A company that intends to offer a helpful assistant might find that the "assistant character" of an LLM is not adequate for being a helpful assistant.

To support GP‘s point: I have Claude connected to a database and wanted it to drop a table.

Claude is trained to refuse this, despite the scenario being completely safe since I own both parts! I think this is the “LLMs should just do what the user says” perspective.

Of course this breaks down when you have an adversarial relationship between LLM operator and person interacting with it (though arguably there is no safe way to support this scenario due to jailbreak concerns).

It's still not clear if the Assistant character is the best at completing tasks.

There are certain things/llm-phenomena that haven't changed since their introduction.

South America is a big place, and there are a lot of countries. The situation isn't this simple. For example, Argentina is historically the most anti-US country of all South America, yet it's government and their supporters celebrated the US attack calling everyone who opposed it "communists" (all this while the government allows Chinese goods to be massively imported). Argentina's government will be trying to make a block of countries that are us-friendly (and be their leader of course).

Also, adding context, argentine elites are pro-us, but not as much as Brazil's elites and their supporters (who wear the US flag in protests)

How do you know they're not doing anything? Do they have the power to do anything at all beyond virtue signaling?

Personally I'm interested in the prospect of enabling ways to change the learning process of a model based on topological structures.

I like this parallel. No joke intended.

> will often adopt a wrong idea of what's okay

I wonder who gets to decide what's okay.

Basic morality and human rights

How is it moral to claim "Murdering people (in fiction) is fine," then?

From a universal perspective, there is no such thing as "basic morality". Only what the most recent cultural norms of the largest (or strongest) group of people say.

I read this as "It's perfectly fine to persecute people for their art". And boy, you're on the wrong side of history.

There are all kinds of things you might qualify as "art" which are forbidden in my country (France) - for example if your "art" is about drawing nazi symbols you hopefully are going to have troubles - and I don't have a problem with having pedophile content in that list.

Does france really prosecute people for only showing nazi symbols, independent of context? So for example, documentary series are forbidden?

To be clear, I still stand by what I said, but I don't think it's fair to equate "pedophile art" with nazi symbology. What I said is meant to be taken as a powerful but general rule that cautions against restricting art (and thus, restricting thought and expression) on the basis of fuzzy logic, hatred towards the content, racism, or any other sort of bias not supported by reality. In this regard, I don't think the logic behind restricting "pedophile art" has the same weight as the logic behind restricting nazi symbology (not even close).

This is my humble opinion, but such a coordinated action from the governments around the world at this particular time has a certain smell. It smells like they're worried about losing governmental narrative control. It could be about foreign powers, but tech nowadays allows regular people to contest power from the government so they become a target as well. AI, the internet, anonymity/cryptography, a probable war with china and/or russia, all exacerbate this worry.

In short, governments want to retain control and prepare for the future, and to retain control they need to control the flow of information and they need to have a monopoly on information. To achieve this they need an intelligence strategy that puts common people at the center (spying on them) and put restrictions in place. But they can't say this outloud because in the current era it's problematic, so the children become a good excuse.

This is particularly clear in governments that don't care about political correctness or are not competent enough to disguise their intentions. Such an example is the Argentine government, which these years passed laws to survey online activity and to put it's intelligence agency to spy on "anyone that puts sovereign narrative and cohesion at risk".

This isn’t the product of shadowy government figures meeting together and plotting to take over the internet. It’s an obvious byproduct of the current moral panic around social media.

Just look at the HN comments. There are people welcoming this level of government control and using famous moral panic topics to justify it, like Andrew Tate or TikTok.

You can be in "moral panic" without instigating what you think is government overreach.

People and especially kids drink too much soda but I don't think bans are appropriate.

Yes, but when moral panic reaches the ears and minds of people in government, who see government as the solution to every problem and don't tend to think much about limits to their own power (I'm a good guy with good intentions, why would you want to limit me?), this is the type of solution you tend to get.

Thinking kids drink too much soda is an opinion (probably backed by evidence), but I wouldn't describe it as a moral panic.

Moral panic usually rises to the level where the threat is viewed as so severe to the fabric of society that excessive laws and regulations are welcomed as a solution. People engaged in moral panic start to believe that their normal baseline values for topics like freedom of expression and innocent until proven guilty can be suspended due to the urgency and magnitude of the threat.

If you're just lamenting the fact that too much soda is consumed, I wouldn't call that a moral panic.

This sounds very reductionist to me.

I do agree mostly, but the threat is not empty:

If democratic outputs can be sufficiently controlled via media that is for sale, then you already have a de-facto plutocracy.

Similarly, allowing foreign interests a significant media presence (and control) in your country is a very real threat to the basic principles of a democratic nation.

>>a threat to the status quo by allowing the underclasses to organize and establish political power

All the organising I'm seeing is of people who are convinced the earth is flat and that vaccines cause autism. I'd love to see an actual political group that's not just "Britain First" appear in my social media ever.

I find Tiktok an easy way to surface very specific demographic and political views- much easier than Meta-owned media.

It was super interesting to watch, for instance, the discussions between liberal and leftist black women around Harris, Gaza, and the 2024 election. If you just swipe out of videos that aren't things you're okay with pretty quickly, then it will change your feed dramatically in a short time.

So your theory is that a single, coherent actor ("deep state"?) is responsible for current public sentiment that is both somewhat critical of social media and specifically foreign control of that media? I disagree on that.

In a democracy, if you gave full control over local media to a foreign nation, do you see how that could lead to problems, or would you be fine with that?

TikTok being owned by a Chinese company didn't represent "giving full control over local media to a foreign nation."

And it's weird that you mistrust the influence of something as banal as TikTok but apparently believe the moral panic around social media and TikTok specifically is entirely organic. Because I guess there is no such thing as propaganda or influence operations on Western social media?

If you're worried about foreign influence on social media literally every Western platform is being aggressively manipulated by both foreign and Western intelligence. It just got revealed that most of the MAGA accounts on Twitter were foreign, likely Russian-based networks. The platform that serves as the de facto psychological operations and communications channel for the current Presidental administration.

But it's just TikTok and the Chinese mind control we should worry about?

I'm absolutely not saying that there is no western propaganda. But giving control over your media to any single actor (especially sovereign ones) is basically suicide for a democracy because it allows those actors to "democratically" achieve results against voter interests.

Politicians having control over media is always a problem, but it got much worse thanks to inherent centralization of modern media, so more regulatory pushback is needed now than in the newspaper age. I'd also argue that foreigners having media control is typically worse because incentives are even less aligned with voters.

>But giving control over your media to any single actor (especially sovereign ones) is basically suicide for a democracy because it allows those actors to "democratically" achieve results against voter interests.

There's plenty of evidence of Russian influence operations affecting Western elections on Facebook and Twitter.

Where is the evidence that the CCP is controlling people's minds and rigging Western elections through TikTok?

Times article explaining that the uk governments first intention was never child protection, it was controlling the public discourse:

https://archive.ph/2025.08.13-190800/https://www.thetimes.co...

This isn't some tin foiled hat wearing nonsense, every person I talk to seems think that ending anonymity online would be a good thing, until I explain the democracy protecting use cases,i.e. whistle blowers.

I think the problem you lay out is interesting. Back when the Arab Spring was brand new, the narrative was something like "Twitter has finally given power to the people, and once they had power they overthrew their evil dictatorships."

A decade and some time later, my personal opinion would be that the narrative reads something like this: "access to social media increases populism, extremism, and social unrest. It's a risk to any and all forms of government. The Arab dictatorships failed first because they were the most brittle."

To the extent that you agree with my claim, it would mean that even a beneficent government would have something to fear from social media. As with the Arab Spring, whatever comes after the revolution is often worse than the very-imperfect government which came before.

> To the extent that you agree with my claim, it would mean that even a beneficent government would have something to fear from social media

I'd say that governments are beneficial to the extent that they adapt to the people they're governing. It's clear that social media poses a grave danger to current governance. But that doesn't mean that all forms of governance are equally attacked.

My belief is that the current governance is just obsolete and dying because of the pace of cultural and technical innovation. Governments will need to change in order to stay beneficial to people, and the change is to adapt to people instead of making the people adapt to the current governance.

> access to social media increases populism, extremism, and social unrest.

I don't think this is necessarily a byproduct of social media, itself. But rather, the byproduct of algorithmic engagement farming social media that capitalizes on inciting negative emotions for retention. Which, I concede, is all of the large ones.

I'm sure, also, that some amount of cause will also be concern of foreign adversaries using social media to sway young people against their government as well. Since they're easier to influence than your typical adult.

>But rather, the byproduct of algorithmic engagement farming social media that capitalizes on inciting negative emotions for retention.

Very fair, and I use the two interchangeably. In principle you could have (and we have previously had) social media without this sort of algorithmic or virality features.

It is unsettling how frank and clear your post is. However, at the time, the algorithms were way "nicer", right? Or was it that people were nicer and or people on social media were nicer?

Maybe. But the thing is that I think there is a legitimate cultural need to minimize mass exposure to these centralized social media platforms. And I think people realised this about now.

I don't advocate legal bans. And people need to stop using it. The risk is great that there will be legal overreach ...

Gen Z can't make it till end of month, can't get married, can't get a mortgage, many graduates struggle to get a job... Meanwhile they see pensioners having a blast and telling them they are lazy/stupid, and keep rising their rents.

You betcha the gerontocracy sees something brewing.

Counterpoint: Sufficient media control kills a democracy because it enables you to control public sentiment and election outcomes.

A democracy that yields sufficient media control to (single) individuals, corporations or foreign nations is basically commiting suicide.

> Counterpoint: Sufficient media control kills a democracy because it enables you to control public sentiment and election outcomes.

That's just as true when the entity seizing control is the government, such that the entity that control public sentiment and election outcomes is the incumbent administration.

Absolutely. A quite typical way for dictatorships to consolidate power.

But the question is how much this applies, especially in most western states; there is a huge spectrum between having some government-determined regulation (or funding) for media and a single individual politician being in full control of all media content.

I'd argue that Turkey/Hungary or past-Italy under Berlusconi were all much farther along that spectrum than most western nations right now, US included.

Heaven forbid that individuals in a democracy would dare influence election outcomes!

You want individuals to have one vote, instead of half a million (by bombarding other voters with misinformation/propaganda at a modest price).

From my point of view I see a coordinated effort against age verification probably because money.

Dark conspiracy... Or collective acknowledgement of the harm of being constantly online has done to a generation of young people. How it amplifies abuse, entrenches deeply negative tribes.

It's not stupid —at a national future-of-society level— to want to do something about this. I agree, it's possible to overreach and just get it wrong, but doing nothing is worse.

I'd rather my government control the narrative my children are exposed to than Andrew Tate.

Edit: To expand, this is not just a flippant remark. People ignore Andrew Tate because he's so obviously, cartoonishly awful, but they are not the audience. It's aimed at children, and from personal experience its effect on a large number of them worldwide is profound, to the extent that I worry about the long term, generational effect.

Children will be exposed to narratives one way or another, and to want to (re)assert some control that over that isn't necessarily just an authoritatian power play.

The targets to control are not children. They don't need to be controlled, from an intelligence point of view. Government's attention is not infinite, and between worries of losing power and worries about the wellbeing of children, one of the two is the winner, and it's not the children. If children's well-being was the priority, you would see other stuff being made.

This sort of makes sense if our governments are, on the whole, 'better' than Andrew Tate, for some definition of 'better'. But as the slide goes on there will be a tipping point where our governments are worse, meaning them surveilling me becomes problematic. Best shout about it now than then.

Do you decline any responsibility in the moral upbringing of your children? I think you should be the one that decides how they interact with dubious content, not your government.