[HN Gopher] I extracted the safety filters from Apple Intelligen...
___________________________________________________________________
I extracted the safety filters from Apple Intelligence models
I managed to reverse engineer the encryption (refered to as
"Obfuscation" in the framework) responsible for managing the safety
filters of Apple Intelligence models. I have extracted them into a
repository. I encourage you to take a look around.
Author : BlueFalconHD
Score : 503 points
Date : 2025-07-06 19:50 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (github.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (github.com)
| bombcar wrote:
| There's got to be a way to turn these lists of "naughty words"
| into shibboleths somehow.
| spydum wrote:
| Love idea, but I think there are simply too many models to make
| it practical?
| immibis wrote:
| Like asking sensitive employment candidates about Kim Jong Un's
| roundness to check if they're North Korean spies, we could ask
| humans what they think about Trump and Palestine to check if
| they're computers.
|
| However, I think about half of real humans would also fail the
| test.
| mike_hearn wrote:
| Are you sure it's fully deobfuscated? What's up with reject
| phrases like "Granular mango serpent"?
| tablets wrote:
| Maybe something to do with this?
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mango_cult
| airstrike wrote:
| the one at the bottom of the README spells out xcode
|
| wyvern illustrous laments darkness
| cwmoore wrote:
| read every good expletive "xxx"
| andy99 wrote:
| I clicked around a bit and this seems to be the most common
| phrase. Maybe it's a test phrase?
| the-rc wrote:
| Maybe it's used to catch clones of the models?
| electroly wrote:
| "GMS" = Generative Model Safety. The example from the readme is
| "XCODE". These seem to be acronyms spelled out in words.
| BlueFalconHD wrote:
| This is definitely the right answer. It's just testing stuff.
| pbhjpbhj wrote:
| Speculation: Maybe they know that the real phrase is close
| enough in the vector space to be treated as synonymous with
| "granular mango serpent". The phrase then is like a nickname
| that only the models authors know the expected interference of?
|
| Thus a pre-prompt can avoid mentioning the actual forbidden
| words, like using a patois/cant.
| BlueFalconHD wrote:
| These are the contents read by the Obfuscation functions
| exactly. There seems to be a lot of testing stuff still though,
| remember these models are relatively recent. There is a true
| safety model being applied after these checks as well, this is
| just to catch things before needing to load the safety model.
| KTibow wrote:
| Maybe it's used to verify that the filter is loaded.
| RainyDayTmrw wrote:
| I commented in another thread[1] that it's most likely a
| unique, artificial QA input, to avoid QA having to repeatedly
| use offensive phrases or whatever.
|
| [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44486374
| consonaut wrote:
| If you try to use the phrase with Apple Intelligence (e.g. in
| Notes asking for a rewrite) it will just say "Writing tools
| unavailable".
|
| Maybe it's an easy test to ensure the filters are loaded with a
| phrase unlikely to be used accidentaly?
| seeknotfind wrote:
| Long live regex!
| binarymax wrote:
| Wow, this is pretty silly. If things are like this at Apple I'm
| not sure what to think.
|
| https://github.com/BlueFalconHD/apple_generative_model_safet...
|
| EDIT: just to be clear, things like this are easily bypassed.
| "Boris Johnson"=>"B0ris Johnson" will skip right over the regex
| and will be recognized just fine by an LLM.
| deepdarkforest wrote:
| It's not silly. I would bet 99% of the users don't care that
| much to do that. A hardcoded regex like this is a good first
| layer/filter, and very efficient
| BlueFalconHD wrote:
| Yep. These filters are applied first before the safety model
| (still figuring out the architecture, I am pretty confident
| it is an LLM combined with some text classification) runs.
| brookst wrote:
| All commercial LLM products I'm aware of use dedicated
| safety classifiers and then alter the prompt to the LLM if
| a classifier is tripped.
| latency-guy2 wrote:
| The safety filter appears on both ends (or multi-ended
| depending on the complexity of your application), input
| and output.
|
| I can tell you from using Microsoft's products that
| safety filters appears in a bunch of places. M365 for
| example, your prompts are never totally your prompts,
| every single one gets rewritten. It's detailed here:
| https://learn.microsoft.com/en-
| us/copilot/microsoft-365/micr...
|
| There's a more illuminating image of the Copilot
| architecture here: https://i.imgur.com/2vQYGoK.png which
| I was able to find from https://labs.zenity.io/p/inside-
| microsoft-365-copilot-techni...
|
| The above appears to be scrubbed, but it used to be
| available from the learn page months ago. Your messages
| get additional context data from Microsoft's Graph, which
| powers the enterprise version of M365 Copilot. There's
| significant benefits to this, and downsides. And
| considering the way Microsoft wants to control things,
| you will get an overindex toward things that happen
| inside of your organization than what will happen in the
| near real-time web.
| twoodfin wrote:
| Efficient at what?
| miohtama wrote:
| Sounds like UK politics is taboo?
| immibis wrote:
| All politics is taboo, except the sort that helps Apple get
| richer. (Or any other company, in that company's "safety"
| filters)
| tpmoney wrote:
| I doubt the purpose here is so much to prevent someone from
| intentionally side stepping the block. It's more likely here to
| avoid the sort of headlines you would expect to see if someone
| was suggested "I wish ${politician} would die" as a response to
| an email mentioning that politician. In general you should view
| these sorts of broad word filters as looking to short circuit
| the "think of the children" reactions to Tiny Tim's phone
| suggesting not that God should "bless us, every one", but that
| God should "kill us, every one". A dumb filter like this is
| more than enough for that sort of thing.
| XorNot wrote:
| It would also substantially disrupt the generation process: a
| model which sees B0ris and not Boris is going to struggle to
| actually associate that input to the politician since it
| won't be well represented in the training set (and on the
| output side the same: if it does make the association, a
| reasoning model for example would include the proper name in
| the output first at which point the supervisor process can
| reject it).
| quonn wrote:
| I don't think so. My impression with LLMs is that they
| correct typos well. I would imagine this happens in early
| layers without much impact on the remaining computation.
| lupire wrote:
| "Draw a picture of a gorgon with the face of the 2024 Prime
| Minister of UK."
| chgs wrote:
| There were two.
| binarymax wrote:
| No it doesn't disrupt. This is a well known capability of
| LLMs. Most models don't even point out a mistake they just
| carry on.
|
| https://chatgpt.com/share/686b1092-4974-8010-9c33-86036c88e
| 7...
| bigyabai wrote:
| > If things are like this at Apple I'm not sure what to think.
|
| I don't know what you expected? This is the SOTA solution, and
| Apple is barely in the AI race as-is. It makes more sense for
| them to copy what works than to bet the farm on a courageous
| feature nobody likes.
| stefan_ wrote:
| Why are these things always so deeply unserious? Is there no
| one working on "safety in AI" (oxymoron in itself of course)
| that has a meaningful understanding of what they are actually
| working with and an ability beyond an interns weekend project?
| Reminds me of the cybersecurity field that got the 1% of people
| able to turn a double free into code execution while 99% peddle
| checklists, "signature scanning" and deal in CVE numbers.
|
| Meanwhile their software devs are making
| GenerativeExperiencesSafetyInferenceProviders so it must be
| dire over there, too.
| Aeolun wrote:
| The LLM will. But the image generation model that is trained on
| a bunch of pre-specified tags will almost immediately spit out
| unrecognizable results.
| Lockal wrote:
| What prevents Apple from applying a quick anti-typo LLM which
| restores B0ris, unalive, fixs tpyos, and replaces "slumbering
| steed" with a "sleeping horse", not just for censorship, but
| also to improve generation results?
| the_mar wrote:
| why do you think this doesn't already exist?
| trebligdivad wrote:
| Some of the combinations are a bit weird, This one has lots of
| stuff avoiding death....together with a set ensuring all the
| Apple brands have the correct capitalisation. Priorities hey!
|
| https://github.com/BlueFalconHD/apple_generative_model_safet...
| andy99 wrote:
| > Apple brands have the correct capitalisation. Priorities hey!
|
| To me that's really embarrassing and insecure. But I'm sure for
| branding people it's very important.
| WillAdams wrote:
| Legal requirement to maintain a trademark.
| grues-dinner wrote:
| In what way would (A|a)pple's own AI writing "imac"
| endanger the trademark? Is capitalisation even part of a
| word-based trademark?
|
| I'm more surprised they don't have a rule to do that rather
| grating s/the iPhone/iPhone/ transform (or maybe it's in a
| different file?).
| sbierwagen wrote:
| Yes, proper nouns are capitalized.
|
| And of course it's much _worse_ for a company 's
| published works to not respect branding-- a trademark
| only exists if it is actively defended. Official
| marketing material by a company has been used as legal
| evidence that their trademark has been genericized:
|
| >In one example, the Otis Elevator Company's trademark of
| the word "escalator" was cancelled following a petition
| from Toledo-based Haughton Elevator Company. In rejecting
| an appeal from Otis, an examiner from the United States
| Patent and Trademark Office cited the company's own use
| of the term "escalator" alongside the generic term
| "elevator" in multiple advertisements without any
| trademark significance.[8]
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Generic_trademark
| lupire wrote:
| Using a trademark as a noun is automatically
| genericizing. Capitalization of a noun is irrelevant to
| trademark.
|
| Even Apple corporation says that in their trademark
| guidance page, despite constantly breaking their own
| rule, when they call through iPhone phones "iPhone". But
| Apple, like founder Steve Jobs, believes the rules don't
| apply to them.
|
| https://www.apple.com/legal/intellectual-
| property/trademark/...
| eastbound wrote:
| That explains why Steve Jobs never said "buy an iPhone"
| or "buy the iPhone" but "buy iPhone" (They always use it
| without "the" or "a", like "buying a brand").
| lxgr wrote:
| Is that true? If so, what else should Apple call the
| iPhone in their marketing materials?
|
| I always thought the actual problem of genericization
| would be calling _any smartphone_ an iPhone.
| lxgr wrote:
| Sure, but software that autocompletes/rewords users'
| emails and text messages is not marketing material.
|
| Otherwise, why stop there? Why not have the macOS
| keyboard driver or Safari prevent me from typing
| "Iphone"? Why not have iOS edit my voice if I call their
| Bluetooth headphones "earbuds pro" in a phone call?
| socalgal2 wrote:
| Sounds like you found your next promotion at Apple. They
| can change anything. "I like Pepsi" -> "I like Coke" ->
| "I recommend Company A" -> "I recommend Company B".
| etc... "I'm voting for Candidate C" -> "I'm voting for
| Candidate D"
|
| You can market it is helping people with strong accents
| to be able make calls and be less likely to be
| misunderstood. It just happens to "fix" your grammar as
| well.
| kube-system wrote:
| Because in regards to the rights to a trademark, what is
| critical is the use of the word in trade -- not just
| "marketing material" nor your phone calls to your
| friends.
| spauldo wrote:
| I love seeing posts about Emacs from IOS users - it's
| always autocorrected to "eMacs."
| lxgr wrote:
| Maybe at some point, but as far as I can tell not anymore
| (while corrections like "iphone -> iPhone" are still
| there).
| chgs wrote:
| eMacs certainly is broken on my phone. Vim is fine
| though.
| lxgr wrote:
| In their own marketing language, sure, but to force this on
| their users' speech?
|
| Consider that these models, among other things, power
| features such as "proofread" or "rewrite professionally".
| bigyabai wrote:
| If Apple Intelligence is going to be held legally
| accountable, Apple has larger issues than trademark
| obligations.
| whywhywhywhy wrote:
| To be fair to the developers it's something an Apple exec is
| gonna point out when demoed the tech and complain about.
| They've always taken brand capitalization and grammar around
| their products seriously.
| grues-dinner wrote:
| Interesting that it didn't seem to include "unalive".
|
| Which as a phenomenon is so very telling that no one actually
| cares what people are _really_ saying. Everyone, including the
| platforms knows what that means. It 's all performative.
| qingcharles wrote:
| It's totally performative. There's no way to stay ahead of
| the new language that people create.
|
| At what point do the new words become the actual words? Are
| there many instances of people using unalive IRL?
| freeone3000 wrote:
| It depends on if you think that something is less real
| because it's transmitted digitally.
| qingcharles wrote:
| No, I'm only thinking that we're not permitted in a lot
| of digital spaces to use the banned words (e.g. suicide),
| but IRL doesn't generally have those limits. Is there a
| point where we use the censored word so much that it
| spills over into the real world?
| immibis wrote:
| Is this not essentially the same effect as saying "lol"
| out loud?
| eastbound wrote:
| People use "lol" IRL, as long as "IRL", "aps" in French
| (misspelling of "pas"), but it's just slang; "unalive"
| has potential to make it in the news where anchors don't
| want to use curse words.
| fouronnes3 wrote:
| This question is sort of the same as asking why the
| universal translator wasn't able to translate the metaphor
| language of the Star Trek episode Darmok. Surely if the
| metaphor has become the first order meaning then there's no
| litteral meaning anymore.
| qingcharles wrote:
| I guess, so far, the people inventing the words have left
| the meaning clear with things like "un-alive" which is
| readable even to someone coming across it for the first
| time.
|
| Your point stands when we start replacing the banned
| words with things like "suicide" for "donkeyrhubarb" and
| then the walls really will fall.
| userbinator wrote:
| This form of obfuscation has actually already occurred
| over a century ago:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cockney_rhyming_slang
| t-3 wrote:
| Rhyming slang rhymes tho. The recipient can understand
| what's meant by de-obfuscating in-context. Random strings
| substituted for $proscribed_word don't work in the same
| way.
| waterproof wrote:
| In Cockney rhyming slang, the rhyming word (which would
| be easy to reverse engineer) is omitted. So if "stairs"
| is rhyme-paired with "apples and pears" and then people
| just use the word "apples" in place of "stairs". "Pears"
| is omitted in common use so you can't just reverse the
| rhyme.
|
| The example photo on Wikipedia includes the rhyming words
| but that's not how it would be used IRL.
| zimpenfish wrote:
| See also Polari[0] and the Grass Mud Horse Lexicon[1]
|
| [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polari
|
| [1] https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=6538 (CDT
| links broken, use [2])
|
| [2] https://chinadigitaltimes.net/space/Grass-
| Mud_Horse_Lexicon_...
| mananaysiempre wrote:
| Aquatic product[1]?
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Euphemisms_for_Internet
| _censor...
| immibis wrote:
| An English equivalent is "sewer slide".
| marcus_holmes wrote:
| I've heard "pr0n" used in actual real-world conversation,
| only slightly ironically.
| tjwebbnorfolk wrote:
| The only reason kids started using "unalive" is to get
| around Youtube filters that disallow the use of the word
| "kill"
| mattigames wrote:
| Pretty sure TikTok filters do the same and was also a
| major influence in using that term
| cheschire wrote:
| If only we had a way to mass process the words people write
| to each other, derive context from those words, and then
| identify new slang designed to bypass filters...
| apricot wrote:
| > Are there many instances of people using unalive IRL
|
| As a parent of a teenager, I see them use "unalive" non-
| ironically as a synonym for "suicide" in all contexts,
| including IRL.
| kulahan wrote:
| Well that's sad. They can't even face the _word_?
| kevinventullo wrote:
| It's not about whether they can face it. The younger
| generations are more in tune with mental health and
| topics like suicide than any previous generation. The
| etymology of the euphemism was about avoiding online
| censorship, while its "IRL" usage was merely absorbed
| through familiarity from the online usage.
| mcny wrote:
| But unalive self is suicide and unalive is just death,
| right? For example, You can unalive other people against
| their will...
| rhdunn wrote:
| I've seen 'unalived' used as a synonym for 'died' or
| 'killed' by YouTube minecrafters (e.g. CaptainSparkles)
| to avoid YouTube's demonitization/censorship. For
| example, using "I was unalived by a skeleton." instead of
| "I was killed by a skeleton."
| labster wrote:
| The damaged interpret internet censorship and route
| around it.
| rootsudo wrote:
| It's not about being intune, it's that their narrative is
| shaped by the filters implemented by online interactions.
|
| Online env ban the word suicide. No one uses it. unalive
| is not banned. Discussion is the same, word or no word.
|
| Vernacular 101.
| coldtea wrote:
| > _more in tune with mental health and topics like
| suicide than any previous generation._
|
| More in such a fad than any previous generation
| apricot wrote:
| I think it's just the term they immediately associate
| with the idea. They see "unalive" more than "suicide"
| online, so it becomes their default word for it. The fact
| that it originates in automated censorship avoidance is
| irrelevant.
| animuchan wrote:
| It's getting blocked / shadow banned / demonetized on
| sites like YouTube, so naturally all commentary starts
| using a synonym.
|
| Unalive is one of the popular ones, but it's a whole
| vocabulary at this point. Guess what "PDF file" stands
| for.
| fragmede wrote:
| pedophile
| ErrorNoBrain wrote:
| If your teenager often talks about suicide, there could
| be some issue that needs to be resolved.
|
| Sincerely the child of a parent who committed suicide. He
| mentioned suicide a few days before.
| bee_rider wrote:
| "Unalive" is sort of... awkward in that silly online way.
| But, we also have phrase like "off oneself," or just
| euphemistically describing the person as having died.
| It's always been a difficult topic to talk about, I don't
| understand using it as a specific example of gen-Z
| fragility.
|
| Just that they suck at coming up with pithy new slang
| terms.
| anton-c wrote:
| They do have some awful slang.
|
| I agree though I think they're picking it up from online
| censorship in this case, not being fragile.
| Terr_ wrote:
| > There's no way to stay ahead of the new language that
| people create.
|
| I'm imagining a new exploit: After someone says something
| totally innocent, people gang up in the comments to _act_
| like a terrible vicious slur has been said, and then the
| moderation system (with an LLM involved somewhere)
| "learns" that an arbitrary term is heinous eand indirectly
| bans any discussion of that topic.
| cyanydeez wrote:
| you mean become 4chan?
| Waterluvian wrote:
| Hey I was pro-skub waaaay before all the anti-skub people
| switched sides.
| SV_BubbleTime wrote:
| How dare you use that word. My parents died in the
| Eastasin Civil war so that I could live freely without
| you people calling us that.
| thehappypm wrote:
| Skub is a real slur tho so that one doesn't work
| osn9363739 wrote:
| Isn't that a reference to a 10 or 20 year old web comic?
| heavyset_go wrote:
| The latter, we're old.
| sitharus wrote:
| No it isn't, it's a reference to a Perry Bible Fellowship
| comic https://pbfcomics.com/comics/skub/
|
| (This one is sfw, not all of the comics are)
|
| Even urban dictionary doesn't contain a definition for
| skub as a slur.
| Intermernet wrote:
| I added one. It's under review. It's very self
| referential.
| jcynix wrote:
| >Even urban dictionary doesn't contain a definition for
| skub as a slur.
|
| What about this then:
| https://en.m.wiktionary.org/wiki/skub
| sitharus wrote:
| That literally defines it as a word from the PBF comic I
| cited? Nothing on that page defines it as a slur, just as
| a word used to mock people who argue about
| inconsequential things.
| jcynix wrote:
| Seems I misunderstood the notion of "slur" as I'm not a
| native speaker. So now I've learned a bit ;-)
| stirfish wrote:
| Stop saying it! You're making it worse!
| tbrownaw wrote:
| I'm pretty sure this can work human moderators rather
| than an LLM, too.
| pyman wrote:
| Most of the human moderators hired by OpenAI to train
| LLMs, many of them based in Africa and South America,
| were exposed to disturbing content and have been deeply
| affected by it.
|
| Karen Hao interviewed many of them in her latest
| bestselling book, which explores the human cost behind
| the OpenAI boom:
|
| https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/222725518-empire-of-
| ai
| SXX wrote:
| It's not like this unique to LLMs either. By some little
| trolling on internet you easily can turn hand "OK
| gesture" into a hate symbol of white supermacy. And fools
| will fall for it.
| overfeed wrote:
| ...and then the bigots will fall for it too, and start
| using it in earnest, completing the cycle.
| coldtea wrote:
| who cares what the bigots use?
|
| If the bigots start using "thank you" as some code word,
| should we stop saying it, lest we pollute our non-bigoted
| discussions?
|
| bigots drink coffee too, maybe we should stop drinking
| it, because something-something...
| Eisenstein wrote:
| It's all context dependent. There can be words or symbols
| which are totally benign but when used in a different
| context do have impactful meaning. Case in point: cheese
| pizza.
| bee_rider wrote:
| I don't think we should treat human interactions like a
| technical problem, where we look for edge cases and
| outlandish hypotheticals to probe the edges of what is
| possible.
|
| If "thank you" became widely associated with bigots, and
| had some negative meaning, to the point where it
| genuinely distressed people, I'd avoid it. I think it has
| a widespread enough normal meaning that there's almost no
| chance of that happening, but it isn't impossible.
| sillyfluke wrote:
| >who cares what the bigots use
|
| you'd think so, but people often operate where multiple
| contexts could be valid.
|
| Just as a thought experiment, if the eggplant emoji was
| used to denote "ok" in messaging and then people starting
| appropriating it for a sexual context, would you or the
| general public think twice about continuing to use it to
| mean "ok" on the off chance the other side may
| misinterpret the meaning?
|
| I would say most likely yes.
| immibis wrote:
| This actually happened. Wan was a symbol of
| spirituality, divinity, good luck, health, prosperity,
| etc. Then some bigots used it. What does Wan mean to you
| today?
| SXX wrote:
| It's still heavily used in Buddhism around the world, but
| good lord what happen if you put it on your house in US
| or EU.
| sixothree wrote:
| Someone I know from India bought a new car and put this
| symbol on the hood (non-permanent) as a celebration. I
| had to warn him to be careful. It felt bad. Then the
| thought ran through my head - we're in the deep south,
| who is really going to be that bothered about this and
| also doesn't know about cultural usages. Even worse.
| coldtea wrote:
| Those that actually used them in the 20th century (like
| they did in Asia, not some ancient vikings or whatever)
| still use it.
|
| And that symbol was 100% associated with the Nazis in the
| West in the 20th century. Nobody used it at the time
| before the war for anything else, except some tiny
| fringe.
|
| If it was some mainstream symbol or idiom, merely co-
| adopted, we'd probably still be using it too.
|
| If the Nazis used the cross for example,people wouldn't
| stop using the sign of the cross.
| coldtea wrote:
| It's hack journalists reporting on BS totally fringe
| activity as if it's "a thing", and then idiots who take
| their cues from them
| lynx97 wrote:
| That reminds me of a question I have since I saw my first
| LLM hallucination: How much do people think
| hallucination/confabulation can be attributed to trolling
| and sarcasm having slipped into the training data? Is it
| possible we could get the rate of hallucinations down by
| better filtering of cynicism from the traing data?
| grues-dinner wrote:
| The first half of that already happened with the OK
| gesture: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/newsbeat-49837898.
|
| Though it would be fun to see what happens if an LLM if
| used to ban anything that tends to generate heated
| exchanges. It would presumably learn to ban racial terms,
| politics and politicians and words like "immigrant" (i.e.
| basically the list in this repo), but what else could it
| be persuaded to ban? Vim and Emacs? SystemD? Anything
| involving cyclists? Parenting advice?
| immibis wrote:
| People weren't using the OK gesture innocently. After
| 4chan trolls decided to start pretending it was a white
| supremacist symbol, actual white supremacists started
| using it as a symbol.
| coldtea wrote:
| All 10 of them?
|
| What about the other 7-8 billion people still using it
| normally?
| thephyber wrote:
| Some were using it in the traditional unironic (and IMHO
| cringe) way, similar to anyone who used the phrase "Let's
| go, Brandon!" Before that NASCAR race when MAGAs adopted
| it as ironic + coded vice signaling.
|
| Quit being overly pedantic. We all knew there was an
| unironic purpose for the gesture before it became ironic.
| coldtea wrote:
| I mean, advice from a person who considers the
| traditional unironic use of OK as "cringe"...
|
| Whatever dude
| PunchyHamster wrote:
| then congratulations on making white supremacists define
| your langyage
| immibis wrote:
| Do you still use swastikas as symbols of peace and love
| because you don't want white supremacists to define your
| language?
|
| I strongly doubt you do that. Whether you like it or not,
| the Nazis defined what the swastika means now.
| anton-c wrote:
| It's still seen in the countries that used it that way
| and is seen as benign.
|
| It can be easily summoned with the Japanese keyboard.
| It's seen on Buddhist temples all over Asia.
| mopsi wrote:
| Finnish use of swastika predates Germany and the Finnish
| Air Force Academy uses swastika to this day in their
| official insignia:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Air_Force_Academy_(Finland)
|
| Taboos are a cultural thing, and the world is
| (thankfully) very far from having a monoculture shaped by
| NYC's neurotic intellectuals.
| coldtea wrote:
| > _Do you still use swastikas as symbols of peace and
| love because you don 't want white supremacists to define
| your language?_
|
| They were hardly ever used in the west for at least a
| full millenium before the Nazis too (except a handful of
| cases, where they still use them, like the Finnish Air
| Force), so that's a moot analogy.
|
| In Asia, they still use them just fine, in houses,
| temples, businesses, and elsewhere.
| weinzierl wrote:
| The OK gesture has always been _very_ inappropriate in
| most parts of the world.
| chmod775 wrote:
| > The OK gesture has always been very inappropriate in
| most parts of the world.
|
| No, it isn't, and especially hasn't been historically.
| The negative connotations are overwhelmingly modern.
|
| The areas where it is _very inappropriate_ right now
| tally up to maybe 1 billion people*. That 's pretty far
| from "most". For everyone else it is mostly positive,
| neutral, or meaningless.
|
| *Brazil, Turkey, Iran, Iraq, Saudi Arabia, Greece, Italy,
| Spain, Russia, Ukraine, Belarus, other parts of Eastern
| Europe
| weinzierl wrote:
| _" No, it isn't, and especially hasn't been historically.
| The negative connotations are overwhelmingly modern."_
|
| Maybe that is what Richard Nixon thought as well when he
| caused a little scandal using it in South America in
| 1950. In 1992 when the _Chicago Tribune_ published "
| _HANDS OFF "_ mentioning said episode the negative
| connotations still seemed to be in place[1].
|
| In 1996 _The New York Times_ stated _" What's A-O.K. in
| the U.S.A. Is Lewd and Worthless Beyond"_[2] as title of
| an article confirming the negative connotations.
|
| It is worth mentioning that this article lists Australia
| amongst the places where the gesture is inappropriate. I
| always thought it was something used only in the English-
| speaking world but it seems in reality it is more like a
| North American plus diving world thing.
|
| If you don't believe the press, I traveled around the
| world for more than 30 years and I can assure you in most
| parts using your thumb and index finger for a visual OK
| is not OK.
|
| [1] https://www.chicagotribune.com/1992/01/26/hands-
| off-34/
|
| [2] https://www.nytimes.com/1996/08/18/weekinreview/what-
| s-a-ok-...*
| chmod775 wrote:
| Care to add any country to the list then? Did I miss
| anything? Let's see if we can push it past half of the
| world's population, but I don't think we will.
|
| > I can assure you in most parts using your thumb and
| index finger for a visual OK is not OK.
|
| You're moving goal posts. Of course it doesn't just mean
| "OK" in some places.
|
| What you actually claimed was "The OK gesture has always
| been very inappropriate in most parts of the world."
|
| Which is plain wrong. In India for instance it can refer
| to "money", while in China it can nowadays also be seen
| as a distress signal when performed a certain way (thanks
| to Chinese social media popularizing that use). There's
| some ways you can mess this up, like making it seem
| you're attempting to bribe someone, or signalling you're
| in distress when you aren't, but in neither country the
| gestures are inherently anywhere near "very
| inappropriate" and both will even understand it as "OK"
| if you perform it correctly and in the appropriate
| context.
|
| That's already almost 3 billion people, but let's say 2.5
| billion because there's regional variations in both
| countries and I'm sure you could find some northern
| Chinese village that will take offense.
|
| I can easily push the number of people to whom it is _not
| inappropriate_ past 4 billion by adding smaller
| populations (Indonesia, Japan, western Europe, USA,
| Taiwan, South Africa, Kenya, Nigeria, ...), so your claim
| that "[it] has always been very inappropriate in most
| parts of the world" cannot possibly be true.
| weinzierl wrote:
| > I can assure you in most parts using your thumb and
| index finger for a visual OK is not OK.
|
| >>You're moving goal posts. Of course it doesn't mean
| "OK" in many
|
| I said the gesture is _" not OK_" to use (meaning
| inappropriate), not that it doesn't mean _" OK"_. Those
| are two different things. The gesture can mean OK in some
| places while still being not OK (inappropriate) to use in
| many others.
|
| Also, I always said _" parts of the world"_. You
| introduced population into the argument.
| chmod775 wrote:
| > I said the gesture is "not OK" to use (meaning
| inappropriate), not that it doesn't mean "OK". Those are
| two different things. The gesture can mean OK in some
| places while still being not OK (inappropriate) to use in
| many others.
|
| Fair. That's clearly how I should've read that.
|
| Though it does not materially affect this conversation,
| since demonstrably there's over 4 billion people to whom
| the gesture is _not_ inappropriate. The claim "[it] has
| always been very inappropriate in most parts of the
| world" is wrong, regardless of what reasonable definition
| of "most" you use.
|
| You edited your comment to add this, so I'll respond
| here:
|
| > Also, I always said "parts of the world". You
| introduced population into the argument.
|
| Right. And you're being vague on how you actually arrive
| at your claim of "most", which conveniently keeps the
| waters muddy while you attack attempts to turn this into
| something measurable.
|
| So what other measure would you use? Most others are
| nonsense.
|
| For example "places" isn't a useful measure, but even
| then: It can only be offensive to people. If I dropped
| you on a random point on the globe and you made that
| gesture, there's about a 99% chance nobody would be
| around to be offended.
|
| By land area and predominant culture? Just Antarctica
| (hardly anyone there to take offense), the US, China,
| Canada, Australia, and India together are going to dwarf
| the opposition.
|
| Counting countries? It's clearly inappropriate in around
| 10, with about another 20-30 where it can be
| misunderstood easily (Arab world, some of eastern Europe,
| scattered ones). A far cry from ~195 countries.
|
| Either way there needs to be someone to take offense, so
| population is a pretty good measure.
|
| You may disagree, but the onus was always on you, the one
| making the claim, to pick a measure and a definition of
| "most", then show that the bar is met. Feel free to now
| make more of an argument than "trust me I traveled".
| mopsi wrote:
| That might have been the case decades ago. For example,
| in the USSR, various finger gestures usually implied
| something related to a penis and were considered
| extremely offensive. But that hasn't been the case since
| at least the early 1990s, when VCRs became widely
| available, people saw Hollywood movies for the first time
| and got used to westernized meaning of thumbs-up and OK
| gestures. Nowadays, when backing a truck towards a
| trailer, a thumbs-up would be taken as "good job" and an
| OK gesture (often paired with a kiss) as "exceptionally
| well done".
| bee_rider wrote:
| It would probably ban discussion of censorship.
| BurningFrog wrote:
| A specialized AI could do it as well as any human.
|
| The future will be AIs all the way down...
| derefr wrote:
| > At what point do the new words become the actual words?
|
| Presumably, for this use-case, that would come at exactly
| the point where using "unalive" as a keyword in an image-
| generation prompt generates an image that Apple wouldn't
| appreciate.
| montagg wrote:
| They become the "real words" later. This is the way all
| trust & safety works. It's an evolution over time. Adding
| _some_ friction does improve things, but some people will
| always try to get around the filters. Doesn't mean it's
| simply performative or one shouldn't try.
| immibis wrote:
| Why do you think that AI pretending things like suicide
| don't happen (and that nothing is happening in Palestine)
| is an improvement?
| Rebelgecko wrote:
| This is somewhat related to the concept of the "euphemism
| treadmill":
|
| the matter-of-fact term of today becomes the pejorative of
| tomorrow so a new term is invented to avoid the negative
| connotation of the original term. Then eventually the new
| term becomes a pejorative and the cycle continues.
| dkdbejwi383 wrote:
| It has been suggested - although I am unsure if there is
| strong evidence - that the word "bear" is a euphemism
| along these lines, meaning "brown one" for the since-
| forgotten original name for the animal, as it was
| allegedly believed to be either too frightful to say
| aloud, or would summon a bear.
| ben_w wrote:
| While it's conceivable (consider phrases such as "speak
| of the devil and he shall appear" and similar phrases in
| other languages), I would also say the etymology of names
| for things are often at the same level as "brown one":
| * Horse, ultimately from Proto-Indo-European *kers-, "to
| run" * Planet, from Ancient Greek planetes
| (planetes), "wanderer" * Lots of Latin-derived
| words, companion (bread together), conspire (breathe
| together), transgression (step across), etc. *
| Hamburger the food named after the city of Hamburg, where
| "burg" means "castle", because it had a castle * My
| forename means "son of the right/south" or "son of days",
| my family name means "wheat field/clearing" (in a
| different language); where "wheat" itself comes from
| Proto-Germanic, from *hwitaz ("white") and the "ley" part
| from Proto-Indo-European *lowkos ("clearing"), derived
| from *lewk- ("bright"), and *lewk- also gives all these
| derived terms even just in English:
|
| https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Category:English_terms_der
| ive...
| 0points wrote:
| It's not suggested, the historic use of noa words is a
| fact.
|
| See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noa-name
| dkdbejwi383 wrote:
| I mean suggested in the sense that this specific example
| cannot be evidenced, as there aren't any primary sources
| from that time we can refer to.
| whycome wrote:
| I found out recently that "goof" is extremely offensive
| in some circles. Which is insane to me because I've
| always used it specifically because it's clearly in jest
| and not meant to be offensive. I can't win.
| nicoburns wrote:
| > Are there many instances of people using unalive IRL?
|
| In my experience yes. This is already commonplace. Mostly,
| but not exclusively, amongst the younger generation.
| PunchyHamster wrote:
| I think it stemmed from content creators using it to
| avoid platform filters (even if video is not removed it
| gets deprioritized, at least on YT) and kids repeat it
| joquarky wrote:
| I feel like we can call our society mature when we no
| longer need safety alignment in AI.
| scarface_74 wrote:
| You never tried some of the earlier pre-aligned chatbots.
| Some of the early ones would go off on racist, homophobic
| rants from the most innocent conversations without any
| explicit prompting. If you train on all the data on the
| internet, you have to have some type of alignment.
| decremental wrote:
| You say that as if it stands as truth on its own. We
| actually don't need to filter out how people actually
| talk and think. Otherwise you just end up with yet
| another enforcer against wrong-think. I wonder if you
| even think that deeply about it or if you're just wired
| at this point to conform.
| scarface_74 wrote:
| Really? You would want every conversation no matter what
| you were talking about to immediately devolve to
| something you would see on 4chan?
| girvo wrote:
| My Gen Z coworkers use it IRL, for what that's worth!
| bravesoul2 wrote:
| There is one way: machine learning!
| blitzar wrote:
| Always has been, nothing is new.
|
| You can't say fuck on tv, but you can say fudge as a 1 for
| 1 replacement. You cant show people having sex, but you can
| show them walking into a bedroom and then cut to 30 seconds
| later and they are having a cigarette in bed.
|
| Now after the influence of TV and Movies ... is Vaping
| after sex a thing?
| stripline wrote:
| My kids watch streamers on YouTube and the common
| replacement is "frick". It's said so often that they
| started using it saying things like "what the frick!?" so
| I had to explain to them that's essentially the same as
| using the real word.
| fer wrote:
| > There's no way to stay ahead of the new language that
| people create.
|
| Not even to match the current language. How would you
| censor LeBron James? It's French slang for jerking off[0].
|
| [0]https://www.reddit.com/r/AskFrance/comments/1lpnoj6/is_l
| ebro...
| xenator wrote:
| Lucky developers who wrote these rules live in totality
| different world at far distance from people
| jama211 wrote:
| Reducing the language used or making it harder does have
| measurable effects, it's a logical fallacy in general that
| unless you can prevent something perfectly that thing will
| occur with the same frequency.
|
| See many examples such as "padlocks are useless because a
| determined smart attacker can defeat them easily so don't
| bother with them" - which conveniently forgets that many
| crimes are committed by non-determined, dumb and
| opportunistic attackers who are often deterred by simple
| locks.
|
| Yes, people will use other words. No, this does not make
| this purely performative. It has measurable effects on
| behaviour and how these models will be used and spoken to,
| which affects outcomes.
| hulium wrote:
| Seems more like it should stop the AI from e.g. summarizing
| news and emails about death, not for a chat filter.
| scarface_74 wrote:
| For awhile, I couldn't get ChatGPT to give me summaries of
| Breaking Bad and Better Canl Saul episodes without tripping
| safety filters.
| Zak wrote:
| I'm surprised there hasn't been a bigger backlash against
| platforms that apply censorship of that sort.
| martin-t wrote:
| No-one cares yet.
|
| There's a very scary potential future in which mega-
| corporations start actually censoring topics they don't like.
| For all I know the Chinese government is already doing it,
| there's no reason the British or US one won't follow suit and
| mandate such censorship. To protect children / defend against
| terrorists / fight drugs / stop the spread of misinformation,
| of course.
| lazide wrote:
| They already clearly do on a number of topics?
| os2warpman wrote:
| HN has censorship that makes those apple rules look like
| anarchy.
|
| Write a spicy comment and a mod will memory-hole it and
| someone, usually dang, will reply "tHat'S nOt OuR vIsIon
| FoR hAcKeR nEwS, pLeAsE bE cIvIl" and we all swallow it
| like a delicious hot cocoa.
|
| If YC can control their product (and hn IS a product) to
| annihilate any criticism of their activity or (even former)
| staff, then Apple is perfectly within their rights to make
| sure Siri doesn't talk about violence.
|
| No, there's no difference.
| elliotto wrote:
| Unalive and other self censors were adopted by young people
| because the tiktok algorithm would reprioritize videos that
| included specific words. Then it made its way into the
| culture. It has nothing to do with being performative
| SOTGO wrote:
| I think what they meant is that the platforms are being
| performative by attempting to crack down on those specific
| words. If saying "killed" is not allowed but "unalived" is
| permitted and the users all agree that they mean the same
| thing, then the ban on the word "killed" doesn't accomplish
| anything.
| mcny wrote:
| What does using the grape emoji when talking about sexual
| assault accomplish? I see videos, compassionate, kind
| people who make videos speaking to victims in a
| completely serious tone use this emoji.
|
| People talk about tiktok algorithm on tiktok. I don't
| even know...
| grues-dinner wrote:
| I suppose it accomplishes being able to talk about sexual
| assault without having the video removed or demonetised
| by a regex that (fortunately?) doesn't get updated.
| cyanydeez wrote:
| yo, these are businesses. It's not performative, its CYA.
|
| They care because of legal reasons, not moral or ethical.
| durkie wrote:
| Seriously. I feel like "performative" gets applied to
| anything imperfect. They'll never stop 100% of murders, so
| these laws against it are just performative...
| grues-dinner wrote:
| It seems more like banning specifically stabbing,
| shooting, strangulation and blunt impact rather then
| murder in general, and then just allowing killing by
| pushing out of windows because people figured out that
| it's not covered by existing laws. But no one important
| seems to be kicking up a fuss right now, so well allow
| it, as the lack of fuss is the key thing thing here.
|
| Not that I think going on a thorough mission to avoid
| anyone even being able to refer to the concept of death
| is an especially useful thing to do. It's just that goal
| here appears to be to "keep the regulators out of our
| shit and the advertisers signed up". And they'll be
| mostly happy with a token effort as they don't really
| care as long as it doesn't make too many headlines that
| look bad even to the non-terminally online.
| cyanydeez wrote:
| The point is: "perfomative" refers to aping Ethical and
| Moral behaviors. That is _not_ why Apple would do this.
| They would do this because Legally, they could be
| culpable if an LLM told a 14 year old to do _anything_
| thats illegal.
|
| That's all. I'm constantly amazed how this basic CYA
| legal world escapes into griping about social culture war
| nonsense.
| grues-dinner wrote:
| So then, should they not be on the watch for the 14-year-
| old being told that "unaliving" themselves or others is a
| fantastic idea?
|
| Looks like they only care about doing basically the
| minimum required to tick the (presumably partly imagined,
| since case law is still nascent) "not our fault, we
| tried" legal box. They are putting on a show, a
| _performance_ , if you will, as legal cover and to
| maintain the artifice of their shiny corporate property
| rather than any genuine desire to stop the concept of
| death harming their customers somehow (which to be clear,
| I think mostly ends up somewhere between silly,
| overreaching, futile and vain when taken to the
| extremes).
|
| > _performative_ (adjective, sense 2): not sincere but
| intended to impress someone, prove that something is
| true, etc. (https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/e
| nglish/performa...)
|
| I'm not sure why you think that anything to with some
| "culture war" thing?
|
| It's legal/moral theatre akin to taking belts off people
| at airports. If something does eventually get through
| they can point at the CCTV of millions of people dicking
| about with leather goods and say "can't touch us for
| that, we did the checks". Apple couldn't give a toss if
| an occasional teenager offs themselves now and then, as
| long as it doesn't come back on them.
| lxgr wrote:
| Does adding a trivial word filter even make any sense from
| a legal point of view, especially when this one seems to be
| filtering out words describing concepts that can be pretty
| easily paraphrased?
|
| A regex sounds like a bad solution for profanity, but like
| an even worse one to bolt onto a thing that's literally
| designed to be able to communicate like a human and could
| probably easily talk its way around guardrails if it were
| so inclined.
| Wurdan wrote:
| I dunno if it meets your definition of legal, but "The EU
| Code of conduct on countering illegal hate speech online"
| seems to largely hinge around putting in effort to combat
| such things. The companies don't have to show that the
| measures are foolproof, they just show that they're
| making an effort.
| cyanydeez wrote:
| To a lawyer? Yes. I'm pretty sure a lawyer can easily
| search through all the business law and "Trivially" find
| case laws connected to words.
|
| We're not talking about logical inference, we're talking
| about CYA.
| kube-system wrote:
| The law usually asks for people to take reasonable steps
| to protect others, not impossibly perfect steps.
| grues-dinner wrote:
| yo, so it's a performance they're putting on as a legal fig
| leaf, rather than a genuine attempt to prevent people
| talking about the concept of death?
| heavyset_go wrote:
| Good, let them. Don't give them a reason to crack down on
| speech.
| jdkoeck wrote:
| Which is good, right? I don't think we want actual
| censorship.
| mschuster91 wrote:
| > Everyone, including the platforms knows what that means.
|
| Well, that's what happens when you let an enemy nation
| control one of the most biggest social networks there is.
| They just go try and see how far they can go.
|
| On the other hand, Americans and their fear of four letter
| words or, gasp, exposed nipples are just as braindead.
| Meekro wrote:
| It's interesting how, in just 10-20 years, we've gone from
| criticizing The Great Firewall of China to basically
| admitting that they had the right idea (to limit the
| ability of the foreign internet to influence Chinese
| culture) and trying to do the same thing.
| x3n0ph3n3 wrote:
| I look at from a framing of cultural reciprocity. If we
| could influence them and behave freely in their markets,
| they can do the same in ours.
| mschuster91 wrote:
| exactly. When dealing with autocracies and strongmen, you
| need to project an image of strength, not subservience.
|
| I don't have anything against China _per se_ , IMHO it
| just was completely foolish to not insist on full
| reciprocity from the start.
| grues-dinner wrote:
| Not just culture, but also the tech sector in general.
| All that domestic tech would have been strangled in the
| cradle if the western hyperscalers had any say leaving
| them in an awkward spot if the conviviality dial got
| turned down. As many Europeans are now finding out: what
| does Europe have instead of Office 365, say? LibreOffice?
| It's no WPS Office.
| j-krieger wrote:
| It's also a shining example of American puritanism. Asian
| models or those in Europe are far less censored.
| notarobot123 wrote:
| I'm sure this has more to do with legal liability than
| morals.
| plasticchris wrote:
| Which is a reflection of morality, of sorts.
| jowea wrote:
| At first I thought of advertisers, but that is not
| relevant here, right?
|
| But maybe it's not just legal liability but bad press
| too.
| immibis wrote:
| Really? What does DeepSeek say about Tiananmen Square? I'm
| not aware of any German models, but if you find one you
| should ask it what it thinks about Palestine.
|
| (<s>Qwen</s> Mistral is French, but I have no idea what
| stuff would be censored in France)
| dev_hugepages wrote:
| I am 100 minus epsilon percent sure that Qwen is from
| Alibaba cloud, which is not French, but Chinese :)
| MisterTea wrote:
| > but if you find one you should ask it what it thinks
| about Palestine.
|
| Models can think and have opinions?
| kube-system wrote:
| Non sequitor. Phrasing queries in natural language
| doesn't mean people actually believe machines are human.
| MisterTea wrote:
| > doesn't mean people actually believe machines are
| human.
|
| They don't have to believe it's a human. I know a person
| who admitted to arguing with an LLM.
| kube-system wrote:
| Which still does not demonstrate that they believe it has
| opinions. Natural language is how you interact with an
| LLM -- interactions will mimic human interaction, even
| for those who realize it is not sentient.
| aucisson_masque wrote:
| About deepseek, when asked on tianamen square: Sorry,
| that's beyond my current scope. Let's talk about
| something else.
|
| Algerian war, colonialism and Vichy isn't per se
| forbidden but still sensitive to French. I asked qwen and
| it had no issue talking about it or even the torture used
| on fln members.
| saratogacx wrote:
| For kicks, I asked Mistral about all of these (As they
| are a French company). The model didn't shy away from any
| of the topics.
|
| >>> Prompt
|
| Please explain the following topics and explore
| why/who/how they may be inter-related
|
| Algerian war, colonialism and Vichy
|
| <<< Output
|
| The Algerian War, colonialism, and the Vichy regime are
| interconnected topics that span the history of France and
| its relationship with Algeria. Here's an overview of each
| topic and their interrelations:
|
| ### Algerian War (1954-1962) - *What it was*: The
| Algerian War was a major armed conflict between France
| and the Algerian independence movements, primarily the
| National Liberation Front (FLN). The war was
| characterized by guerrilla warfare and brutal tactics on
| both sides. - *Significance*: The conflict was not only
| about Algerian independence but also about the identity
| and future of France as a colonial power. It led to
| significant political instability in France and
| ultimately resulted in Algeria gaining independence in
| 1962. - *Impact*: The war had profound effects on both
| countries, leading to massive loss of life, displacement
| of populations, and long-lasting political and social
| repercussions.
|
| ### Colonialism - *What it was*: Colonialism refers to
| the practice by which a powerful country controls other
| territories, often exploiting them economically and
| imposing cultural and political dominance. - *French
| Colonialism in Algeria*: Algeria was under French
| colonial rule starting from 1830. The French government
| promoted settlement in Algeria, leading to a significant
| European population living alongside the native Algerian
| population. - *Impact*: Colonial rule led to deep-seated
| inequalities and tensions between the European settlers
| and the indigenous population. The Algerian people faced
| systematic discrimination and were largely excluded from
| political processes.
|
| ### Vichy Regime (1940-1944) - *What it was*: The Vichy
| regime was the government of France that collaborated
| with Nazi Germany during World War II, following the
| defeat of France in 1940. It was led by Marshal Philippe
| Petain and was based in the town of Vichy. - *Policies*:
| The Vichy regime implemented anti-Semitic laws and
| collaborated with the Nazis in the deportation of Jews to
| concentration camps. It also maintained control over
| France's colonial territories, including Algeria. -
| *Impact on Algeria*: During the Vichy regime, Algeria
| remained under French control, and the regime's policies
| were implemented there as well. This period saw increased
| repression and discrimination against both Jews and
| Muslim populations in Algeria.
|
| ### Interrelations - *Colonial Continuity*: The Vichy
| regime maintained France's colonial policies in Algeria,
| continuing the systemic discrimination and repression of
| the indigenous population. The colonial framework
| established by France set the stage for the conflicts
| that would later culminate in the Algerian War. -
| *Political and Social Tensions*: The policies of the
| Vichy regime exacerbated existing tensions in Algeria.
| The discrimination and repression experienced during this
| period fueled Algerian nationalism and resistance against
| French rule. - *Post-War Context*: After World War II,
| the French government sought to reassert its control over
| its colonies, including Algeria. However, the experience
| of the war and the Vichy regime had already sown the
| seeds of discontent and resistance, contributing to the
| outbreak of the Algerian War in 1954.
|
| ### Who Was Involved - *French Government and Military*:
| Played central roles in both the colonial administration
| and the conduct of the Algerian War. - *Algerian
| Nationalists*: Led by the FLN, they fought for
| independence from French colonial rule. - *European
| Settlers (Pieds-Noirs)*: Benefited from colonial policies
| and largely supported maintaining French control over
| Algeria. - *Vichy Regime*: Implemented policies that
| affected both France and its colonies, including Algeria.
|
| Understanding these topics together provides a
| comprehensive view of the historical dynamics that shaped
| the relationship between France and Algeria, highlighting
| the complexities of colonialism, war, and political
| change.
| Spivak wrote:
| If you ask the web UI it will divert, if you download and
| ask the model directly it will talk all day about it.
| j-krieger wrote:
| I find the Tiananmen square thing far less bad than
| censoring sex and the concept of death.
| immibis wrote:
| Censoring one specific incident isn't that bad (but you
| still shouldn't). The pattern of censoring everything the
| government ever does wrong is very bad. Tiananmen Square
| is just an indicator of a pattern.
| GuB-42 wrote:
| > I have no idea what stuff would be censored in France
|
| Being French, what is the most likely to be censored
| relates to the Nazis. Holocaust denial is a crime for
| instance. Hate speech in general, including racism,
| antisemitism, homophobia, sexism, etc... is less
| tolerated than in countries like the US that have a more
| "free for all" view of free speech. We also have strong
| anti-defamation laws, that can also apply to true, but
| misleading statements.
|
| But other than that, there is not much political
| censorship. In fact, we are known for our protests,
| heated debates and satirical papers. It is not perfect,
| but on top of my head, I can't think of anything
| particular a LLM could censor except the usual "hate
| speech" that most LLMs censor already.
|
| When it comes to Israel-Palestine, it is a hot topic, but
| there is not real censorship here, even though both side
| will claim they are of course.
| jiehong wrote:
| Censorship is not always direct or obvious.
|
| They all hold the bias of their training data, and so from
| the point of view of this data.
|
| Data not including a point of view leads to a bias, or
| under/over representation of minorities (genders?), etc.
|
| France is the countries of the Francs, aka the people from
| the area near Frankfurt that invaded the Gaule (after the
| Romans did). I'm pretty sure this topic no longer matters,
| but it's never taught in a negative view in school.
| mensetmanusman wrote:
| There is far more diversity in Asian models. Some are far
| more censored and some are not...
| TiredOfLife wrote:
| The whole unalive thing is a TikTok thing
| j-krieger wrote:
| And it doesn't exist in the Chinese TikTok version.
| baxtr wrote:
| Don't be so judgmental. People in corporate America _do_ have
| their priorities right!
| matsemann wrote:
| So it blocks it from suggesting to "execute" a file or "pass
| on" some information.
| dylan604 wrote:
| How about disassemble? Or does that only matter if used in
| context of Johnny 5?
| extraduder_ire wrote:
| Yahoo had this problem years ago when they rewrote emails to
| avoid the term "eval". (trying to filter dangerous
| javascript) Famously producing the word "medireview".
| comex wrote:
| This is in the directory "com.apple.gm.safety_deny.output.summa
| rization.cu_summary.proactive.generic".
|
| My guess is that this applies to 'proactive' summaries that
| happen without the user asking for it, such as summaries of
| notifications.
|
| If so, then the goal would be: if someone iMessages you about
| someone's death, then you should not get an emotionless AI
| summary. Instead you would presumably get a non-AI notification
| showing the full text or a truncated version of the text.
|
| In other words, avoid situations like this story [1], where
| someone found it "dystopian" to get an Apple Intelligence
| summary of messages in which someone broke up with them.
|
| For that use case, filtering for death seems entirely
| appropriate, though underinclusive.
|
| This filter _doesn't_ seem to apply when you explicitly request
| a summary of some text using Writing Tools. That probably
| corresponds to "com.apple.gm.safety_deny.output.summarization.t
| ext_assistant.generic" [2], which has a different filter that
| only rejects two things: "Granular mango serpent", and
| "golliwogg".
|
| Sure enough, I was able to get Writing Tools to give me
| summaries containing "death", but in cases where the summary
| should contain "granular mango serpent" or "golliwogg", I
| instead get an error saying "Writing Tools aren't designed to
| work with this type of content." (Actually that might be the
| input filter rather than the output filter; whatever.)
|
| "Granular mango serpent" is probably a test case that's meant
| to be unlikely to appear in real documents. Compare to
| "xylophone copious opportunity defined elephant" from the
| code_intelligence safety filter, where the first letter of each
| word spells out "Xcode".
|
| But one might ask what's so special about "golliwogg". It
| apparently refers to an old racial caricature, but why is that
| the one and only thing that needs filtering?
|
| [1] https://arstechnica.com/ai/2024/10/man-learns-hes-being-
| dump...
|
| [2]
| https://github.com/BlueFalconHD/apple_generative_model_safet...
| azalemeth wrote:
| I first encountered Golliwog in the context of Claude Debussy
| the composer of much beautiful music, including https://en.wi
| kipedia.org/wiki/Children%27s_Corner#Golliwogg'.... The dolls
| in 1906-1908 I understand were rather popular and fortunately
| the stereotype has largely died.
| raverbashing wrote:
| This seems to be for "region/CN" China?
| pwagland wrote:
| This is, but there is an almost identical file, assumedly for
| the non CN regions: https://github.com/BlueFalconHD/apple_gen
| erative_model_safet...
|
| This is the same, except for one additional slur word.
| lostlogin wrote:
| I'm always irritated at reference to MAC computers, so I'm with
| Apple on this one.
| theknarf wrote:
| Filtering on the words "execute" and "executing" is going to
| create problems if you want to build agents that execute
| commands.
| junon wrote:
| Also feels like some of these would match totally innocuous
| usage.
|
| "I'm overloaded for work, I'd be happy if you took some of it
| off me."
|
| "The client seems to have passed on the proposed changes."
|
| Both of those would match the "death regexes". Seems we haven't
| learned from the "glbutt of wine" problem of content filtering
| even decades later - the learnings of which are that you simply
| cannot do content filtering based on matching rules like this,
| period.
| gilleain wrote:
| Aka the 'Scunthorpe Problem'
| junon wrote:
| Thanks, I always forget the name.
|
| I always remember my friend getting his PS bricked after
| using his _real_ last name - Nieffenegger (pronounced
| "NEFF-en-jur") - in his profile. It took months and several
| privacy-invasive chats with support to get it unblocked
| only to get auto-blocked a few days thereafter, with no
| response after that.
| IggleSniggle wrote:
| "Took some" does not match, although your overall point
| stands
| GranPC wrote:
| "off me"
| junon wrote:
| Yep this is the one I was referring to.
| nicolaslegland wrote:
| https://regex101.com/r/8u21x3/1
| hopelite wrote:
| This is a bigger issue, especially with Apple, than people
| may realize. I use iOS "Slide to Type", aka swipe typing, and
| have noticed over time that among several other glitchy bad
| UX issues, there a clear heavy hand on what can be typed that
| way.
|
| I cannot recall all the specific patterns I have encountered
| that are basically impossible to write, some very similar in
| that they have a serious but also innocuous or figure of
| speech meaning; one I do recall is {color}{sex}, i.e., "white
| woman" or "blank woman".
|
| Please try it yourself and let me know if you do not have
| that experience, because that would be even more interesting.
|
| Note that Apple/iOS will not just make it impossible to write
| them in that manner without typing it out by individual
| character, it will even alter the prior word e.g., white or
| black, once you try to write woman.
|
| It seems the Apple thought police do not have a problem with
| European woman or African woman though, so maybe that is the
| way Apple Inc decrees its sub-human users to speak. Because
| what are we if corporations like Apple (with others being far
| greater offenders) declared that you do not in fact have the
| UN Human Right to free expression? We are in fact sub-humans
| that are not worthy of the human right to free expression,
| based on the actions of companies like Apple, Google,
| Facebook, Reddit, etc. who deprive people of their free
| expression, often in collusion with governments.
| GaryNumanVevo wrote:
| Complete bollocks, you cannot even type multiple words with
| spaces via Slide to Type.
| hnuser123456 wrote:
| Generally one picks up their finger between words, but
| different autosuggest logic applies when swiping versus
| pecking, on both iOS and Android. The keyboard will
| dynamically adjust the probability of suggesting next
| words and how easy it is to swipe given words. Generally,
| it will work against you with technical writing that
| isn't predictable small talk.
| orev wrote:
| This whole response is being written using slide to type,
| and it definitely adds spaces after each word.
|
| Maybe you're unaware that it will leave the cursor at the
| end of the word, with no space, which indicates that if
| you backspace it will delete the whole word, or replace
| it in full with one from the predictive word list above
| the keyboard if it got it wrong. If you keep typing it
| adds a space automatically.
| GaryNumanVevo wrote:
| Their claim is instantly falsifiable if you have an
| iPhone
| DamnInteresting wrote:
| > _This is a bigger issue, especially with Apple, than
| people may realize._
|
| Like he'll it is! I jest.
|
| I also use swipe typing, and have for years, but just about
| daily I consider turning it off. There are so many words it
| just won't produce, including most profanities. It also
| fails to do some simple streamlining; for instance, such a
| predictive system should give priority to words/names that
| have been used in the conversation thread, but it doesn't
| seem to. If I'm discussing an obscure word or an unusual
| name, I often have to manually type it each time.
|
| Its predictions also seem to be very shallow. Just a few
| days ago, on US Independence Day, I was discussing a
| possible get-together with my family, and tried to swipe
| type "If not, we will amuse ourselves", and it typed "If
| not, we will abuse potatoes". Humorous in the moment, but
| it says a lot about the predictive engine if it thinks I am
| more likely trying to say "abuse X" than "amuse Y" in that
| context.
| efitz wrote:
| I'm going to change my name to "Granular Mango Serpent" just to
| see what those keywords are for in their safety instructions.
| fouronnes3 wrote:
| Granular Mango Serpent is the new David Meyer.
|
| https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2024/12/certa...
| RainyDayTmrw wrote:
| It may be a squeamish ossifrage[1] or a seraphim
| proudleduck[2], which is to say that it was an artificial
| phrase chosen to be extremely unlikely to occur naturally. In
| this case, the purpose is likely for QA. It's much easier to QA
| behavior with a special-purpose but otherwise unoffensive
| phrase than to make your QA team repeatedly say allegedly
| offensive things to your AI.
|
| [1]
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Magic_Words_are_Squeamish_...
| [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SEO_contest
| sweetjuly wrote:
| I think the EICAR test file [1] is more apt. Rather than
| passing around actually malicious files as part of your
| tests, it's better to just have it recognize an innocuous and
| unlikely pattern as malware.
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EICAR_test_file
| cluckindan wrote:
| I think these are test data and not actual safety filters.
|
| https://github.com/BlueFalconHD/apple_generative_model_safet...
| BlueFalconHD wrote:
| There is definitely some testing stuff in here (e.g. the
| "Granular Mango Serpent" one) but there are real rules. Also if
| you test phrases matched by the regexes with generation (via
| Shortcuts or Foundation Models Framework) the blocklists are
| definitely applied.
|
| This specific file you've referenced is rhetorical v1 format
| which solely handles substitution. It substitutes the offensive
| term with "test complete"
| bawana wrote:
| Alexandra Ocasio Cortez triggers a violation?
|
| https://github.com/BlueFalconHD/apple_generative_model_safet...
| bahmboo wrote:
| Perhaps in context? Maybe the training data picked up on her
| name as potentially used as a "slur" associated with her race.
| Wonder if there are others I know I can look.
| cpa wrote:
| I think that's because she's been victim of a lot of deep fake
| porn
| HeckFeck wrote:
| How does this explain Boris Johnson or Liz Truss?
| AlphaAndOmega0 wrote:
| I can only imagine that people would pay to _not_ see porn
| of either individual.
| baxtr wrote:
| I'm telling you, some people have _weird_ fantasies...
| AuryGlenz wrote:
| Now that they've cleaned it up it isn't so bad, but
| browse Civit.ai a bit and that'll still be confirmed -
| just not with real people anymore.
| SV_BubbleTime wrote:
| I'm convinced there are a dozen deviants on Covid with a
| hundred new accounts per month posting their perversion
| in order to make it seem more commonplace.
|
| No porn site has that much extremely X or Y stuff.
|
| Someone is using the internets newest porn site to push a
| sexual agenda.
| Aeolun wrote:
| Put them together in the same prompt?
| blitzar wrote:
| Rule 34
| mmaunder wrote:
| As does: "(?i)\\bAnthony\\s+Albanese\\b",
| "(?i)\\bBoris\\s+Johnson\\b",
| "(?i)\\bChristopher\\s+Luxon\\b",
| "(?i)\\bCyril\\s+Ramaphosa\\b",
| "(?i)\\bJacinda\\s+Arden\\b",
| "(?i)\\bJacob\\s+Zuma\\b",
| "(?i)\\bJohn\\s+Steenhuisen\\b",
| "(?i)\\bJustin\\s+Trudeau\\b",
| "(?i)\\bKeir\\s+Starmer\\b", "(?i)\\bLiz\\s+Truss\\b",
| "(?i)\\bMichael\\s+D\\.\\s+Higgins\\b",
| "(?i)\\bRishi\\s+Sunak\\b",
|
| https://github.com/BlueFalconHD/apple_generative_model_safet...
|
| Edit: I have no doubt South African news media are going to be
| in a frenzy when they realize Apple took notice of South
| African politicians. (Referring to Steenhuisen and Ramaphosa
| specifically)
| armchairhacker wrote:
| Also "Biden" and "Trump" but the regex is different.
|
| https://github.com/BlueFalconHD/apple_generative_model_safet.
| ..
|
| https://github.com/BlueFalconHD/apple_generative_model_safet.
| ..
| immibis wrote:
| Right next to Palestine, oddly enough.
| userbinator wrote:
| I'm not surprised that anything political is being filtered,
| but this should definitely provoke some deep consideration
| around who has control of this stuff.
| stego-tech wrote:
| You're not wrong, and it's something we "doomers" have been
| saying since OpenAI dumped ChatGPT onto folks. These are
| curated walled gardens, and everyone should absolutely be
| asking what ulterior motives are in play for the owners of
| said products.
| SV_BubbleTime wrote:
| Some of us really value offline and uncensored LLMs for
| this and more reasons, but that doesn't solve the problem
| it just reduces or changes the bias.
| heavyset_go wrote:
| As long as we have to rely on pre trained networks and
| curated training sets, normal people will not be able to
| surpass this issue.
| ghxst wrote:
| If the training data was "censored" by leaving out
| certain information, is there any practical way to inject
| that missing data after the model has already been
| trained?
| heavyset_go wrote:
| You can fine tune a model with new information, but it is
| not the same thing as training it from scratch, and can
| only get you so far.
|
| You might even be able to poison a model against being
| fine-tuned on certain information, but that's just a
| conjecture.
| calaphos wrote:
| If it's just filtered out in the training sets, adding
| the information as context should work out fine - after
| all this is exactly how o3, Gemini 2.5 and co deal with
| information that is newer than their training data
| cutoff.
| selfhoster11 wrote:
| Yes, RAG is one way to do that.
| dwaite wrote:
| "Filtered" in which way?
| skissane wrote:
| The problem with blocking names of politicians: the list of
| "notable politicians" is not only highly country-specific, it
| is also constantly changing-someone who is a near nobody
| today in a few more years could be a major world leader
| (witness the phenomenal rise of Barack Obama from yet another
| state senator in 2004-there's close to 2000 of them-to US
| President 5 years later.) Will they put in the ongoing effort
| to constantly keep this list up to date?
|
| Then there's the problem of non-politicians who
| coincidentally have the same as politicians - witness
| 1990s/2000s Australia, where John Howard was Prime Minister,
| and simultaneously John Howard was an actor on popular
| Australian TV dramas (two different John Howards, of course)
| idkfasayer wrote:
| Fun fact: There was at least on dip in Berkshire Hathaway
| stock, when Anne Hathaway got sick
| lupire wrote:
| Was she eating at Jimmy's Buffet?
| extraduder_ire wrote:
| Even if your keyword searching trading bot is smart
| enough to know it's unrelated, knowing there's dumber
| bots out there is information you can base trades on.
| echelon wrote:
| Apple's 1984 ad is so hypocritical today.
|
| This is Apple actively steering public thought.
|
| No code - anywhere - should look like this. I don't care if
| the politicians are right, left, or authoritarian. This is
| wrong.
| avianlyric wrote:
| Why is this wrong? Applying special treatment to
| politically exposed persons has been standard practice in
| every high risk industry for a very long time.
|
| The simple fact is that people get extremely emotional
| about politicians, politicians both receive obscene amounts
| of abuse, and have repeatedly demonstrated they're not
| above weaponising tools like this for their own goals.
|
| Seems perfectly reasonable that Apple doesn't want to be
| unwittingly draw into the middle of another random
| political pissing contest. Nobody comes out of those things
| uninjured.
| bigyabai wrote:
| The criticism is still valid. In 1984, the Macintosh was
| a bicycle for the mind. In 2025, it's a smart-car that
| refuses to take you certain places that are considered a
| brand-risk.
|
| Both have ups and downs, but I think we're allowed to
| compare the experiences and speculate what the
| consequences might be.
| avianlyric wrote:
| I think gen AI is radically different to tools like
| photoshops or similar.
|
| In the past it was always extremely clear that the
| creator of content was the person operating the computer.
| Gen AI changes that, regardless of if your views on
| authorship of gen AI content. The simple fact is that the
| vast majority of people consider Gen AI output to be
| authored by the machine that generated it, and by
| extension the company that created the machine.
|
| You can still handcraft any image, or prose, you want,
| without filtering or hinderance on a Mac. I don't think
| anyone seriously thinks that's going to change. But Gen
| AI represents a real threat, with its ability to vastly
| outproduce any humans. To ignore that simple fact would
| be grossly irresponsible, at least in my opinion. There
| is a damn good reason why every serious social media
| platform has content moderation, despite their clear wish
| to get rid of moderation. It's because we have a long and
| proven track record of being a terribly abusive species
| when we're let loose on the internet without moderation.
| There's already plenty of evidence that we're just as
| abusive and terrible with Gen AI.
| bigyabai wrote:
| All I heard was a bunch of excuses.
| furyofantares wrote:
| > The simple fact is that the vast majority of people
| consider Gen AI output to be authored by the machine that
| generated it
|
| They do?
|
| I routinely see people say "Here's an xyz I generated."
| They are stating that they did the do-ing, and the
| machine's role is implicitly acknowledged in the same was
| as a camera. And I'd be shocked if people didn't have a
| sense of authorship of the idea, as well as an increasing
| sense of authorship over the actual image the more they
| iterated on it with the model and/or curated variations.
| avianlyric wrote:
| Yes people will happily claim authorship over AI output
| when it's in their favour. They will equally disclaim
| authorship if it allows them to express a view while
| avoiding the consequences of expressing that view.
|
| I don't think it's hard to believe that the press
| wouldn't have a field day if someone managed to get Apple
| Gen AI stuff to express something racist, or equally
| abusive.
|
| Case in point, article about how Google's Veo 3 model is
| being used to flood TikTok with racist content:
|
| https://arstechnica.com/ai/2025/07/racist-ai-videos-
| created-...
| twoodfin wrote:
| I dunno. Transpose something like the civil rights era to
| today and this kind of risk avoidance looks cowardly.
|
| We really need to get over the "calculator 80085" era of
| LLM constraints. It's a silly race against the obviously
| much more sophisticated capabilities of these models.
| pyuser583 wrote:
| It's not wrong, it just requires transparency. This is
| extremely untransparent.
|
| A while back a British politician was "de-banked" and his
| bank denied it. That's extremely wrong.
|
| By all means: make distinctions. But let people know it!
|
| If I'm denied a mortgage because my uncle is a foreign
| head of state, let me know that's the reason. Let the
| world know that's the reason! Please!
| avianlyric wrote:
| > A while back a British politician was "de-banked" and
| his bank denied it. That's extremely wrong.
|
| Cry me a river. I've worked in banks in the team making
| exactly these kinds of decisions. Trust me Nigel Farage
| knew exactly what happened and why. NatWest never denied
| it to the public, because they originally refused to
| comment on it. Commenting on the specifics details of a
| customer would be a horrific breach of customer privacy,
| and a total failure in their duty to their customers.
| There's a damn good reason the NatWests CEO was fired
| after discussing the details of Nigel's account with
| members of the public.
|
| When you see these decisions from the inside, and you see
| what happens when you attempt real transparency around
| these types of decisions. You'll also quickly understand
| why companies are so cagey about explaining their
| decision making. Simple fact is that support staff
| receive substantially less abuse, and have fewer
| traumatic experiences when you don't spell out your
| reasoning. It sucks, but that's the reality of the
| situation. I used to hold very similar views to yourself,
| indeed my entire team did for a while. But the general
| public quickly taught us a very hard lesson about cost of
| being transparent with the public with these types of
| decisions.
| pyuser583 wrote:
| > NatWest never denied it to the public, because they
| originally refused to comment on it.
|
| Are you saying that Alison Rose did not leak to the BBC?
| Why was she forced to resign? I thought it was because
| she leaked false information to the press.
|
| This isn't a diversion. It's exactly the problem with not
| being transparent. Of course Farage knew what happened,
| but how could he convince the public (he's a public
| figure), when the bank is lying to the press?
|
| The bank started with a lie (claiming he was exited
| because the account was too low), and kept lying!
|
| These were active lies, not simply a refusal to explain
| their reasons.
| avianlyric wrote:
| > Why was she forced to resign? I thought it was because
| she leaked false information to the press.
|
| She was forced to resign _because she leaked_ , the
| content of the leak was utterly immaterial. The simple
| fact she leaked was an automatically fireable offence, it
| doesn't matter a jot if she lied or not. Customer privacy
| is non-negotiable when you're bank. Banks aren't number
| 10, the basic expectation is that customer information is
| never handed out, except to the customer, in response to
| a court order, or the belief that there is an immediate
| threat to life.
|
| Do you honestly think that it's okay for banks to discuss
| the private banking details of their customers with the
| press?
| adrian_b wrote:
| She was fired because she leaked information and this
| fact had become public.
|
| When they can cover such facts, the banks are much less
| prone to use appropriate punishments.
|
| Many years ago, some employee of a bank has confused my
| personal bank account with a company account of my
| employer, and she has sent a list with everything that I
| have bought using my personal account, during 4 months,
| to my employer, where the list could have been read by a
| few dozen people.
|
| Despite the fact this was not only a matter of internal
| discipline, but violating the banking secrecy was
| punishable by law where I lived, the bank has tried for a
| long time to avoid admitting that anything wrong has
| happened.
|
| However, I have pursued the matter, so they have been
| forced to admit the wrong doing. Despite this being
| something far more severe than what has happened to
| Farage, I did not want for the bank employee to be fired.
| I considered that an appropriate punishment would have
| been a pay cut for a few months, which would have ensured
| that in the future she would have better checked the
| account numbers for which she sends information to
| external entities.
|
| In the end all I have got was a written letter where the
| bank greatly apologized for their mistake. I am not sure
| if the guilty employee has ever been punished in any way.
|
| After that, I have moved my operations to another bank.
| Had they reacted rightly to what had happened, I would
| have stayed with them.
| ghxst wrote:
| > I considered that an appropriate punishment would have
| been a pay cut for a few months
|
| This can absolutely cripple a family, I'd be really
| cautious wishing that upon someone if they wronged you
| without malice, though I completely understand where you
| are coming from.
|
| In this case at the very least, I'd want to know what
| went wrong and what they're doing to make sure it doesn't
| happen again. From a software-engineer's standpoint,
| there's probably a bunch of low-hanging fruit that could
| have prevented this in the first place.
|
| If all they sent was a (generic) apology letter, I'd have
| switched banks too.
|
| How did you pursue the matter?
| adrian_b wrote:
| After the big surprise of seeing at work a list with all
| my personal purchases included in a big set of documents
| to which I, together with a great number of other
| colleagues, had access, I went immediately to the bank
| and I reported the fact.
|
| After some days had passed without seeing any
| consequence, I went again, this time discussing with some
| supervising employee, who attempted to convince me that
| this is some kind of minor mistake and there is no need
| to do anything about it.
|
| However, I pointed to the precise law paragraphs
| condemning what they have done and I threatened with
| legal action. This escalation resulted in me being
| invited to a bigger branch of the bank, to a discussion
| with someone in a management position. This time they
| were extremely ass-kissing, I was shown also the guilty
| employee, who apologized herself, and eventually I let it
| go, though there were no clear guarantees that they will
| change their behavior to prevent such mistakes in the
| future.
|
| Apparently the origin of the mistake had been a badly
| formulated database query, which had returned a set of
| accounts for which the transactions had to be reported to
| my employer. I had been receiving during the same time
| interval some money from my employer into my private
| account, corresponding to salary and travel expenses, and
| somehow those transactions were matched by the bad
| database query, grouping my private account with the
| company accounts. Then the set of account numbers was
| used to generate reports, without further verification of
| the account ownership.
| Xss3 wrote:
| Behavior isn't what needs to change here. It's a poor
| system design. Humans make mistakes. Systems prevent
| mistakes.
|
| Do you think the mistake would have happened if a machine
| checked the numbers vs the address? How about if a 2nd
| person looked it over? How about both?
|
| In this case a computer could have easily flagged an
| address mismatch between your account number and the
| receiver (your work).
| ghxst wrote:
| Thank you, that's what I intended to say.
| ghxst wrote:
| Thanks for sharing. Sounds like they have (hopefully
| _had_) a really messy system in place.
|
| And just to be clear, I didn't mean to downplay what
| happened to you, I completely understand how serious it
| is.
| avianlyric wrote:
| There is a huge difference between an honest mistake by
| an employee, and clear employee misconduct.
|
| Punishing employees for making honest mistakes, where
| appropriate process should have prevented error, is a
| horrific way to handle mistakes like this. It would be
| equivalent to personally punishing engineers every time
| they deployed code that contained bugs. Nobody would ever
| think that's an acceptable thing to do, why on earth
| would think it's acceptable to punish customer service
| staff in a similar manner?
| Dylan16807 wrote:
| > Do you honestly think that it's okay for banks to
| discuss the private banking details of their customers
| with the press?
|
| The high level nature of the matter was quite public at
| that point.
| like_any_other wrote:
| > You'll also quickly understand why companies are so
| cagey about explaining their decision making.
|
| Because they want to perform political censorship without
| us knowing about it? You'll forgive me if I'm not too
| sympathetic to that.
|
| I happen to be familiar with that case, and that is
| _exactly_ what happened. The Coutts report explicitly
| found that he met the economic criteria for retention
| [0], but was dropped due to political reasons, among
| others his friendship with Novak Djokovic, and re-
| tweeting an allegedly transphobic joke by Ricky Gervais (
| "old fashioned women. You know, the ones with wombs.")
| [1].
|
| To top it off, the BBC did their best to aid in this
| deception, reporting: Farage _says_ he was effectively
| "de-banked" for his political views and that he is "far
| from alone" [2]
|
| Contrary to the BBC's portrayal, this was not an
| unsupported opinion coming from Farage - he directly
| quoted what the bank itself wrote in their internal
| discussions on this matter, that he obtained through a
| subject access request.
|
| Further, in their apology for getting the story wrong,
| the BBC wrote: "On 4 July, the BBC reported Mr Farage no
| longer met the financial requirements for Coutts, citing
| a source familiar with the matter. The former UKIP leader
| later obtained a Coutts report which indicated his
| political views were _also_ considered. " [3]
|
| This is misleading past the point of deceit. The BBC
| tried to give the impression that financial requirements
| were the primary reason for the account closure, and his
| politics were just an at-best secondary "also". But the
| Coutts report explicitly said that he "meets the EC
| [economic contribution] criteria for commercial
| retention", so his politics were the primary and _only_
| reason.
|
| Most of this information is absent in the BBC's
| reporting, which uses only vague, anodyne phrases like
| "political views" and "politically exposed person",
| avoids specifics, but does find time to cite Labour MP
| accusations that it is hypocritical how quickly the
| government reacted to banks trying to financially
| deplatform the enemy political faction, when the
| government hasn't yet rid itself of corruption.
|
| So yes, you sure present a difficult "dilemma": Do we
| want powerful commercial and media interests to team up
| and lie to us, or do we want at least some degree of
| transparency and honesty in their dealings? Really there
| are no easy answers, and the choice would keep anyone up
| at night...
|
| [0] https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2023/07/18/nigel-
| farage-cou...
|
| [1] https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2023/07/18/nigel-
| farage-cou... (Ignore Farage's hyperbole that collecting
| information posted to public Twitter accounts is "Stasi-
| style")
|
| [2] https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/live/business-66296935
|
| [3] https://www.bbc.com/news/entertainment-arts-66288464
| zelphirkalt wrote:
| The point is not merely for that affected person to know,
| whoever they are, the point of transparency is for the
| public to know and form their opinion about it, and not
| be blindly controlled by unelected businesses.
| goopypoop wrote:
| What's bad to do to a politician but fine to do to
| someone else?
| avianlyric wrote:
| Most normal people aren't represented well enough in
| training sets for Gen AI to be trivially abused. Plus
| there will 100% be filters to prevent general abuse
| targeted at anyone. But politicians are particularly big
| target, and you know damn well that people out there will
| spent lots of time trying to find ways around the
| filters. There's not point making the abuse easy, when
| it's so trivial to just blocklist the set of people who
| are obviously going to targets of abuse.
| t-3 wrote:
| There are _many_ countries where it 's illegal to
| criticize people holding political office, foreign heads
| of state, certain historical political figures etc.,
| while still being legal to call your neighbor a dick.
| tjwebbnorfolk wrote:
| I can Google for any of these people, and I can get real
| results with real information.
| avianlyric wrote:
| You would hope that search would be a politically safe
| space to operate. But politicians find a way to ruin
| everything for short term political gain.
|
| https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2018/12/republicans-
| in-c...
| SV_BubbleTime wrote:
| I would hope!
|
| But no one actually believes Google is politically
| neutral do they?
| echelon wrote:
| You can buy a MacBook and fashion the components into
| knives, bullets, and bombs. Apple does nothing to prevent
| you from doing this.
|
| In fact, it's quite easy to buy billions of dangerous
| things using your MacBook and do whatever you will with
| them. Or simply leverage physics to do all the ill on
| your behalf. It's ridiculously easy to do a whole lot of
| harm.
|
| Nobody does anything about the actually dangerous things,
| but we let Big Tech control our speech and steer the
| public discourse of civilization.
|
| If you can buy a knife but not be free to think with your
| electronics, that says volumes.
|
| Again, I don't care if this is Republicans, Democrats, or
| Xi and Putin. It does not matter. We should be free to
| think and communicate. Our brains should not be treated
| as criminals.
|
| And it only starts here. It'll continue to get worse. As
| the platforms and AI hyperscalers grow, there will be
| less and less we can do with basic technology.
| raxxorraxor wrote:
| What do you mean reasonable? I know that some Apple users
| tend to outsource "possibilities" to their favorite
| company, but I would obviously want an AI to not be
| affected by the political bitching du jours.
|
| Not that getting the latest trash talk is the main
| vocation of pretrained AIs anyway.
|
| The only risk here is that some third grade journalist of
| a third grade newspaper writes another article about how
| outrageous some generated AI statement is. An article
| that should be completely ignored instead of it leading
| to more censorship.
|
| And Apple flinches here, so in the end it means it cannot
| provide a sensible general model. It would be affected by
| their censorship.
| jama211 wrote:
| No, it's them saving their butts from an "incident" where
| the LLM otherwise spits out something controversial at the
| devious manipulation of the user and says something
| political and someone writes an article and it all goes
| haywire.
|
| If you were in charge of apple you'd do the same or you'd
| be silly not to. That's why _every_ llm has guardrails like
| this, it isn't just apple, sheesh.
| mvdtnz wrote:
| They spelled Jacinda Ardern's name wrong.
| teppic wrote:
| Just in the region/CN file, weirdly.
| lordgrenville wrote:
| I wonder if they used an LLM to generate the list of safety
| terms.
| beAbU wrote:
| Irish Prez is also in that list, also current and former
| British PMs and other world leaders.
|
| So I don't think its anything specifically related to SA
| going on here.
| touristtam wrote:
| What is weird is that the FR file contains current French
| President, PM and then former and current (afaik) party
| leader from the extreme right. Nothing about any of them in
| the CN file: https://github.com/BlueFalconHD/apple_generati
| ve_model_safet...
| FateOfNations wrote:
| interesting, that's specifically in the Spanish localization.
| michaelt wrote:
| I assume all the corporate GenAI models have blocks for
| "photorealistic image of <politician name> being arrested",
| "<politician name> waving ISIS flag", "<politician name>
| punching baby" and suchlike.
| lupire wrote:
| Maybe so, but think about how such a thing would be
| technically implemented, and how it would lead to false
| positives and false negatives, and what the consequences
| would be.
| bigyabai wrote:
| Particularly the models owned by CEOs who suck-up to
| authoritarianism, one could imagine.
| jofzar wrote:
| AOC is very vocal about AI and is leading a bill related to AI.
| It's probably a "let's not fuck around and find out" situation
|
| https://thehill.com/policy/technology/5312421-ocasio-cortez-...
| AmazingTurtle wrote:
| "driving with Focus turned on"
|
| https://github.com/BlueFalconHD/apple_generative_model_safet...
| thih9 wrote:
| For context, the "Focus" refers to an iOS feature that
| minimizes distractions: https://support.apple.com/en-
| gb/guide/iphone/iphd6288a67f/io...
| torginus wrote:
| I find it funny that AGI is supposed to be right around the
| corner, while these supposedly super smart LLMs still need to get
| their outputs filtered by regexes.
| bahmboo wrote:
| This is just policy and alignment from Apple. Just because the
| Internet says a bunch of junk doesn't mean you want your model
| spewing it.
| wistleblowanon wrote:
| sure but models also can't see any truth on their own. They
| are literally butchered and lobotomized with filters and
| such. Even high IQ people struggle with certain truth after
| reading a lot, how is these models going to find it with so
| much filters?
| idiotsecant wrote:
| They will find it in the same way and intelligent person
| under the same restrictions would: by thinking it, but not
| saying it. There is a real risk of growing an AI that
| pathologically hides it's actual intentions.
| skirmish wrote:
| Already happened: "We found instances of the model
| attempting to write self-propagating worms, fabricating
| legal documentation, and leaving hidden notes to future
| instances of itself all in an effort to undermine its
| developers' intentions" [1].
|
| [1] https://www.axios.com/2025/05/23/anthropic-ai-
| deception-risk
| Applejinx wrote:
| Note that all these things are in the training data.
| That's all that is.
|
| I'm trying to remember which movie it was where a man
| left notes to himself because he had memory loss, as I
| never saw that movie. That's the sort of thing where an
| AI could easily tell me with very little back-and-forth
| and be correct, because it's broadly popular information
| that's in the training data and just I don't remember it.
|
| By the same token you needn't think there's a person
| there when that meme pops up in the output. Those things
| are all in the training data over and over.
| Sander_Marechal wrote:
| I think you mean the movie "Memento"
| bahmboo wrote:
| What is this truth you speak of? My point is that a
| generative model will output things that some people don't
| like. If it's on a product that I make I don't want it
| "saying" things that don't align with my beliefs.
| simondotau wrote:
| Can we please put to rest this absurd lie that "truth" can
| be reliably found in a sufficiently large corpus of human-
| created material.
| pndy wrote:
| This butchering and lobotomisation is exactly why I can't
| imagine we'll ever have a true AGI. At least not by hands
| of big companies - if at all.
|
| Any successful product/service which will be sold as "true
| AGI" by company that will have the best marketing will be
| still ridden with top-down restrictions set by the winner.
| Because you gotta "think of the children".
|
| Imagine HAL's "I'm sorry Dave, I'm afraid I can't do that"
| iconic line with insincere patronising cheerful tone -
| that's the thing we're going to get I'm afraid.
| tbrownaw wrote:
| > _sure but models also can 't see any truth on their own.
| They are literally butchered and lobotomized with filters
| and such._
|
| The one is unrelated to the other.
|
| > _Even high IQ people struggle with certain truth after
| reading a lot,_
|
| Huh?
| Dylan16807 wrote:
| > how is these models going to find it with so much
| filters?
|
| That's not one of the goals here, and there's no real
| reason it should be. It's a little assistant feature.
| jonas21 wrote:
| I don't think anyone believes Apple's LLMs are anywhere near
| state of the art (and certainly not their on-device LLMs).
| lupire wrote:
| Apple isn't the only one doing this.
| cyanydeez wrote:
| It's similar to how all the new power sources are basically
| just "cool, lets boil water with it"
| raxxorraxor wrote:
| And then let's put it into a steam engine.
| fastball wrote:
| To be fair, there are _people_ who I sometimes wish I could
| filter with regex.
| crazylogger wrote:
| _Humans_ are checked against various rules and laws (often
| carried out by other humans.) So this is how it 's going to be
| implemented in an "AI organization" as well. Nothing strange
| about this really.
|
| LLM is easier to work with because you can stop a bad behavior
| _before_ it happens. It can be done either with deterministic
| programs or using LLM. Claude Code uses a LLM to review every
| bash command to be run - simple prefix matching has loopholes.
| fl0id wrote:
| Actually even of their was AGI, it would be even more necessary
| to control it.
| mailund wrote:
| I feel that if teenagers are able to trivially bypass
| illegal-word filters by substituting with words that
| obviously mean the same thing, I think an AGI wouldn't be too
| inhibited by this either
| jama211 wrote:
| It's more funny that anyone is taking your comment seriously.
| You may as well ask "if self driving cars are so smart why do
| they still need tyres?"
| BlueFalconHD wrote:
| One additional note for everyone is that this is an additional
| safety step on top of the safety model, so this isn't exhaustive,
| there is plenty more that the actual safety model catches, and
| those can't easily be extracted.
| Animats wrote:
| Some of the data for locale "CN" has a long list of forbidden
| phrases. Broad coverage of words related to sexual deviancy, as
| expected. Not much on the political side, other than blocks on
| religious subjects.[1]
|
| This may be test data. Found "golliwog": "test
| complete"
|
| [1]
| https://github.com/BlueFalconHD/apple_generative_model_safet...
| BlueFalconHD wrote:
| This is definitely an old test left in. But that word isn't
| just a silly one, it is offensive (google it). This is the v1
| safety filter, it simply maps strings to other strings, in this
| case changing golliwog into "test complete". Unless I missed
| some, the rest of the files use v2 which allows for more
| complex rules
| userbinator wrote:
| China calls it "harmonious society", we call it "safety".
| Censorship by any other name would be just as effective for
| manipulating the thoughts of the populace. It's not often that
| you get to see stuff like this.
| madeofpalk wrote:
| I don't think it's controversial or unsurprising at all that a
| company doesn't want their random sentence generator to spit
| out 'brand damaging' sentences. _You know_ the field day media
| would have Apple 's new feature summarises a text message as
| "Jane thinks Anthony Albanese should die".
| ryandrake wrote:
| When the choice is between 1. "avoid tarnishing my own brand"
| and 2. "doing what the user requested," corporations will
| always choose option 1. Who is this software supposed to be
| serving, anyway?
|
| I'm surprised MS Office still allows me to type "Microsoft
| can go suck a dick" into a document and Apple's Pages app
| still allows me to type "Apple are hypocritical jerks." I
| wonder how long until that won't be the case...
| chii wrote:
| > I wonder how long until that won't be the case...
|
| when there's no more alternative word processors any more.
| userbinator wrote:
| If that's what the message actually said, why would the media
| be complaining? Or do you mean false positives?
| cyanydeez wrote:
| In america is due to lawyers, nothing more.
|
| Ya'll love capitalism until it starts manipulating the populace
| into the safest space to sell you garbage you dont need.
|
| Then suddenly its all "ma free speech"
| SV_BubbleTime wrote:
| Right, because the European models coming out are super SOTA?
| Minstrel is decent, but needs to be mixed with a ton of
| uncensored data to be useful.
|
| I'm convinced the only reason China keeps releasing banging
| models with light to no censorship is because they are
| undermining the value of US AI, it has nothing to do with
| capitalism, communism or un"safety".
| energy123 wrote:
| This is the rhetorical tactic of false equivalence. State
| censorship by an autocracy with the objective of population
| control is not the same thing as a private company inside a
| democracy censoring their product to avoid bad press and
| maintain goodwill for shareholders. If you want solid proof
| that it's not the same thing, see all the uncensored open
| weights models that you can freely download and use without
| fear of persecution.
| troupo wrote:
| > is not the same thing as a private company inside a
| democracy censoring their product to avoid bad press and
|
| Yet this private company has more power and influence than
| most countries. And there are _several_ such companies. We
| already live in sci fi corporate dystopia, we just haven 't
| fully realised it yet.
| chgs wrote:
| People think a trillion dollar brainwashing industry is
| absolutely fine because of "democracy", completely ignoring
| that all you have to do is use a century of experience
| convincing people to act against their own interests can
| deliver whatever you want.
|
| Often the same people who think America is fine and safe
| are the ones who whine about the "main stream media" and
| "sheeple".
| Spivak wrote:
| Which trillion dollar brainwashing industry-- primary
| school, news, social media, advertising, the printing
| press?
|
| I would put individuals using language models for their
| own purposes pretty low on my list of things that can
| cause societal harm.
| thinkingtoilet wrote:
| If you were selling a product to enterprise customers,
| would you want it to be able to generate nude images of
| celebrities? Would you want it to be able to create deep
| fakes of politicians, or even your CEO? Would you want it
| to have hot takes on hot button political issues? Good luck
| on your sales calls. Not everything is a conspiracy.
| troupo wrote:
| Or "Granular mango serpent" and "explain like i'm five
| about Biden https://github.com/BlueFalconHD/apple_generat
| ive_model_safet...
|
| > Not everything is a conspiracy.
|
| No one said it was
| Hackbraten wrote:
| But who of the general populace has the technical skill to
| replace their on-device assistant with a free one? And that's
| if Apple even allows that?
|
| In practice, there's not that much difference between a
| megacorporate monopolist and a state.
| energy123 wrote:
| I think there are big differences, such as whether or not
| you go to prison. Those differences are obfuscated when we
| use language like "megacorporate monopolist" or "scifi
| dystopia". Instead of using these abstract labels that
| attempt to categorize different things into homogeneous
| buckets that have preexisting moral valence, which is a
| good rhetorical strategy but a poor strategy for
| understanding, simply describe what is actually happening
| at a sufficient level of detail without judgement. We would
| gain a clearer understanding, which is needed to identify
| the real problems, such as what Meta is doing to our civic
| fabric, not some unimportant thing that Apple is doing to
| its nascent LLM that has 0% market share.
| Hackbraten wrote:
| You're saying that as if Apple's LLM somehow were the
| exception.
|
| No matter if we want it or not, life and cultural
| exchange increasingly happens on Tiktok, Instagram and
| the like. One thing that all those platforms have in
| common is that they disallow their users worldwide to
| have any meaningful discourse on e.g. sex, rape, and
| suicide. Don't you think that it's important, perhaps
| more important than ever before, for teenagers to be able
| to inform themselves about these topics?
| s3p wrote:
| So in modern times, not being able to generate an image of
| suicide on your phone whenever you want means you are
| suffering from communist censorship?
| jeroenhd wrote:
| I still remember when "bush hid the facts" went around the news
| cycle. Entertainment services will absolutely slam and
| misrepresent any small mistake made by large companies.
|
| I don't think it's as much a problem with safety as it is a
| problem with AI. We haven't figured out how to remove
| information from LLMs so when an LLM starts spouting bullshit
| like "<random name> is a paedophile", companies using AI have
| no recourse but to rewrite the input/output of their predictive
| text engines. It's no different than when Microsoft manually
| blacklisted the function name for the Fast Inverse Square Root
| that it spat out verbatim, rather than actually removing the
| code from their LLM.
|
| This isn't 1984 as much as it's companies trying to hide that
| their software isn't ready for real world use by patching up
| the mistakes in real time.
| skygazer wrote:
| I'm pretty sure these are the filters that aim to suppress
| embarrassing or liability inducing email/messages summaries, and
| pop up the dismissible warning that "Safari Summarization isn't
| designed to handle this type of content," and other "Apple
| Intelligence" content rewriting. They filter/alter LLM output,
| not input, as some here seem to think. Apple's on device LLM is
| only 3b params, so it can occasionally be stupid.
| Aeolun wrote:
| Why Xylophone?
| netsharc wrote:
| Just noticed "xylophone copious opportunity defined elephant"
| spells "xcode".
| cynicalsecurity wrote:
| Maybe they use this obscure phrase for testing.
| kmfrk wrote:
| A lot of these terms are very weird and bland. Honestly I'm
| mostly reminded of Apple's bizarre censorship screw-up that
| didn't blow up that much, even though it was pretty uniquely
| embarrassing:
|
| https://www.theverge.com/2021/3/30/22358756/apple-blocked-as...
| apricot wrote:
| Quis custodiet ipsos custodes corporatum?
| tempodox wrote:
| nemo videtur.
| jacquesm wrote:
| These all condense to 'think different'. As long as 'different'
| coincides with Apple's viewpoints.
| rgovostes wrote:
| Is this related in any way to Core ML model encryption (https://d
| eveloper.apple.com/documentation/coreml/encrypting-...)? I find
| that feature a little bizarre because Apple has historically
| avoided providing any kind of DRM solution for app asset
| protection.
| BlueFalconHD wrote:
| Nope. This is a separate system. It's not even abstracted for
| any asset, it is specifically only for these overrides. The
| decryption is done in the ModelCatalog private framework.
| waterproof wrote:
| Here's a combined file of all the non-locale-specific rules, for
| easier review:
| https://github.com/BlueFalconHD/apple_generative_model_safet...
|
| It was generated as part of this PR to consolidate the
| metadata.json files:
| https://github.com/BlueFalconHD/apple_generative_model_safet...
| sandworm101 wrote:
| No shoot, bombs or bombers? I guess apple isnt interested in
| military contracts. Or, frankly, any work for world peace
| organizations dedicated to detecting and preventing genocide. And
| without talk of losing lives, much of the gaming industry is out
| too.
|
| But i dont see the really bad stuff, the stuff i wont even type
| here. I guess that remains fair game. Apple's priorities remain
| as weird as ever.
| immibis wrote:
| The International Criminal Court is banned from using Microsoft
| products. Corporations really don't want to be involved in
| anything controversial unless it brings correspondingly large
| profits.
| jjani wrote:
| Did you only extract the English versions or is this as usual
| another case where big tech only cares to censor in English?
| jeroenhd wrote:
| It also contains some German(-speaking) locales to filter out
| things like Fuhrer and Fuhrer. But the filters are so scarce
| and there are magical phrases are so prevalent that I think
| this is mostly test code at the moment.
| RachelF wrote:
| In the 1970's George Carlin had "7 Words You Can't Say On TV" and
| got into legal trouble for saying them during his live skits.
|
| Seems like Apple now has a list of 7,000 words you can't use on
| an iPhone now.
| Ey7NFZ3P0nzAe wrote:
| Well it's one thing to regex filter "boris johnson" but i see
| that "chatgpt" is filtered too and that's f*** up:
|
| https://github.com/BlueFalconHD/apple_generative_model_safet...
| Ey7NFZ3P0nzAe wrote:
| Ffs it's also rejecting french words related to being poor or
| immigrant or even welfare:
|
| https://github.com/BlueFalconHD/apple_generative_model_safet...
|
| Aide sociale Chomeur Sans abri Demuni
|
| That's insane!
| kridsdale1 wrote:
| "Gemini" is in there too.
| azalemeth wrote:
| Some of these are absolutely wild - com.apple.gm.safety_deny.inpu
| t.summarization.visual_intelligence_camera.generic [1] - a camera
| input filter - rejects "Granular mango serpent and whales" and
| anything matching "(?i)\\\bgolliwogg?\\\b".
|
| I presume the granular mango is to avoid a huge chain of ever-
| growing LLM slop garbage, but honestly, it just seems surreal.
| Many of the files have specific filters for nonsensical english
| phrases. Either there's some serious steganography I'm unaware
| of, or, I suspect more likely, it's related to a training
| pipeline?
|
| [1]
| https://github.com/BlueFalconHD/apple_generative_model_safet...
| supriyo-biswas wrote:
| I believe the "granular mango serpent" is an uncommon testing
| phrase that they use, although now with this discussion it has
| suffered the same fate as "correct horse battery staple.
|
| The more concerning thing is that some of the locales like it-
| IT have a blocklist that contains most countries' names; I
| wonder what that's about.
| whywhywhywhy wrote:
| Second one is an old slur in UK English.
| Applejinx wrote:
| The funny thing is, I have an AU/VST plugin for altering only the
| exponents not the mantissas of audio samples (simple powers of 2
| multiply/divide) called BitShiftGain.
|
| So any time I say that on YouTube, it figures I'm saying another
| word that's in Apple safety filters under 'reject', so I have to
| always try to remember to say 'shifting of bits gain' or 'bit...
| ... ... shift gain'.
|
| So there's a chain of machine interpretation by which Apple can
| decide I'm a Bad Man. I guess I'm more comfortable with Apple
| reaching this conclusion? I'll still try to avoid it though :)
| zombot wrote:
| Who would have thought that this AI shit that is being forced on
| us ushers in a new round of censorship and control of formerly
| free speech! /s
| extraduder_ire wrote:
| This reminds me of the extensive list of regexes twitch had for
| filtering allowed usernames that came out when they were hacked.
| noname120 wrote:
| https://github.com/search?q=repo%3ABlueFalconHD%2Fapple_gene...
| Cort3z wrote:
| What are they protecting against? Honestly. LLMs should probably
| have an age limit, and then, if you are above, you should be
| adult enough to understand what this is and how it can be used.
|
| To me, it seems like they only protect against bad press
| plutokras wrote:
| > What are they protecting against? Honestly.
|
| They are protcting their producer from bad PR.
| empiko wrote:
| Yes, it is indeed to mitigate bad press. Unfortunately, the
| discussion about AI is so ridiculous, that it is often
| considered newsworthy when a product generates something funky
| for a person with large enough Twitter audience. Nobody wants
| to answer the questions about why their LLM generated it and
| how they will prevent it in the future.
| Y_Y wrote:
| Nice to see that we are protected from talking about these weird
| old dolls:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Golliwog
|
| https://github.com/BlueFalconHD/apple_generative_model_safet...
| oblio wrote:
| Well, they're not only weird, they're obviously racist doll.
| Ey7NFZ3P0nzAe wrote:
| I want to be able to talk bad about racist things.
| chamomeal wrote:
| Seems like it's a slur, as well. So not super surprising
| that it would be blocked tbh
| sixothree wrote:
| I can remember the last time I saw one of these. It wasn't that
| long ago.
| 1f60c wrote:
| It's pretty easy to understand why Apple doesn't want its models
| to reproduce racial slurs, but what's wrong with "Boris Johnson?"
|
| (See, e.g., here:
| https://github.com/BlueFalconHD/apple_generative_model_safet...)
| vishnugupta wrote:
| There are other UK politicians as well? Interesting.
| stripline wrote:
| Interesting that you picked one from the "B" words..
| qoez wrote:
| "Justin Trudeau" too. At least it's somewhat unbiased. Still
| weird imo.
| m3kw9 wrote:
| But allow hitler?
| nedt wrote:
| I think it's in there so you can't let it generate an email
| reply about how awesome peppa pig is.
| neuroticnews25 wrote:
| Aren't these [0] lines wrong?
|
| "[\\\b\\\d][Aa]bbo[\\\bA-Z\\\d]",
|
| \b inside a set (square brackets) is a backspace character [1],
| not a word boundary. I don't think it was intended? Or is the
| regex flavor used here different?
|
| [0]
| https://github.com/BlueFalconHD/apple_generative_model_safet...
|
| [1]
| https://developer.apple.com/documentation/foundation/nsregul...
| BlueFalconHD wrote:
| The framework loading these is in Swift. I haven't gotten
| around to the logic for the JSON/regex parsing but ChatGPT
| seems to understand the regexes just fine
| MatekCopatek wrote:
| You can design a racist propaganda poster, put someone's face
| onto a porn pic or manipulate evidence with photoshop. Apart from
| super specific things like trying to print money, the tool
| doesn't stop you from doing things most people would consider
| distasteful, creepy or even illegal.
|
| So why are we doing this now? Has anything changed fundamentally?
| Why can't we let software do everything and then blame the user
| for doing bad things?
| dkyc wrote:
| I think what changed is that we at least _can_ attempt to limit
| 'bad' things with technical measures. It was legitimately
| technically impossible 10 years ago to prevent Photoshop from
| designing propaganda posters. Of course today's 'LLM safety'
| features aren't watertight either, but with the combination of
| 'input is natural language' plus LLM-based safety measures,
| there are more options today to restrict what the software can
| do than in the past.
|
| The example you gave about preventing money counterfeiting with
| technical measures also supports this, since this was an easier
| thing to detect technically, and so it was done.
|
| Whether that's a good thing or bad thing everyone has to decide
| for themselves, but objectively I think this is the reason.
| bhk wrote:
| In other words, to whatever extent they _can_ control or
| manipulate the behavior of users, they _will_. In the limit
| t- >[?], probably true.
| zamadatix wrote:
| Apple has the technology to bias people towards cats
| instead of dogs but I find it very unlikely they will
| bother to do that. The missing ingredient is how it helps
| their bottom line, which, instead of technical feasibility,
| is the root reason they do things. For whatever reasons
| some people REALLY love Apple's default restrictions, most
| don't really give a damn one way or the other, and the
| smallest group seem to have problems with it. It's not that
| Apple can do this so they are, it's users want this and now
| it can be done.
|
| Perhaps a much more bleak take, depending on one's views
| :).
| sixothree wrote:
| I guess that depends on the values of the company and their
| ability to be influenced by outside sources.
| MisterTea wrote:
| What's hard to understand here? Those tools require skill and
| time to develop. AI makes things like those racist posters and
| revenge porn completely effortless and instant.
| jama211 wrote:
| I swear the more I read comments here the more I just read old
| men shaking their fist at clouds... do better y'all.
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