| ▲ | slg 6 days ago |
| Thank you, “we just have to accept that these systems will occasionally kill children” is a perfect example of the type of mindset I was criticizing. |
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| ▲ | jackjeff 6 days ago | parent | next [-] |
| Don’t cars and ropes and drills occasionally kill people too? Society seems to have accepted that fact long ago. Somehow we expect the digital world to be devoid of risks. Cryptography that only the good guys can crack is another example of this mindset. Now I’m not saying ClosedAI look good on this, their safety layer clearly failed and the sycophantic BS did not help. But I reckon this kind of failure more will always exist in LLMs. Society will have to learn this just like we learned cars are dangerous. |
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| ▲ | slg 6 days ago | parent | next [-] | | Another great example of the HN mindset. How can you say "their safety layer clearly failed" without being able to acknowledge that they should be held responsible for that failure and that we should work to reduce the likelihood of similar failures in the future? If a car, rope, or drill had some sort of failure in their manufacturing that killed people, those companies would be held responsible. Why can't we do the same with OpenAI? This isn't a desire for "the digital world to be devoid of risks", it is a desire for people and companies in the digital world to be held responsible for the harm they are causing. Yet, people here seem to believe that no one should ever be held responsible for the damage caused by the software they create. | |
| ▲ | kunley 6 days ago | parent | prev [-] | | Cars and ropes don't "talk" and don't make an impression of a human being. |
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| ▲ | SnuffBox 6 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| If we banned everything that contributed to the death of children we'd eventually have nothing left to ban. |
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| ▲ | insane_dreamer 6 days ago | parent [-] | | Contributing to and facilitating are 2 very different things. This was more the latter. |
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| ▲ | dkiebd 6 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| We have many tools in this life that can maim and kill people and we keep them anyway because they are very useful for other purposes. It’s best to exercise some personal responsibility, including not allowing a 16 year old child unattended access to the internet. |
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| ▲ | slg 6 days ago | parent | next [-] | | Yeah, that is why we don’t have any regulations on the manufacturing and sale of stuff like guns or drugs. The only thing in the way of a 16 year old having unfettered access is personal responsibility. | | |
| ▲ | alexey-salmin 6 days ago | parent [-] | | So you're in favor of regulating ropes then? I'm not a big fan of LLMs but so far their danger level is much closer to a rope then to a gun. |
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| ▲ | 6 days ago | parent | prev [-] | | [deleted] |
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| ▲ | ml-anon 6 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| America is perfectly happy with sacrificing kids in exchange for toys though. |
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| ▲ | int_19h 5 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| That statement is going to be true for anything short of a complete Panopticon where everyone and everything is watched 24/7 to nip any potential harm in the bud. If you're not okay with that arrangement (why not?), then we're left to argue about which level of "will occasionally kill children" is acceptable. |
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| ▲ | kouteiheika 6 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| So what's the alternative? Pervasive censorship and horrible privacy and freedom-of-speech destroying legislation like UK's Online Safety Act? I'm not looking forward to the day when half of the Internet will require me to upload my ID to verify that I'm an adult, and the other half will be illegal/blocked because they refuse to do the verification. But yeah, think of the children! |
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| ▲ | kunley 6 days ago | parent [-] | | The alternative is as usual, getting certain individuals to the court and making them pay for the damage or even to go to jail, instead of preemptively trying to give them a holy cow status. |
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| ▲ | 6 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
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| ▲ | holbrad 6 days ago | parent | prev [-] |
| >“we just have to accept that these systems will occasionally kill children” I think this a generally a good mindset to have. I just see the hyper obsessive "safety" culture corrupting things. We as a society are so so afraid of any risk that we're paralysing ourselves. |
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| ▲ | insane_dreamer 6 days ago | parent [-] | | That sounds a lot like the people who gloss over school shootings because they want to be able to play with guns. | | |
| ▲ | rpdillon 6 days ago | parent | next [-] | | Unpopular, but backed by numbers: school shootings are predominantly media hype. There are a total of 50,000 gun deaths in the United States each year. Half of those are suicide. The total number of fatalities from all school shootings in the US since 1990 is 536, with roughly 1100 injuries over the same period. School shootings are very disturbing, but they are also flashy and attract media coverage, and so they are overblown, especially relative to other gun deaths. But I think human psychology leads people to see higher risk in situations where they feel like they have no control. The idea of sending your kid off to school and having them get killed evokes sort of the same helpless feeling as the feeling around a plane crashing when you're a passenger. But when it's inner city gang violence, or a depressed man killing himself in his garage, we don't seem to care as much. This also plays into the narrative around police shootings. There are about 1100 people killed by cops every year in the United States, and that number has stayed pretty consistent over the last decade. But our narrative around it is out of proportion to the actual number of people killed because of the circumstances around the killing. In any case, it's often easier to articulate the cost of freedom rather than its value. | | |
| ▲ | insane_dreamer 5 days ago | parent | next [-] | | > predominantly media hype hmm, tell that to parents whose kids were killed, or who are genuinely freaked out that there is a chance that their kid could die when they send them to school as a parent who moved to the US and encountered this fear for the first time -- a fear that's just not present in other countries because while anything can happen anywhere, the chances are much much lower. why? not because there aren't crazy people in other countries, but because they don't have easy access to guns > so they are overblown, especially relative to other gun deaths actually, it's the other way around; it's the "other gun deaths" that are _under-valued_ and often ignored in the gun debate -- we should be talking about those _more_ not talking about school shootings less 50K gun deaths a year in the US is absolutely bonkers compared to other developed countries, and on par with Central America per-capita; and even if half are suicides, many who commit suicide may not have done so if guns weren't so readily accessible (sure there are other ways to do, but it's not as easy) > plays into the narrative around police shootings. There are about 1100 people killed by cops every year in the United States the reason for the narrative, is that in no other other advanced democracy on earth is there such a high rate of police killing civilians (when calculated per capita) -- it's not even close they get attention because police shouldn't be killing civilians in the first place; it's pretty simple if the USA didn't have such an obsession with guns, we wouldn't even be having this conversation | |
| ▲ | slg 6 days ago | parent | prev [-] | | Roughly an hour after this comment was made, someone walked into the church at a Catholic school, killed an 8-year-old and a 10-year-old, shot 17 other people including 14 children, and then turned the gun on himself.[1] "Predominantly media hype" indeed. [1] - https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/live-blog/live-updates-... | | |
| ▲ | rpdillon 6 days ago | parent [-] | | Yep, an excellent illustration of the point. Two dead, a dozen injured. What other gun violence happened this week that we'll never hear about? | | |
| ▲ | slg 6 days ago | parent [-] | | Has there been some other incident of gun violence this week that resulted in 3 deaths and 17 injuries that hasn't been reported? According to Wikipedia[1] this is the largest mass shooting this year in terms of number of injuries. I guess that isn't worth reporting in the media. [1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_mass_shootings_in_the_... | | |
| ▲ | rpdillon 6 days ago | parent [-] | | You're using media coverage to critique my point that media coverage is overblown. My only point here is that less than 1/10 of 1% of the shooting deaths in the United States over the last 30 years were related to school shootings. This shooting is definitely newsworthy. I'm mostly concerned about the other ~800 shooting deaths, mostly suicides, that statistically happened this week that we don't discuss. Suicides in the US are on the rise, and murder rates are down. https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2025/03/05/what-the-... | | |
| ▲ | slg 5 days ago | parent [-] | | >You're using media coverage to critique my point that media coverage is overblown. That isn't what I'm doing. I pointed to an instance of a school shooting, asked you if any other shootings of that scale have occurred without receiving similar media coverage, and then pointed to reference material that indicates there have been any in this calendar year. I truly don't know what point you think you are making. Yes, not every act of gun violence receives the same media coverage as a school shooting. But what is your desired alternative? Should any individual act of gun violence not be reported on because there is so much gun violence? Or are you demanding that every singular act of gun violence should receive national coverage? What is the specific change you want to see in the media coverage? It is true that school shootings are only one facet of this country's gun problem, but I just don't know how you get from that point to the conclusion that they're "predominantly media hype". | | |
| ▲ | rpdillon 5 days ago | parent [-] | | I'm saying that if we want to address the bulk of gun deaths, even entirely eliminating school shootings and mass shootings won't move the statistics more than by about 1%. I don't think most adults understand this, because they base their perception on what's reported, rather than reality. > What is the specific change you want to see in the media coverage? Editing to answer this, since it's a good question. I'm interested in massively reducing deaths from guns in the US. I think voters turn to the news to understand these issues. I'm worried that politicians will claim to be tackling gun violence through measures that try to reduce the number of high-profile events, while ignoring the larger societal problem that underpins the violence. So what I would like to see in media coverage is using school shootings, which get clicks, to devote time and attention in the article to the larger trends of gun violence in the US to help citizens better evaluate what sorts of measures would be most effective in reducing the bulk of the deaths. I'm basically trying to push for a setup where we can more effectively tackle gun violence by understanding it well. | | |
| ▲ | slg 5 days ago | parent [-] | | I think the general argument that the media is not effectively using the attention these events draw is in direct conflict with the idea that these shootings are "predominantly media hype". Also, I quite frankly think this mindset is naive to how both politics and the media work. Nothing materially is being done to reduce school shootings and today's tragedy is just another example of that. So why the fear that this need for a solution to general gun violence will be satiate by a solution to school shootings? We aren't getting any solution to school shootings either. Plus most of the mainstream media has a desire for neutrality that would prevent them from doing what you suggest. And those that aren't opposed to being seen as partisan and agree with you about overall gun violence are already advocating for greater gun control in a way that is not exclusively set to address school shootings. |
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| ▲ | Dilettante_ 6 days ago | parent | prev [-] | | Wow. Incredible framing, leaving absolutely no room for a rebuttal to have any legitimate, reasonable position. | | |
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