What is your worst-case scenario here?

Something like a pop-sci article along the lines of "Mad scientists create racist, imperialistic AI"?

I honestly don't see publication of the weights as a relevant risk factor, because sensational misrepresentation is trivially possible with the given example responses alone.

I don't think such pseudo-malicious misrepresentation of scientific research can be reliably prevented anyway, and the disclaimers make your stance very clear.

On the other hand, publishing weights might lead to interesting insights from others tinkering with the models. A good example for this would be the published word prevalence data (M. Brysbaert et al @Ghent University) that led to interesting follow-ups like this: https://observablehq.com/@yurivish/words

I hope you can get the models out in some form, would be a waste not to, but congratulations on a fascinating project regardless!

Perhaps you could detect these... "dated"... conclusions and prepend a warning to the responses? IDK.

I think the uncensored response is still valuable, with context. "Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it" sort of thing.

You’re going to get more negative attention not releasing them than you would releasing them. And to be clear, it will be trivial attention in all cases, a few low-ranking comments on here or reddit or twitter. This is not a high value target for anyone.

And even engaging in such discussions really detracts from the work. Take the high road and just ignore it.

> It’s as if every researcher in this field is getting high on the small amount of power they have from denying others access to their results. I’ve never been as unimpressed by scientists as I have been in the past five years or so.

This is absolutely nothing new. With experimental things, it's non uncommon for a lab to develop a new technique and omit slight but important details to give them a competitive advantage. Similarly in the simulation/modelling space it's been common for years for researchers to not publish their research software. There's been a lot of lobbying on that side by groups such as the Software Sustainability Institute and Research Software Engineer organisations like RSE UK and RSE US, but there's a lot of researchers that just think that they shouldn't have to do it, even when publicly funded.

> “We’ve created something so dangerous that we couldn’t possibly live with the moral burden of knowing that the wrong people (which are never us, of course) might get their hands on it, so with a heavy heart, we decided that we cannot just publish it.”

Or, how about, "If we release this as is, then some people will intentionally mis-use it and create a lot of bad press for us. Then our project will get shut down and we lose our jobs"

Be careful assuming it is a power trip when it might be a fear trip.

I've never been as unimpressed by society as I have been in the last 5 years or so.

I think it's more likely they are terrified of someone making a prompt that gets the model to say something racist or problematic (which shouldn't be too hard), and the backlash they could receive as a result of that.