> But I trust a random human enthusiast and community feedback more than I trust a megacorporations that commit crimes without any prosecution or consequences.

I'm not saying we should trust megacorps, but they have a very strong incentive not to build these sorts of backdoors into their models; if that backdoor were discovered, their reputation would be shot, permanently, and they'd stand to lose out big, much much much more than any possible benefit they'd derive.

"Random" is the operative word in "random human enthusiast". I don't trust randoms on the internet, period. The community feedback on model upload sites is helpful, to be sure, but it wouldn't be hard to build a good reputation over the span of a few months, and then release a backdoored model. Given the pace of things here, that feels significantly easier than, e.g. getting a malicious commit into a popular open source project.

Given the fact that the article proves this can be accomplished with very little training, I believe it could at least be a possibility that this could happen unintentionally (or at least without their creators' knowledge) via adversarial training data.

> I'm not saying we should trust megacorps, but they have a very strong incentive not to build these sorts of backdoors into their models;

All it takes is one disgruntled employee. Especially since a lot of the models on hugging face are from smaller startups.

>if that backdoor were discovered, their reputation would be shot, permanently, and they'd stand to lose out big, much much much more than any possible benefit they'd derive.

Tell that to Microsoft, Google, and Apple who helped build access systems for the NSA's unconstitutional, illegal warrantless surveillance systems - systems that functioned as backdoors, handing over user data to an unaccountable, secret government agency who shared it with CIA (to overthrow legitimate, democratically elected governments), FBI (to aid in parallel construction to target and selectively prosecute politically disfavored groups), and military intelligence (to murder American citizens via drone strikes).

Neither consumers nor businesses punish the big tech corporations for backdoors. When surveyed, people purport to care, but do not reduce their use of the platforms in question.