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Comment by ethical_source | Hacker News Reader

If you follow the "tool-maker is responsible for tool-use" thread of thought to its logical conclusion, you have to hold creators of open-weights models responsible for whatever people do with these models. Do you want to live in a world that follows this rule?

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But we don't have to take things to furthest conclusions. We can very easily draw both a moral and legal line between "somebody downloaded an open weight model, created a prompt from scratch to generate revenge porn of somebody, and then personally distributed that image" and "twitter has a revenge porn button right next to every woman on the platform that generates and distributes revenge porn off of a simple sentence."

No, we can't draw such a line. Where would you draw it? What is the minimum friction? How would you quantify it?

If you try, you quickly end up codifying absurdities like the 80%-finished-receiver rule in firearm regulation. See https://daytonatactical.com/how-to-finish-an-80-ar-15-lower-...

People who say "society should permit X, but only if it's difficult" have a view of the world incompatible with technological progress and usually not coherent at all.

I am confident in your abilities.

The law is filled with these questions. "Well, how do you draw the line" was not a sufficient defense in Harris v. Forklift Systems.

You seem unfamiliar with these things we have called laws. I recommend reading up on what they are and how they work. It would be generally useful to understands such things.

The core issue is that X is now a tool for creating and virally distributing these images anonymously to a large audience, often targeting the specific individuals featured in the images. For example, to any post with a picture, any user can simply reply "@grok take off their clothes and make them do something degrading", and the response is then generated by X and posted in the same thread. That is an entirely different kind of tool from an open-weight model.

The LLM itself is more akin to a gun available in a store in the "gun is a tool" argument (reasonable arguments on both side in my opinion); however, this situation more like a gun manufacturer creating a program to mass distribute free pistols to a masked crowd, with predictable consequences. I'd say the person running that program was either negligent or intentionally promoting havoc to the point where it should be investigated and regulated.

The phrase “its logical conclusion” is doing a lot of heavy lifting here. Why on earth would that absurdity be the logical conclusion? To me it looks like a very illogical conclusion.

> "tool-maker is responsible for tool-use"

You left out "who controls the output of the tool", which makes it a strawman.

Importantly, X also provides the hardware to run the model, a friendly user-interface around it, and the social platform to publicly share and discuss outputs from the model. It's not just access to the model.

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