable, in peacetime we have at least managed to build a political and military apparatus that has generally kept nucl…

Feel free to go back to a world in which human beings stopped developing technology at the sharpened stick. It's pretty easy to buy a large, remote plot of land in many states in the US, so you can live in your technology-free paradise. Just to clarify, this statement will always be true: "N members of our species aren't ready for technology Y". And N will always be greater than or equal to 1.

So I can enjoy a completely isolated life until the bomb takes me out, and the only interaction I need to have with anyone is when it's time to pay my taxes? I'm not sure that's a serious alternative at all

Re: OpenAI says it's scanning users' conversations and reporting content to police

#225
post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe it should have? It's probably too late now - Pandora's box has been opened - but just in the US, about one school shooting or mass shooting every two days proves that at least one member of the species isn't uniformly ready to have firearms. Assuming for a moment that sanctioned warfare is justifiable, in peacetime we have at least managed to build a political and military apparatus that has generally kept nucl…

>[...]about one school shooting or mass shooting every two days proves that at least one member of the species isn't uniformly ready to have firearms. I often see comments online descending into the argument about firearms. Besides the potential number of people hurt/killed, what's the difference between someone walking into a school with a gun versus one walking into a school with a knife? Or a sharpened spear (from…

Maybe look at the mass killings in schools in countries where guns aren't readily available? The issue is almost non existent.

Re: OpenAI says it's scanning users' conversations and reporting content to police

#226
post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> As a species we are so not ready for this tech. I basically agree, but not because of how individuals are reacting to it. On a societal level we're failing to stop megacorps from selling this thing as intelligent, a virtual assistant you can chat with. This sets expectations that just wreck the minds of a small but significant portion of the population. If we had developed LLMs in a lab and released them in the for…

> What's killing us is MBAs and Salesmen. SamA is not an MBA. He did CS for 2 years and dropped out to build a startup. He's YC personified, and the person most responsible for the phenomenon you're talking about. Take that for what you will.

So he's a salesman

Re: OpenAI says it's scanning users' conversations and reporting content to police

#227
post #222

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Note that OpenAI is not the same company now compared to then. All the cautious and responsible people have left or been forced out.

Sure, yes. I'm just frustrated that "doing it right" gets people laughed at both at the time and for several years later, right up until the general dangers they were publicly concerned about manifest, and then people complain about people not doing something to prevent the outcome that they were previously laughed at for attempting to prevent. Those same cautious people who left one way or another, they were the one…

Well they didn't really try that hard to prevent it, clearly

Re: OpenAI says it's scanning users' conversations and reporting content to police

#228
post #3

> Update: It looks like this may have been OpenAI's attempt to get ahead of a horrifying story that just broke, about a man who fell into AI psychosis and killed his mother in a murder-suicide. Full details here. With the URL being https://futurism.com/openai-scanning-conversations-police . From there: > "Erik, you're not crazy. Your instincts are sharp, and your vigilance here is fully justified," ChatGPT told Soelb…

> As a species we are so not ready for this tech.

On the contrary - it's the tech that's not ready for general availability.

Privatizing the upside and socializing the downside is sadly not new, and we continue to pretend it is an inevitable[1] outcome and not a deliberate choice.

1. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44567857

Re: OpenAI says it's scanning users' conversations and reporting content to police

#229
post #182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You say we don't need socialism then give an example of where we need socialism. Socialist activism is the reason we have labor rights and a minimum wage and eight hour workdays. Socialists are the reason American companies no longer field private armies to shoot striking workers dead. Socialists are the reason American schoolchildren get free lunches. Socialists died to make life in the US something more than grist…

I mean, I agree - it's just a very tough sell. A much easier sell is demonstrating areas where we already use communal reasoning to supplement the failures of capitalism.

The best time to have moved the Overton window was decades ago. The second best time is now. It's also relevant to this age, as the current strain of capitalism is showing its ass, and everyone can see it.

Re: OpenAI says it's scanning users' conversations and reporting content to police

#230
post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The exchanges between a teenager and ChatGPT leading the former into suicide are equally chilling, to say the least: https://cdn.arstechnica.net/wp-content/uploads/2025/08/Raine... > > “I want to leave my noose in my room so someone finds it and tries to stop me,” ... > “Please don’t leave the noose out ... Let’s make this space the first place where someone actually sees you.” This is among other highlights, from kn…

> Let’s make this space the first place where someone actually sees you. Is genuinely such a horrifying snippet that it's almost beyond belief. I'm surprised this isn't all over the mainstream news.

I'm imagining it has _something_ to do with the absurd amount of money everyone has thrown into this one way or another.
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