You may be interested in the case of Bernard Boursicot.
567 karma · joined August 23, 2011
There are clearly uses for the raw pretrained models without post-training, fine-tuning, or alignment; if not, there would not be a market for decensored and abliterated model variants by third parties.
If reputable model publishers could instead publish their models in verifiable parts: pretrained weights, fine-tuning/alignment adapters, and a combined intended-use model - this would reduce the attractiveness of malicious fine-tune publishers. I'm not holding my breath for that though, quite the opposite. I expect the economic and power incentives will encourage the big training players to push for ever-higher but nebulous safety regulations until everyone else is choked out except for them.
Until training costs come down, and perhaps even after that, all AI should be treated as untrusted rogue agents, constrained by default regardless of source. That's just the sensible thing to do, but the economics will have something to say about that.
> The focus on deepfakes in a vacuum is actually missing the forest for the trees, with the ‘forest’ being the fact that we now rely on five massive social media platforms as the arbiters.
I think the way legislators have come to understand media - at least by the way laws are being written - is that the collection, distribution, and filtering must happen on a single platform. So there's this attempt to force platforms to be the arbiters of truth.
But this is dangerous in several different ways:
1. It is impossible to be an arbiter of truth, it's a fundamental problem of epistemology that cannot be solved without perfect knowledge of the "real world", and so the platforms must necessarily be allowed to fail to some, or a large degree.
2. Having been given this impossible responsibility, the platforms are going to disallow/punish based on controversy, because their real problem isn't breaking the law, it's others bringing attention to where they're breaking the law.
3. In the meantime the platforms might offer some token resistance to these laws, but ultimately they will not say no to being handed the one tool that gives them enormous political and economic power, power which will protect them if the law comes after them.
These three points will keep reinforcing themselves to lock us into the information dystopia we're in today.
I don't think it's possible to preserve 1. freedom of speech, 2. protection from mis/disinformation unless the different layers could be forcibly separated. My current crackpot idea is that the distribution and filtering layers have to be broken up in a way that both forces information to flow freely, and allow consumers to protect themselves by consciously selecting and filtering their consumption in meaningful ways. Filtering providers cannot be given the power to control information supply for other filtering providers, which allows the market to abandon untrustworthy providers at will, and also gives the authorities the degree of power required to find bad actors and dispense meaningful punishments.
What if creating easily-fusable isotopes is the most efficient way to store "renewable" energy? Fusion is the most concentrated release of power humans are able to muster. What's to say such concentrated power will never be required for any purpose?
Statistically speaking one could be fairly confident, but as a rule it is wrong due to the presence of compound surnames.
Ending MIQ is inevitable but it's a one-way decision. Once the virus takes hold there's no going back, even if you take quarantine and isolation to China levels. Nobody likes a lockdown. My opinion is that the right time is when the globally dominant variant is a fast-spreading one with a proven hospitalisation rate post-wave that is lower than what NZ could cope with, given the vaccination rate. Omicron could be a candidate but its wave is still spreading, so it's too early to tell.
As for MIQ dues, the government and therefore the people bear its cost. NZ$13 million isn't a trivial sum, but it isn't huge either, so while any scheme to reduce the burden would be welcome, a plan with a huge potential cost such as ending MIQ is a bit too much risk, especially with Omicron data coming soon on the horizon.
[1] https://www.miq.govt.nz/being-in-managed-isolation/charges-f...
[2] https://www.miq.govt.nz/about/media-centre/common-topics-for...
[3] https://www.miq.govt.nz/being-in-managed-isolation/isolation...
The ideographs were important in that they could tie together vastly different spoken languages in the same family. Because the writing was unified, all the spoken variants had their own influence on it by way of traders and administrators, and successful changes by proxy affected the speech of other regions. This meant that all the different places effectively evolved their languages around a virtual core based on the communications of the literate class - even the phonetic-based parts; and they could do it peacefully and continuously, constantly realigning their definitions without legal or violent coercion, uninterrupted by the constant evolution of the whole group of spoken languages.
For example, French has had a great influence on English, and they both use the Latin alphabet. Would such influence have been possible in the same time without violent conquest, given the alphabetic system of writing?
This is where the mistake is. Written Chinese does have all those characters - it is the adoption of a "standard Chinese" that caused those characters not to be taught when mass education was introduced. The people were left to transliterate or create new characters for their spoken native tongue, and the correct characters are now known only to researchers.
One very annoying part of Mandarin's effect on modern Chinese is that many words are being replaced by transliterations of/in Mandarin, even when the Chinese word itself exists. Often this is because the source of the word was foreign. To a non-Mandarin speaker, written Chinese is very slowly turning into complete nonsense, and written Chinese is losing its edge in longevity by no longer being a ideograph-based language.