> The comment I was replying to was effectively saying "no one cares about kids so you're lying if you say 'for the children'".

I don't see that in the comment you replied to. They pointed out that LLM providers have a commercial interest in avoiding bad press, which is true. No one stops buying Fords or BMWs when someone drives one off a cliff or into a crowd of people, but LLMs are new and confusing and people might react in all sorts of illogical ways to stories involving LLMs.

> Part of the reason these "for the children" arguments are so persistent is that lots of people do genuinely want these things "for the children".

I'm sure that's true. People genuinely want lots of things that are awful ideas.

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slg 20 hours ago | parent [-]

Here is what was said that prompted my initial reply:

>When a model is censored for "AI safety", what they really mean is brand safety.

The equivalent analogy wouldn't be Fords and BMWs driving off a cliff, they effectively said that Ford and BMW only install safety features in their cars to protect their brand with the implication that no one at these companies actually cares about the safety of actual people. That is an incredibly cynical and amoral worldview and it appears to be the dominate view of people on HN.

Once again, you can say that specific AI safety features are stupid or aren't worth the tradeoff. I would have never replied if the original comment said that. I replied because the original comment dismissed the motivations behind these AI safety features.

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buu700 19 hours ago | parent | next [-]

I read that as a cynical view of the motivations of corporations, not humans. Even if individuals have good faith beliefs in "AI 'safety'", and even if some such individuals work for AI companies, the behaviors of the companies themselves are ultimately the product of many individual motivations and surrounding incentive structures.

To the extent that a large corporation can be said to "believe" or "mean" anything, that seems like a fair statement to me. It's just a more specific case of pointing out that for-profit corporations as entities are ultimately motivated by profit, not public benefit (even if specific founders/employees/shareholders are individually motivated by certain ideals).

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slg 18 hours ago | parent [-]

>I read that as a cynical view of the motivations of corporations, not humans.

This is really just the mirror image of what I was originally criticizing. Any decision made by a corporation is a decision made by a person. You don't get to ignore the morality of your decisions just because you're collecting a paycheck. If you're a moral person, the decisions you make at work should reflect that.

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coderenegade 17 hours ago | parent | next [-]

The morality of an organization is distinct from the morality of the decision-makers within the organization. Modern organizations are setup to distribute responsibility, and take advantage of extra-organizational structures and entities to further that end. Decision-makers often have legal obligations that may override their own individual morality.

Whenever any large organization takes a "think of the children" stance, it's almost always in service of another goal, with the trivial exception of single-issue organizations that specifically care about that issue. This doesn't preclude individuals, even within the organization, from caring about a given issue. But a company like OpenAI that is actively considering its own version of slop-tok almost certainly cares about profit more than children, and its senior members are in the business of making money for their investors, which, again, takes precedence over their own individual thoughts on child safety. It just so happens that in this case, child safety is a convenient argument for guard rails, which neatly avoids having to contend with advertisers, which is about the money.

	▲	cindyllm 16 hours ago \| parent [-]
		[dead]

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buu700 18 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Sure, but that doesn't really have anything to do with what I said. The CEO of an AI company may or may not believe in the social benefits of censorship, and the reasoning for their beliefs could be any number of things, but at the end of the day "the corporation" is still motivated by profit.

Executives are beholden to laws, regulations, and shareholder interests. They may also have teams of advisors and board members convincing them of the wisdom of decisions they wouldn't have arrived at on their own. They may not even have a strong opinion on a particular decision, but assent to one direction as a result of internal politics or shareholder/board pressure. Not everything is a clear-cut decision with one "moral" option and one "immoral" option.

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astrange 10 hours ago | parent [-]

> but at the end of the day "the corporation" is still motivated by profit.

OpenAI and Anthropic are both PBCs. So neither of them are supposedly purely motivated by this thing.

	▲	buu700 10 hours ago \| parent [-]
		That adds some nuance, but doesn't dramatically change the incentive structure. A PBC is still for-profit: https://www.cooleygo.com/glossary/public-benefit-corporation.

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int_19h 19 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Organizations don't have a notion of morality; only people do.

The larger an organization is, and the more bureaucratized it is, the less morality of individual people in it affects it overall operation.

Consequently, yes, it is absolutely true that Ford and BMW as a whole don't care about safety of actual people, regardless of what individual people working for them think.

Separately, the nature of progression in hierarchical organizations is basically a selection for sociopathy, so the people who rise to the top of large organizations can generally be assumed to not care about other people, regardless of what they claim in public.