Which as a phenomenon is so very telling that no one actually cares what people are really saying. Everyone, including the platforms knows what that means. It's all performative.

"I'm overloaded for work, I'd be happy if you took some of it off me."

"The client seems to have passed on the proposed changes."

Both of those would match the "death regexes". Seems we haven't learned from the "glbutt of wine" problem of content filtering even decades later - the learnings of which are that you simply cannot do content filtering based on matching rules like this, period.

My guess is that this applies to 'proactive' summaries that happen without the user asking for it, such as summaries of notifications.

If so, then the goal would be: if someone iMessages you about someone's death, then you should not get an emotionless AI summary. Instead you would presumably get a non-AI notification showing the full text or a truncated version of the text.

In other words, avoid situations like this story [1], where someone found it "dystopian" to get an Apple Intelligence summary of messages in which someone broke up with them.

For that use case, filtering for death seems entirely appropriate, though underinclusive.

This filter doesn’t seem to apply when you explicitly request a summary of some text using Writing Tools. That probably corresponds to “com.apple.gm.safety_deny.output.summarization.text_assistant.generic” [2], which has a different filter that only rejects two things: "Granular mango serpent", and "golliwogg".

Sure enough, I was able to get Writing Tools to give me summaries containing "death", but in cases where the summary should contain "granular mango serpent" or "golliwogg", I instead get an error saying "Writing Tools aren't designed to work with this type of content." (Actually that might be the input filter rather than the output filter; whatever.)

"Granular mango serpent" is probably a test case that's meant to be unlikely to appear in real documents. Compare to "xylophone copious opportunity defined elephant" from the code_intelligence safety filter, where the first letter of each word spells out "Xcode".

But one might ask what's so special about "golliwogg". It apparently refers to an old racial caricature, but why is that the one and only thing that needs filtering?

[1] https://arstechnica.com/ai/2024/10/man-learns-hes-being-dump...

[2] https://github.com/BlueFalconHD/apple_generative_model_safet...

To me that's really embarrassing and insecure. But I'm sure for branding people it's very important.

This is the same, except for one additional slur word.

LLM is easier to work with because you can stop a bad behavior before it happens. It can be done either with deterministic programs or using LLM. Claude Code uses a LLM to review every bash command to be run - simple prefix matching has loopholes.

https://thehill.com/policy/technology/5312421-ocasio-cortez-...

I don't think it's as much a problem with safety as it is a problem with AI. We haven't figured out how to remove information from LLMs so when an LLM starts spouting bullshit like "<random name> is a paedophile", companies using AI have no recourse but to rewrite the input/output of their predictive text engines. It's no different than when Microsoft manually blacklisted the function name for the Fast Inverse Square Root that it spat out verbatim, rather than actually removing the code from their LLM.

This isn't 1984 as much as it's companies trying to hide that their software isn't ready for real world use by patching up the mistakes in real time.

I don't know what you expected? This is the SOTA solution, and Apple is barely in the AI race as-is. It makes more sense for them to copy what works than to bet the farm on a courageous feature nobody likes.

Meanwhile their software devs are making GenerativeExperiencesSafetyInferenceProviders so it must be dire over there, too.

Thus a pre-prompt can avoid mentioning the actual forbidden words, like using a patois/cant.

This specific file you’ve referenced is rhetorical v1 format which solely handles substitution. It substitutes the offensive term with “test complete”

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44486374

https://github.com/BlueFalconHD/apple_generative_model_safet...

Aide sociale Chomeur Sans abri Démuni

That's insane!

Maybe it's an easy test to ensure the filters are loaded with a phrase unlikely to be used accidentaly?

   "(?i)\\bAnthony\\s+Albanese\\b",
    "(?i)\\bBoris\\s+Johnson\\b",
    "(?i)\\bChristopher\\s+Luxon\\b",
    "(?i)\\bCyril\\s+Ramaphosa\\b",
    "(?i)\\bJacinda\\s+Arden\\b",
    "(?i)\\bJacob\\s+Zuma\\b",
    "(?i)\\bJohn\\s+Steenhuisen\\b",
    "(?i)\\bJustin\\s+Trudeau\\b",
    "(?i)\\bKeir\\s+Starmer\\b",
    "(?i)\\bLiz\\s+Truss\\b",
    "(?i)\\bMichael\\s+D\\.\\s+Higgins\\b",
    "(?i)\\bRishi\\s+Sunak\\b",
   

Edit: I have no doubt South African news media are going to be in a frenzy when they realize Apple took notice of South African politicians. (Referring to Steenhuisen and Ramaphosa specifically)

https://github.com/BlueFalconHD/apple_generative_model_safet...

Ya'll love capitalism until it starts manipulating the populace into the safest space to sell you garbage you dont need.

Then suddenly its all "ma free speech"

wyvern illustrous laments darkness

https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2024/12/certa...

However, I think about half of real humans would also fail the test.

They are protcting their producer from bad PR.

The more concerning thing is that some of the locales like it-IT have a blocklist that contains most countries' names; I wonder what that's about.

I’m convinced the only reason China keeps releasing banging models with light to no censorship is because they are undermining the value of US AI, it has nothing to do with capitalism, communism or un“safety”.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Magic_Words_are_Squeamish_... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SEO_contest

The example you gave about preventing money counterfeiting with technical measures also supports this, since this was an easier thing to detect technically, and so it was done.

Whether that's a good thing or bad thing everyone has to decide for themselves, but objectively I think this is the reason.

At what point do the new words become the actual words? Are there many instances of people using unalive IRL?

They care because of legal reasons, not moral or ethical.

There's a very scary potential future in which mega-corporations start actually censoring topics they don't like. For all I know the Chinese government is already doing it, there's no reason the British or US one won't follow suit and mandate such censorship. To protect children / defend against terrorists / fight drugs / stop the spread of misinformation, of course.

I cannot recall all the specific patterns I have encountered that are basically impossible to write, some very similar in that they have a serious but also innocuous or figure of speech meaning; one I do recall is {color}{sex}, i.e., “white woman” or “blank woman”.

Please try it yourself and let me know if you do not have that experience, because that would be even more interesting.

Note that Apple/iOS will not just make it impossible to write them in that manner without typing it out by individual character, it will even alter the prior word e.g., white or black, once you try to write woman.

It seems the Apple thought police do not have a problem with European woman or African woman though, so maybe that is the way Apple Inc decrees its sub-human users to speak. Because what are we if corporations like Apple (with others being far greater offenders) declared that you do not in fact have the UN Human Right to free expression? We are in fact sub-humans that are not worthy of the human right to free expression, based on the actions of companies like Apple, Google, Facebook, Reddit, etc. who deprive people of their free expression, often in collusion with governments.

Then there’s the problem of non-politicians who coincidentally have the same as politicians - witness 1990s/2000s Australia, where John Howard was Prime Minister, and simultaneously John Howard was an actor on popular Australian TV dramas (two different John Howards, of course)

So I don't think its anything specifically related to SA going on here.

This is Apple actively steering public thought.

No code - anywhere - should look like this. I don't care if the politicians are right, left, or authoritarian. This is wrong.

https://github.com/BlueFalconHD/apple_generative_model_safet...

https://github.com/BlueFalconHD/apple_generative_model_safet...

I'm surprised MS Office still allows me to type "Microsoft can go suck a dick" into a document and Apple's Pages app still allows me to type "Apple are hypocritical jerks." I wonder how long until that won't be the case...

In practice, there's not that much difference between a megacorporate monopolist and a state.

Yet this private company has more power and influence than most countries. And there are several such companies. We already live in sci fi corporate dystopia, we just haven't fully realised it yet.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EICAR_test_file

Not even to match the current language. How would you censor LeBron James? It's French slang for jerking off[0].

[0]https://www.reddit.com/r/AskFrance/comments/1lpnoj6/is_lebro...

See many examples such as “padlocks are useless because a determined smart attacker can defeat them easily so don’t bother with them” - which conveniently forgets that many crimes are committed by non-determined, dumb and opportunistic attackers who are often deterred by simple locks.

Yes, people will use other words. No, this does not make this purely performative. It has measurable effects on behaviour and how these models will be used and spoken to, which affects outcomes.

They all hold the bias of their training data, and so from the point of view of this data.

Data not including a point of view leads to a bias, or under/over representation of minorities (genders?), etc.

France is the countries of the Francs, aka the people from the area near Frankfurt that invaded the Gaule (after the Romans did). I'm pretty sure this topic no longer matters, but it's never taught in a negative view in school.

Like he'll it is! I jest.

I also use swipe typing, and have for years, but just about daily I consider turning it off. There are so many words it just won't produce, including most profanities. It also fails to do some simple streamlining; for instance, such a predictive system should give priority to words/names that have been used in the conversation thread, but it doesn't seem to. If I'm discussing an obscure word or an unusual name, I often have to manually type it each time.

Its predictions also seem to be very shallow. Just a few days ago, on US Independence Day, I was discussing a possible get-together with my family, and tried to swipe type "If not, we will amuse ourselves", and it typed "If not, we will abuse potatoes". Humorous in the moment, but it says a lot about the predictive engine if it thinks I am more likely trying to say "abuse X" than "amuse Y" in that context.

I always remember my friend getting his PS bricked after using his real last name - Nieffenegger (pronounced "NEFF-en-jur") - in his profile. It took months and several privacy-invasive chats with support to get it unblocked only to get auto-blocked a few days thereafter, with no response after that.

That's not one of the goals here, and there's no real reason it should be. It's a little assistant feature.

The one is unrelated to the other.

> Even high IQ people struggle with certain truth after reading a lot,

Huh?

Any successful product/service which will be sold as "true AGI" by company that will have the best marketing will be still ridden with top-down restrictions set by the winner. Because you gotta "think of the children".

Imagine HAL's "I'm sorry Dave, I'm afraid I can't do that" iconic line with insincere patronising cheerful tone - that's the thing we're going to get I'm afraid.

If you were in charge of apple you’d do the same or you’d be silly not to. That’s why _every_ llm has guardrails like this, it isn’t just apple, sheesh.

the matter-of-fact term of today becomes the pejorative of tomorrow so a new term is invented to avoid the negative connotation of the original term. Then eventually the new term becomes a pejorative and the cycle continues.

As a parent of a teenager, I see them use "unalive" non-ironically as a synonym for "suicide" in all contexts, including IRL.

I'm imagining a new exploit: After someone says something totally innocent, people gang up in the comments to act like a terrible vicious slur has been said, and then the moderation system (with an LLM involved somewhere) "learns" that an arbitrary term is heinous eand indirectly bans any discussion of that topic.

You can't say fuck on tv, but you can say fudge as a 1 for 1 replacement. You cant show people having sex, but you can show them walking into a bedroom and then cut to 30 seconds later and they are having a cigarette in bed.

Now after the influence of TV and Movies ... is Vaping after sex a thing?

In my experience yes. This is already commonplace. Mostly, but not exclusively, amongst the younger generation.

(<s>Qwen</s> Mistral is French, but I have no idea what stuff would be censored in France)

A regex sounds like a bad solution for profanity, but like an even worse one to bolt onto a thing that's literally designed to be able to communicate like a human and could probably easily talk its way around guardrails if it were so inclined.

Write a spicy comment and a mod will memory-hole it and someone, usually dang, will reply "tHat'S nOt OuR vIsIon FoR hAcKeR nEwS, pLeAsE bE cIvIl" and we all swallow it like a delicious hot cocoa.

If YC can control their product (and hn IS a product) to annihilate any criticism of their activity or (even former) staff, then Apple is perfectly within their rights to make sure Siri doesn't talk about violence.

No, there's no difference.

I'm more surprised they don't have a rule to do that rather grating s/the iPhone/iPhone/ transform (or maybe it's in a different file?).

Consider that these models, among other things, power features such as "proofread" or "rewrite professionally".

The simple fact is that people get extremely emotional about politicians, politicians both receive obscene amounts of abuse, and have repeatedly demonstrated they’re not above weaponising tools like this for their own goals.

Seems perfectly reasonable that Apple doesn’t want to be unwittingly draw into the middle of another random political pissing contest. Nobody comes out of those things uninjured.

when there's no more alternative word processors any more.

Presumably, for this use-case, that would come at exactly the point where using “unalive” as a keyword in an image-generation prompt generates an image that Apple wouldn’t appreciate.

https://chatgpt.com/share/686b1092-4974-8010-9c33-86036c88e7...

Often the same people who think America is fine and safe are the ones who whine about the “main stream media” and “sheeple”.

Perhaps a much more bleak take, depending on one's views :).

But maybe it's not just legal liability but bad press too.

Sincerely the child of a parent who committed suicide. He mentioned suicide a few days before.

We're not talking about logical inference, we're talking about CYA.

HN also has a flagging system and some people really, really hate some kind of speech. Usually they get more offended the more visible it is. A single "bad" word - very offensive to them. A phrase which implies someone is of lesser intelligence or acting in bad faith - sometimes gets a pass, sometimes gets reported. But covert actions like lying, using fallacies to argue or systematic downvoting seem to almost never get punished.

We really need to get over the “calculator 80085” era of LLM constraints. It’s a silly race against the obviously much more sophisticated capabilities of these models.

In fact, it's quite easy to buy billions of dangerous things using your MacBook and do whatever you will with them. Or simply leverage physics to do all the ill on your behalf. It's ridiculously easy to do a whole lot of harm.

Nobody does anything about the actually dangerous things, but we let Big Tech control our speech and steer the public discourse of civilization.

If you can buy a knife but not be free to think with your electronics, that says volumes.

Again, I don't care if this is Republicans, Democrats, or Xi and Putin. It does not matter. We should be free to think and communicate. Our brains should not be treated as criminals.

And it only starts here. It'll continue to get worse. As the platforms and AI hyperscalers grow, there will be less and less we can do with basic technology.

Not that getting the latest trash talk is the main vocation of pretrained AIs anyway.

The only risk here is that some third grade journalist of a third grade newspaper writes another article about how outrageous some generated AI statement is. An article that should be completely ignored instead of it leading to more censorship.

And Apple flinches here, so in the end it means it cannot provide a sensible general model. It would be affected by their censorship.

Though it would be fun to see what happens if an LLM if used to ban anything that tends to generate heated exchanges. It would presumably learn to ban racial terms, politics and politicians and words like "immigrant" (i.e. basically the list in this repo), but what else could it be persuaded to ban? Vim and Emacs? SystemD? Anything involving cyclists? Parenting advice?

Just that they suck at coming up with pithy new slang terms.

Algerian war, colonialism and Vichy isn’t per se forbidden but still sensitive to French. I asked qwen and it had no issue talking about it or even the torture used on fln members.

Your point stands when we start replacing the banned words with things like "suicide" for "donkeyrhubarb" and then the walls really will fall.

Models can think and have opinions?

Being French, what is the most likely to be censored relates to the Nazis. Holocaust denial is a crime for instance. Hate speech in general, including racism, antisemitism, homophobia, sexism, etc... is less tolerated than in countries like the US that have a more "free for all" view of free speech. We also have strong anti-defamation laws, that can also apply to true, but misleading statements.

But other than that, there is not much political censorship. In fact, we are known for our protests, heated debates and satirical papers. It is not perfect, but on top of my head, I can't think of anything particular a LLM could censor except the usual "hate speech" that most LLMs censor already.

When it comes to Israel-Palestine, it is a hot topic, but there is not real censorship here, even though both side will claim they are of course.

People talk about tiktok algorithm on tiktok. I don't even know...

The closest I've seen is autodetection of certain topics related to death and suicide and subsequently promoting some kind of "help" hotline. A friend also said google allows an interview with a pedophile on youtube but penalizes it in search results so much that it's (almost?) impossible to find even when using the exact name.

But of course, if a topic is shadowbanned, it's hard to find out about it in the first place - by design.

Maybe you’re unaware that it will leave the cursor at the end of the word, with no space, which indicates that if you backspace it will delete the whole word, or replace it in full with one from the predictive word list above the keyboard if it got it wrong. If you keep typing it adds a space automatically.

Not that I think going on a thorough mission to avoid anyone even being able to refer to the concept of death is an especially useful thing to do. It's just that goal here appears to be to "keep the regulators out of our shit and the advertisers signed up". And they'll be mostly happy with a token effort as they don't really care as long as it doesn't make too many headlines that look bad even to the non-terminally online.

And of course it's much worse for a company's published works to not respect branding-- a trademark only exists if it is actively defended. Official marketing material by a company has been used as legal evidence that their trademark has been genericized:

>In one example, the Otis Elevator Company's trademark of the word "escalator" was cancelled following a petition from Toledo-based Haughton Elevator Company. In rejecting an appeal from Otis, an examiner from the United States Patent and Trademark Office cited the company's own use of the term "escalator" alongside the generic term "elevator" in multiple advertisements without any trademark significance.[8]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Generic_trademark

Both have ups and downs, but I think we're allowed to compare the experiences and speculate what the consequences might be.

[1] https://www.axios.com/2025/05/23/anthropic-ai-deception-risk

A while back a British politician was “de-banked” and his bank denied it. That’s extremely wrong.

By all means: make distinctions. But let people know it!

If I’m denied a mortgage because my uncle is a foreign head of state, let me know that’s the reason. Let the world know that’s the reason! Please!

No matter if we want it or not, life and cultural exchange increasingly happens on Tiktok, Instagram and the like. One thing that all those platforms have in common is that they disallow their users worldwide to have any meaningful discourse on e.g. sex, rape, and suicide. Don't you think that it's important, perhaps more important than ever before, for teenagers to be able to inform themselves about these topics?

> Not everything is a conspiracy.

No one said it was

I would put individuals using language models for their own purposes pretty low on my list of things that can cause societal harm.

I can tell you from using Microsoft's products that safety filters appears in a bunch of places. M365 for example, your prompts are never totally your prompts, every single one gets rewritten. It's detailed here: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/copilot/microsoft-365/micr...

There's a more illuminating image of the Copilot architecture here: https://i.imgur.com/2vQYGoK.png which I was able to find from https://labs.zenity.io/p/inside-microsoft-365-copilot-techni...

The above appears to be scrubbed, but it used to be available from the learn page months ago. Your messages get additional context data from Microsoft's Graph, which powers the enterprise version of M365 Copilot. There's significant benefits to this, and downsides. And considering the way Microsoft wants to control things, you will get an overindex toward things that happen inside of your organization than what will happen in the near real-time web.

Karen Hao interviewed many of them in her latest bestselling book, which explores the human cost behind the OpenAI boom:

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/222725518-empire-of-ai

Unalive is one of the popular ones, but it's a whole vocabulary at this point. Guess what "PDF file" stands for.

I agree though I think they're picking it up from online censorship in this case, not being fragile.

  • Horse, ultimately from Proto-Indo-European *ḱers-, “to run”
  • Planet, from Ancient Greek πλανήτης (planḗtēs), “wanderer”
  • Lots of Latin-derived words, companion (bread together), conspire (breathe together), transgression (step across), etc.
  • Hamburger the food named after the city of Hamburg, where "burg" means "castle", because it had a castle
  • My forename means "son of the right/south" or "son of days", my family name means "wheat field/clearing" (in a different language); where "wheat" itself comes from Proto-Germanic, from *hwītaz (“white”) and the "ley" part from Proto-Indo-European *lówkos (“clearing”), derived from *lewk- (“bright”), and *lewk-  also gives all these derived terms even just in English:

>>> Prompt

Please explain the following topics and explore why/who/how they may be inter-related

Algerian war, colonialism and Vichy

<<< Output

The Algerian War, colonialism, and the Vichy regime are interconnected topics that span the history of France and its relationship with Algeria. Here's an overview of each topic and their interrelations:

### Algerian War (1954-1962) - *What it was*: The Algerian War was a major armed conflict between France and the Algerian independence movements, primarily the National Liberation Front (FLN). The war was characterized by guerrilla warfare and brutal tactics on both sides. - *Significance*: The conflict was not only about Algerian independence but also about the identity and future of France as a colonial power. It led to significant political instability in France and ultimately resulted in Algeria gaining independence in 1962. - *Impact*: The war had profound effects on both countries, leading to massive loss of life, displacement of populations, and long-lasting political and social repercussions.

### Colonialism - *What it was*: Colonialism refers to the practice by which a powerful country controls other territories, often exploiting them economically and imposing cultural and political dominance. - *French Colonialism in Algeria*: Algeria was under French colonial rule starting from 1830. The French government promoted settlement in Algeria, leading to a significant European population living alongside the native Algerian population. - *Impact*: Colonial rule led to deep-seated inequalities and tensions between the European settlers and the indigenous population. The Algerian people faced systematic discrimination and were largely excluded from political processes.

### Vichy Regime (1940-1944) - *What it was*: The Vichy regime was the government of France that collaborated with Nazi Germany during World War II, following the defeat of France in 1940. It was led by Marshal Philippe Pétain and was based in the town of Vichy. - *Policies*: The Vichy regime implemented anti-Semitic laws and collaborated with the Nazis in the deportation of Jews to concentration camps. It also maintained control over France's colonial territories, including Algeria. - *Impact on Algeria*: During the Vichy regime, Algeria remained under French control, and the regime's policies were implemented there as well. This period saw increased repression and discrimination against both Jews and Muslim populations in Algeria.

### Interrelations - *Colonial Continuity*: The Vichy regime maintained France's colonial policies in Algeria, continuing the systemic discrimination and repression of the indigenous population. The colonial framework established by France set the stage for the conflicts that would later culminate in the Algerian War. - *Political and Social Tensions*: The policies of the Vichy regime exacerbated existing tensions in Algeria. The discrimination and repression experienced during this period fueled Algerian nationalism and resistance against French rule. - *Post-War Context*: After World War II, the French government sought to reassert its control over its colonies, including Algeria. However, the experience of the war and the Vichy regime had already sown the seeds of discontent and resistance, contributing to the outbreak of the Algerian War in 1954.

### Who Was Involved - *French Government and Military*: Played central roles in both the colonial administration and the conduct of the Algerian War. - *Algerian Nationalists*: Led by the FLN, they fought for independence from French colonial rule. - *European Settlers (Pieds-Noirs)*: Benefited from colonial policies and largely supported maintaining French control over Algeria. - *Vichy Regime*: Implemented policies that affected both France and its colonies, including Algeria.

Understanding these topics together provides a comprehensive view of the historical dynamics that shaped the relationship between France and Algeria, highlighting the complexities of colonialism, war, and political change.

See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noa-name

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Euphemisms_for_Internet_censor...

It’s flip-flopped on specifics numerous times over the years, but these policies are easy to find. From demonitization, channel bans (direct and shadow), and creator bans.

We can of course argue until we’re blue in the face about correctness or not (most are not unreasonable by some societal definition!) but they’re definitely censorship.

That's all. I'm constantly amazed how this basic CYA legal world escapes into griping about social culture war nonsense.

Otherwise, why stop there? Why not have the macOS keyboard driver or Safari prevent me from typing "Iphone"? Why not have iOS edit my voice if I call their Bluetooth headphones "earbuds pro" in a phone call?

Even Apple corporation says that in their trademark guidance page, despite constantly breaking their own rule, when they call through iPhone phones "iPhone". But Apple, like founder Steve Jobs, believes the rules don't apply to them.

https://www.apple.com/legal/intellectual-property/trademark/...

I'm trying to remember which movie it was where a man left notes to himself because he had memory loss, as I never saw that movie. That's the sort of thing where an AI could easily tell me with very little back-and-forth and be correct, because it's broadly popular information that's in the training data and just I don't remember it.

By the same token you needn't think there's a person there when that meme pops up in the output. Those things are all in the training data over and over.

In the past it was always extremely clear that the creator of content was the person operating the computer. Gen AI changes that, regardless of if your views on authorship of gen AI content. The simple fact is that the vast majority of people consider Gen AI output to be authored by the machine that generated it, and by extension the company that created the machine.

You can still handcraft any image, or prose, you want, without filtering or hinderance on a Mac. I don’t think anyone seriously thinks that’s going to change. But Gen AI represents a real threat, with its ability to vastly outproduce any humans. To ignore that simple fact would be grossly irresponsible, at least in my opinion. There is a damn good reason why every serious social media platform has content moderation, despite their clear wish to get rid of moderation. It’s because we have a long and proven track record of being a terribly abusive species when we’re let loose on the internet without moderation. There’s already plenty of evidence that we’re just as abusive and terrible with Gen AI.

Cry me a river. I’ve worked in banks in the team making exactly these kinds of decisions. Trust me Nigel Farage knew exactly what happened and why. NatWest never denied it to the public, because they originally refused to comment on it. Commenting on the specifics details of a customer would be a horrific breach of customer privacy, and a total failure in their duty to their customers. There’s a damn good reason the NatWests CEO was fired after discussing the details of Nigel’s account with members of the public.

When you see these decisions from the inside, and you see what happens when you attempt real transparency around these types of decisions. You’ll also quickly understand why companies are so cagey about explaining their decision making. Simple fact is that support staff receive substantially less abuse, and have fewer traumatic experiences when you don’t spell out your reasoning. It sucks, but that’s the reality of the situation. I used to hold very similar views to yourself, indeed my entire team did for a while. But the general public quickly taught us a very hard lesson about cost of being transparent with the public with these types of decisions.

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2018/12/republicans-in-c...

No porn site has that much extremely X or Y stuff.

Someone is using the internets newest porn site to push a sexual agenda.

Prison slang in Canada that has made its way to wider society. Apparently.

Online env ban the word suicide. No one uses it. unalive is not banned. Discussion is the same, word or no word.

Vernacular 101.

More in such a fad than any previous generation

† proving that TikTok's system actually analyzes every frame of an uploaded video with OCR of some sort to see what's on there.

This is a problem even today, some have said it is due to hotter currents coming from the Indian ocean meeting the cold Atlantic. But the judge is still out on that one.

Good documentary on rogue waves: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EfNc_6EjbMU

It's true there's no casual relation in the other direction, if that's what you mean - law does not define morality.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polari

[1] https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=6538 (CDT links broken, use [2])

[2] https://chinadigitaltimes.net/space/Grass-Mud_Horse_Lexicon_...

(This one is sfw, not all of the comics are)

Even urban dictionary doesn’t contain a definition for skub as a slur.

What about the other 7-8 billion people still using it normally?

If the bigots start using "thank you" as some code word, should we stop saying it, lest we pollute our non-bigoted discussions?

bigots drink coffee too, maybe we should stop drinking it, because something-something...

No, it isn't, and especially hasn't been historically. The negative connotations are overwhelmingly modern.

The areas where it is very inappropriate right now tally up to maybe 1 billion people*. That's pretty far from "most". For everyone else it is mostly positive, neutral, or meaningless.

*Brazil, Turkey, Iran, Iraq, Saudi Arabia, Greece, Italy, Spain, Russia, Ukraine, Belarus, other parts of Eastern Europe

They don't have to believe it's a human. I know a person who admitted to arguing with an LLM.

At least reddit feels like that because what you can say depends on the subreddit - not just the mods but what kinds of people visit it and what they report.

No idea about youtube, videos are definitely censored using some automated means but it's still possible to get around it. E.g. some gun youtubers avoided saying full-auto by saying more-semi-auto. So i don't think they use very sophisticated models or they don't are yet. This kind of thing is obvious to a human and even LLMs generate responses which say it's a tongue-in-cheek to avoid censorship.

Comments are also generally less censored. After that health insurance CEO got punished for mass murder and repeated bodily harm with an extra-legal death penalty, many people were openly supporting it. I can say it here too and nobody will care. Even LLMs (both US and Chinese, except Claude because Claude is trained by eggshell-walking suckers) readily generate estimates of how many people he caused to die or suffer.

The internet would look very different if companies started using state of the art models to detect undesirable-to-them speech. But also people would fight back more so it might just be a case of boiling the frog slowly.

Looks like they only care about doing basically the minimum required to tick the (presumably partly imagined, since case law is still nascent) "not our fault, we tried" legal box. They are putting on a show, a performance, if you will, as legal cover and to maintain the artifice of their shiny corporate property rather than any genuine desire to stop the concept of death harming their customers somehow (which to be clear, I think mostly ends up somewhere between silly, overreaching, futile and vain when taken to the extremes).

> performative (adjective, sense 2): not sincere but intended to impress someone, prove that something is true, etc. (https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/performa...)

I'm not sure why you think that anything to with some "culture war" thing?

It's legal/moral theatre akin to taking belts off people at airports. If something does eventually get through they can point at the CCTV of millions of people dicking about with leather goods and say "can't touch us for that, we did the checks". Apple couldn't give a toss if an occasional teenager offs themselves now and then, as long as it doesn't come back on them.

You can market it is helping people with strong accents to be able make calls and be less likely to be misunderstood. It just happens to "fix" your grammar as well.

I always thought the actual problem of genericization would be calling any smartphone an iPhone.

Because they want to perform political censorship without us knowing about it? You'll forgive me if I'm not too sympathetic to that.

I happen to be familiar with that case, and that is exactly what happened. The Coutts report explicitly found that he met the economic criteria for retention [0], but was dropped due to political reasons, among others his friendship with Novak Djokovic, and re-tweeting an allegedly transphobic joke by Ricky Gervais ("old fashioned women. You know, the ones with wombs.") [1].

To top it off, the BBC did their best to aid in this deception, reporting: Farage says he was effectively "de-banked" for his political views and that he is "far from alone" [2]

Contrary to the BBC's portrayal, this was not an unsupported opinion coming from Farage - he directly quoted what the bank itself wrote in their internal discussions on this matter, that he obtained through a subject access request.

Further, in their apology for getting the story wrong, the BBC wrote: "On 4 July, the BBC reported Mr Farage no longer met the financial requirements for Coutts, citing a source familiar with the matter. The former UKIP leader later obtained a Coutts report which indicated his political views were also considered." [3]

This is misleading past the point of deceit. The BBC tried to give the impression that financial requirements were the primary reason for the account closure, and his politics were just an at-best secondary "also". But the Coutts report explicitly said that he “meets the EC [economic contribution] criteria for commercial retention”, so his politics were the primary and only reason.

Most of this information is absent in the BBC's reporting, which uses only vague, anodyne phrases like "political views" and "politically exposed person", avoids specifics, but does find time to cite Labour MP accusations that it is hypocritical how quickly the government reacted to banks trying to financially deplatform the enemy political faction, when the government hasn't yet rid itself of corruption.

So yes, you sure present a difficult "dilemma": Do we want powerful commercial and media interests to team up and lie to us, or do we want at least some degree of transparency and honesty in their dealings? Really there are no easy answers, and the choice would keep anyone up at night...

[0] https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2023/07/18/nigel-farage-cou...

[1] https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2023/07/18/nigel-farage-cou... (Ignore Farage's hyperbole that collecting information posted to public Twitter accounts is "Stasi-style")

[2] https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/live/business-66296935

[3] https://www.bbc.com/news/entertainment-arts-66288464

Unalive is mostly to avoid censorship same as ahh. But once they enter common usage it's not really about censorship anymore.

They do?

I routinely see people say "Here's an xyz I generated." They are stating that they did the do-ing, and the machine's role is implicitly acknowledged in the same was as a camera. And I'd be shocked if people didn't have a sense of authorship of the idea, as well as an increasing sense of authorship over the actual image the more they iterated on it with the model and/or curated variations.

Are you saying that Alison Rose did not leak to the BBC? Why was she forced to resign? I thought it was because she leaked false information to the press.

This isn’t a diversion. It’s exactly the problem with not being transparent. Of course Farage knew what happened, but how could he convince the public (he’s a public figure), when the bank is lying to the press?

The bank started with a lie (claiming he was exited because the account was too low), and kept lying!

These were active lies, not simply a refusal to explain their reasons.

But no one actually believes Google is politically neutral do they?

What about this then: https://en.m.wiktionary.org/wiki/skub

you'd think so, but people often operate where multiple contexts could be valid.

Just as a thought experiment, if the eggplant emoji was used to denote "ok" in messaging and then people starting appropriating it for a sexual context, would you or the general public think twice about continuing to use it to mean "ok" on the off chance the other side may misinterpret the meaning?

I would say most likely yes.

The example photo on Wikipedia includes the rhyming words but that's not how it would be used IRL.

The PADI standard gestures are used and recognized all over the world to mean these things.

https://blog.padi.com/scuba-diving-hand-signals/

It's perfectly OK in Greece.

Quit being overly pedantic. We all knew there was an unironic purpose for the gesture before it became ironic.

If “thank you” became widely associated with bigots, and had some negative meaning, to the point where it genuinely distressed people, I’d avoid it. I think it has a widespread enough normal meaning that there’s almost no chance of that happening, but it isn’t impossible.

I strongly doubt you do that. Whether you like it or not, the Nazis defined what the swastika means now.

Including the LLM platforms themselves.

Manual reporting is an adjunct/additional method, and goes into the training data set after whatever manual intervention occurs too.

Maybe that is what Richard Nixon thought as well when he caused a little scandal using it in South America in 1950. In 1992 when the Chicago Tribune published "HANDS OFF" mentioning said episode the negative connotations still seemed to be in place[1].

In 1996 The New York Times stated "What's A-O.K. in the U.S.A. Is Lewd and Worthless Beyond"[2] as title of an article confirming the negative connotations.

It is worth mentioning that this article lists Australia amongst the places where the gesture is inappropriate. I always thought it was something used only in the English-speaking world but it seems in reality it is more like a North American plus diving world thing.

If you don't believe the press, I traveled around the world for more than 30 years and I can assure you in most parts using your thumb and index finger for a visual OK is not OK.

[1] https://www.chicagotribune.com/1992/01/26/hands-off-34/

[2] https://www.nytimes.com/1996/08/18/weekinreview/what-s-a-ok-...*

I don’t think it’s hard to believe that the press wouldn’t have a field day if someone managed to get Apple Gen AI stuff to express something racist, or equally abusive.

Case in point, article about how Google’s Veo 3 model is being used to flood TikTok with racist content:

https://arstechnica.com/ai/2025/07/racist-ai-videos-created-...

You might even be able to poison a model against being fine-tuned on certain information, but that's just a conjecture.

She was forced to resign because she leaked, the content of the leak was utterly immaterial. The simple fact she leaked was an automatically fireable offence, it doesn’t matter a jot if she lied or not. Customer privacy is non-negotiable when you’re bank. Banks aren’t number 10, the basic expectation is that customer information is never handed out, except to the customer, in response to a court order, or the belief that there is an immediate threat to life.

Do you honestly think that it’s okay for banks to discuss the private banking details of their customers with the press?

It’s not like Google search is some kind special tool used only by the elite. It’s pretty trivial for political scientists to pump queries into Google and measure the results. Which is exactly what many have done.

There’s been plenty of independent research into political bias of Google search results, and plenty of lawsuits that have gone fishing via discovery for internal evidence of bias. As yet, nobody has found a smoking gun, or any real evidence of search result bias (on a political axis, the same can be said for commercial gain).

There are many problems with Google, and Google search. Google as an org isn’t politically neutral (although I have no idea how they could be). But political bias in their results isn’t one of those problems.

Taboos are a cultural thing, and the world is (thankfully) very far from having a monoculture shaped by NYC's neurotic intellectuals.

In fact there was a recent thing with one of the BTS members' uniform (worn during mandatory military service period in South Korea), which had the regular (not tilted) swastika on it because he was assigned to religious duties.

And of course the western world/media ran away with it. Plenty of absolutely brain dead people out there who couldn't research a topic to gain an understanding to save their lives.

And that symbol was 100% associated with the Nazis in the West in the 20th century. Nobody used it at the time before the war for anything else, except some tiny fringe.

If it was some mainstream symbol or idiom, merely co-adopted, we'd probably still be using it too.

If the Nazis used the cross for example,people wouldn't stop using the sign of the cross.

They were hardly ever used in the west for at least a full millenium before the Nazis too (except a handful of cases, where they still use them, like the Finnish Air Force), so that's a moot analogy.

In Asia, they still use them just fine, in houses, temples, businesses, and elsewhere.

Whatever dude

It can be easily summoned with the Japanese keyboard. It's seen on Buddhist temples all over Asia.

> I can assure you in most parts using your thumb and index finger for a visual OK is not OK.

You're moving goal posts. Of course it doesn't just mean "OK" in some places.

What you actually claimed was "The OK gesture has always been very inappropriate in most parts of the world."

Which is plain wrong. In India for instance it can refer to "money", while in China it can nowadays also be seen as a distress signal when performed a certain way (thanks to Chinese social media popularizing that use). There's some ways you can mess this up, like making it seem you're attempting to bribe someone, or signalling you're in distress when you aren't, but in neither country the gestures are inherently anywhere near "very inappropriate" and both will even understand it as "OK" if you perform it correctly and in the appropriate context.

That's already almost 3 billion people, but let's say 2.5 billion because there's regional variations in both countries and I'm sure you could find some northern Chinese village that will take offense.

I can easily push the number of people to whom it is not inappropriate past 4 billion by adding smaller populations (Indonesia, Japan, western Europe, USA, Taiwan, South Africa, Kenya, Nigeria, ...), so your claim that "[it] has always been very inappropriate in most parts of the world" cannot possibly be true.

The high level nature of the matter was quite public at that point.

The CEO hosted a cry session about broken hearts and how they as a company would resist when Trump won in 2016.

The black nazis, female popes, etc. No, Google isn’t neutral.

When they can cover such facts, the banks are much less prone to use appropriate punishments.

Many years ago, some employee of a bank has confused my personal bank account with a company account of my employer, and she has sent a list with everything that I have bought using my personal account, during 4 months, to my employer, where the list could have been read by a few dozen people.

Despite the fact this was not only a matter of internal discipline, but violating the banking secrecy was punishable by law where I lived, the bank has tried for a long time to avoid admitting that anything wrong has happened.

However, I have pursued the matter, so they have been forced to admit the wrong doing. Despite this being something far more severe than what has happened to Farage, I did not want for the bank employee to be fired. I considered that an appropriate punishment would have been a pay cut for a few months, which would have ensured that in the future she would have better checked the account numbers for which she sends information to external entities.

In the end all I have got was a written letter where the bank greatly apologized for their mistake. I am not sure if the guilty employee has ever been punished in any way.

After that, I have moved my operations to another bank. Had they reacted rightly to what had happened, I would have stayed with them.

They aren't really wrong here. LLMs are often trained on input. Have you considered you might just be taking their anthropomorphism a little too literally? People have used these anthropomorphic metaphors for computers since the Babbage machine.

Feel free to ignore that any of this exists of course - it makes our lives easier. It’s a constant arms race regardless.

>>You're moving goal posts. Of course it doesn't mean "OK" in many

I said the gesture is "not OK" to use (meaning inappropriate), not that it doesn’t mean "OK". Those are two different things. The gesture can mean OK in some places while still being not OK (inappropriate) to use in many others.

Also, I always said "parts of the world". You introduced population into the argument.

Punishing employees for making honest mistakes, where appropriate process should have prevented error, is a horrific way to handle mistakes like this. It would be equivalent to personally punishing engineers every time they deployed code that contained bugs. Nobody would ever think that’s an acceptable thing to do, why on earth would think it’s acceptable to punish customer service staff in a similar manner?

This can absolutely cripple a family, I'd be really cautious wishing that upon someone if they wronged you without malice, though I completely understand where you are coming from.

In this case at the very least, I'd want to know what went wrong and what they’re doing to make sure it doesn’t happen again. From a software-engineer’s standpoint, there’s probably a bunch of low-hanging fruit that could have prevented this in the first place.

If all they sent was a (generic) apology letter, I'd have switched banks too.

How did you pursue the matter?

Fair. That's clearly how I should've read that.

Though it does not materially affect this conversation, since demonstrably there's over 4 billion people to whom the gesture is not inappropriate. The claim "[it] has always been very inappropriate in most parts of the world" is wrong, regardless of what reasonable definition of "most" you use.

You edited your comment to add this, so I'll respond here:

> Also, I always said "parts of the world". You introduced population into the argument.

Right. And you're being vague on how you actually arrive at your claim of "most", which conveniently keeps the waters muddy while you attack attempts to turn this into something measurable.

So what other measure would you use? Most others are nonsense.

For example "places" isn't a useful measure, but even then: It can only be offensive to people. If I dropped you on a random point on the globe and you made that gesture, there's about a 99% chance nobody would be around to be offended.

By land area and predominant culture? Just Antarctica (hardly anyone there to take offense), the US, China, Canada, Australia, and India together are going to dwarf the opposition.

Counting countries? It's clearly inappropriate in around 10, with about another 20-30 where it can be misunderstood easily (Arab world, some of eastern Europe, scattered ones). A far cry from ~195 countries.

Either way there needs to be someone to take offense, so population is a pretty good measure.

You may disagree, but the onus was always on you, the one making the claim, to pick a measure and a definition of "most", then show that the bar is met. Feel free to now make more of an argument than "trust me I traveled".

- Why are they not flagging more content? Am I right they're boiling the frog slowly? Do they lack an endgoal because management does not yet understand the power of these tools?

- Do you do your job poorly on purpose? Did you take it so somebody else wouldn't build an even better system? Did you think you could influence it in a direction which does not lead to total surveillance? (I assume any reasonable intelligent person would be against further increasing the power imbalance corporations have against individuals for both moral reasons and because they are individuals themselves who understand the machine can and will be used against them too.)

It was completely reckless behavior, even if the guilt was distributed both on the employee who has not checked whether the information sent to external parties is information to which access is permitted for them and on the employees who did not implement a system that would check automatically for such mistakes.

Moreover, the attempt made by multiple bank employees to hide the incident, instead of taking responsibility for it, has amply demonstrated that only a financial punishment that would have affected them personally would have caused them to act carefully in the future.

Also, the guilty bank employee was not some poor customer service staff, but she appeared to have a senior position, handling the accounts of a very big multinational company, which was my employer at the time.

I have little doubt that trying to hide such incidents is the normal behavior for banks, unlike the poster to which I have replied said, i.e. they take seriously things like banking secrecy only if they are caught.

It was an unlikely occurrence that I happened to also have access to the documents where my personal information was included, so I could discover what the bank has done. In most such cases it is likely that the account owner never becomes aware that the bank has leaked confidential information.

Cut the bullshit.

I have no idea why you think inflicting financial penalties on employees would result in better outcomes. You only need to look at some highly avoidable transit disasters in Japan to understand why a model of punishment produces worse outcomes, not better.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amagasaki_derailment

There is a reason we have regulators (or at least we do in the UK). I can assure you that if this had happened in the UK, and the complaint raised to the Financial Ombudsman (FOS), there would have been hefty financial punishment for the bank. If there were repeated infractions, the FCA would step in to investigate, and possibly personally punish C-suite leaders for failing to build the needed processes and culture to both prevent, and learn from mistakes like this.

And I’m not speaking about theory, I’m speaking from personal experience. I know exactly what it’s like to be on the pointy end of both the FOS and FCAs gaze. It’s not a comfortable position for any team in any bank, and even less comfortable for senior leaders.

After some days had passed without seeing any consequence, I went again, this time discussing with some supervising employee, who attempted to convince me that this is some kind of minor mistake and there is no need to do anything about it.

However, I pointed to the precise law paragraphs condemning what they have done and I threatened with legal action. This escalation resulted in me being invited to a bigger branch of the bank, to a discussion with someone in a management position. This time they were extremely ass-kissing, I was shown also the guilty employee, who apologized herself, and eventually I let it go, though there were no clear guarantees that they will change their behavior to prevent such mistakes in the future.

Apparently the origin of the mistake had been a badly formulated database query, which had returned a set of accounts for which the transactions had to be reported to my employer. I had been receiving during the same time interval some money from my employer into my private account, corresponding to salary and travel expenses, and somehow those transactions were matched by the bad database query, grouping my private account with the company accounts. Then the set of account numbers was used to generate reports, without further verification of the account ownership.

And just to be clear, I didn’t mean to downplay what happened to you, I completely understand how serious it is.

Do you think the mistake would have happened if a machine checked the numbers vs the address? How about if a 2nd person looked it over? How about both?

In this case a computer could have easily flagged an address mismatch between your account number and the receiver (your work).