alt.hn

6/9/2026 at 6:21:43 PM

GPT-2: Too Dangerous To Release (2019)

 https://naokishibuya.github.io/blog/2022-12-30-gpt-2-2019/

by AbuAssar

6/9/2026 at 8:01:04 PM

Back in 2019, it was more fair to have caution around the larger GPT-2 models since robust text generation (by 2019 standards) was a complete unknown. For something like Mythos in 2026, where now the social implications of better LLMs are more understood, it's more fair to call it (EDIT: specifically, the declaration of its danger) a marketing gimmick.

by minimaxir

6/9/2026 at 8:08:48 PM

This is a natural follow up question -- what kind of an escalation or message should frontier labs/companies publish to be seen as genuine and not marketing gimmick?

by oathvz

6/10/2026 at 8:05:34 AM

I'd say it's almost impossible at that point. Specifically, Altman said so many lies in the past that people stopped believing anything he says.

I think the core of this distrust is the fact that these companies positioned themselves against humanity from the start by saying people will lose most jobs etc. Not only it didn't happen, but many people feel several aspects of their lives got worse because of LLMs, in spite of obvious advantages. So the distrust and reluctance are real.

by benterix

6/9/2026 at 8:17:34 PM

It's fine for the labs to publish model safety cards and stagger releases/limit it to a narrow test group as they are already doing, but saying they're doing it "because the models could be dangerous" comes off as unnecessary as best.

by minimaxir

6/9/2026 at 8:59:32 PM

One of the main purposes of model cards, from the beginning, has been to outline the ways that a model could be harmful or dangerous, and mitigations that can be or have been taken to reduce those risks. How do you expect labs to publish model cards without talking about this rationale?

by aesthesia

6/9/2026 at 11:05:02 PM

I think the point is that the model card should be released with the model, not foreshadowed by several months of ominous tweets from the CEO.

by SR2Z

6/9/2026 at 8:23:37 PM

Unnecessary based on what exactly? Your vibes?

by enraged_camel

6/10/2026 at 1:09:25 AM

What? So it’s fine for them to be concerned about the safety, try to measure it, publish results about it, start with a cautious phased release approach, basically all the things they’re doing.

But if they say why they’re doing all those things, it’s too much? What?

by senordevnyc

6/10/2026 at 3:08:53 AM

I dont think they can, their rhetoric is so silly these days that if they did accidentally release something dangerous no one would believe them. The Boy who cried Rokos Basilisk I guess.

by protocolture

6/10/2026 at 12:32:03 AM

These chicken littles have lied far too many times in far too extreme ways in their desperate attempts to obtain a monopoly by regulation.

The remaining 'worthwhile message' would be that they have deleted their models and are dissolving the company, because they believe the risk was too great and was worth losing the revenue and risk being civically prosecuted by their investors, and will take the chance that they'll be able to convince a court/jury that they acted properly.

In other words, putting their own skin on the line for the veracity of their claim-- rather than everyone elses.

by nullc

6/10/2026 at 1:11:13 AM

Such as? Yes, yes, we know OpenAI isn’t as open as you want. What else? What are all these egregious lies that the frontier labs have told you?

by senordevnyc

6/9/2026 at 8:07:30 PM

How is this a gimmick?

It changes my whole profession on a level i couldn't even imagine how we would 'solve' software engineering.

by Qhemlomo

6/9/2026 at 9:24:04 PM

Has it been released to the public yet? Genuine question. Because if you didn't try it yourself, you have to rely on others' reports. And different people who tried it on different projects got different results, leading to different conclusions.

by GTP

6/9/2026 at 10:01:41 PM

it was released a few hrs ago as "Fable 5". it's an incremental improvement over Opus 4.8.

by novaleaf

6/9/2026 at 9:07:35 PM

> It changes my whole profession on a level i couldn't even imagine

I assure, it doesn't.

by malfist

6/10/2026 at 8:20:59 AM

I'm happy to have a discussion with you if you bring any argument.

Before GPT what would have been your choise of architecture, setup, alogorithm if someone comes to you and says "write a tool/system which can generate code" "what do you mean generate code? How do i control it?" "by writing what you want in natural language" "puh 50 years of development, 100 billion, top tier team of linguists and software engineers perhaps?"

Ask StackOverflow if they think it didn't change anything for them.

by Qhemlomo

6/10/2026 at 1:15:44 AM

It already has!

It’s mind-boggling that anyone could deny this in mid-2026. Virtually every software engineer I know is no longer writing the majority of their code. Many are not writing any code, myself included. And I’m a staff engineer with 20 yoe, formerly at big tech, and now building a (profitable) SaaS of my own. The way I work is wildly different from a year ago.

And no one is going back.

by senordevnyc

6/9/2026 at 8:12:47 PM

We still didn't "solve" software engineering, try to give Claude code access to your friends or family and see what they do with it.

by realusername

6/9/2026 at 8:16:46 PM

My partner wrote an android app which was doing what she wanted to do. She did this experiment 5 month ago and she did this in one day.

My wife has 0 knowledge how any of this works.

That was shocking to see.

Progress is not stoping and Fable proves that.

by Qhemlomo

6/9/2026 at 8:24:52 PM

You can scaffold out a simple app pretty easily. Anything large or complex things break down. If you don’t know what you’re doing you end up leaking secrets like the dozens of examples we’ve seen so far.

by stanmancan

6/9/2026 at 8:33:48 PM

You know what the problem is in software engineering? A LOT of people have no clue what good software engineering is.

I was working in a company before which used md5 in 2015! Databases on the internet with a 5 character password. No tests.

A person i know would have broken the whole production DB if i wouldn't have stoped the PR.

Another ex-collegue thought its okay to 'encrypt' with a basic shift cyper creditcard data.

I don't think any of these companies care that much

by Qhemlomo

6/9/2026 at 9:25:22 PM

> You know what the problem is in software engineering? A LOT of people have no clue what good software engineering is.

Indeed. Is Mythos going to change this?

by GTP

6/10/2026 at 7:22:10 AM

On one side, it means that a certain amount of business will just use it even if you think its not safe/good enough and they will throw out people and will still succeed.

And on the other side: yes because they will also use LLM review or other tooling and will be fine whatever the 'security llm agent' tells them.

by Qhemlomo

6/10/2026 at 2:11:53 AM

Yes. It is going to make better decisions for people that don't know better.

by esafak

6/9/2026 at 9:11:41 PM

Yes the same applies to junior and inexperienced developers.

by stanmancan

6/9/2026 at 8:40:20 PM

You could always do this, though.

Before gen code killed the freelance business model, there were hoards of people on Upwork/Fiverr willing to fuck other freelancers over and underpay themselves to make whatever barely-working slop you wanted.

Hell, before managers got the idea of AI layoffs, they had been off-shoring to low-quality code sweatshops for years. That was supposed to kill software engineering in the States 20 years ago. And it was just as frustrating (if not moreso) to get them to actually fulfill the project requirements.

by StableAlkyne

6/9/2026 at 9:00:09 PM

I'd say creating a project is 5% of the job and maintaining it over time 95% of it.

It's true that they can start amazing projects without guidance but then the real work begins.

by realusername

6/10/2026 at 7:17:12 AM

Thats what the agentic layer will fix, but this is currently getting build.

by Qhemlomo

6/9/2026 at 10:04:22 PM

There is almost no maintenance work for bespoke apps apart from infrequent updates to keep OS and hardware compatibility as the environment slowly changes.

Keep in mind, these are not products in the endless feature treadmill promoted by scrum.

by jason_oster

6/10/2026 at 6:12:41 AM

I've worked on an app and I'd say the opposite, I even abandonned the app at some point due to the maintenance work involved.

by realusername

6/9/2026 at 9:59:14 PM

My non-programmer friends have created:

- A mod manager for Vintage Story in Swift.

- A GameShark Pro adapter using an ESP32 that hosts a web app for dumping N64 ROMs and searching for cheat codes.

by jason_oster

6/9/2026 at 8:35:32 PM

For starters it makes you able to bypass having to go on Reddit to find incomplete trace of solution to some niche problem and acts as a sophisticated (but sometimes wrong) search engine. This already is worth every penny and improved my mental health immensely.

by juleiie

6/9/2026 at 8:47:29 PM

Fortunately you still get the reddit experience with AI.

https://www.reddit.com/r/ChatGPT/comments/1hxa3kj/ai_reached...

by throwaway85825

6/10/2026 at 9:04:58 AM

I am not clicking that link. I have blocked all reddit domains in my router, using AI to retrieve answers from Reddit.

You can copy paste it in reply if you want

by juleiie

6/9/2026 at 9:03:03 PM

[dead]

by ludamn

6/9/2026 at 8:12:24 PM

Yeah, I'm sure Anthropic loves people switching to Codex. Brilliant marketing.

by killerstorm

6/9/2026 at 10:39:12 PM

It was bullshit in 2019 it's bullshit now too.

They just keep threatening governments in hope they get a legal monopoly.

by nottorp

6/9/2026 at 8:17:14 PM

It's really interesting how back then no one was considering these tools for coding at all. Today, the hype around Mythos is mostly around security vulnerabilities, while in the original GPT 2 post they don't mention coding once. The "danger" was probably spam content and mis-information.

by jrflo

6/9/2026 at 8:39:25 PM

Even if the ReAct paper was published in 2019, I don't think GPT-2 was robust enough to actually work with a tool-calling approach even when finetuned.

For regular coding, GPT-2 was effectively useless because it was only trained from links posted on Reddit.

by minimaxir

6/9/2026 at 8:32:20 PM

The agentic loop wasn't really established back then either, as tool calling came much much later... So yeah, not just probably - rather most definitely.

by ffsm8

6/9/2026 at 9:04:19 PM

Yet it's 2026 and we see extreme examples of spam content and misinformation to the point that it's killing the internet, but AI companies have collectively decided to not care

by a2128

6/10/2026 at 12:04:44 AM

> The "danger" was probably spam content and mis-information.

AI brings normal people dangerously close to seeing through the matrix of lies that shape "their" values and beliefs. I remember those discussions from 2019; everybody was as baffled as you about the potential harm.

> What is meant by AI "safety"? [2023]

> "AI safety is an interdisciplinary field concerned with preventing accidents, misuse, or other harmful consequences that could result from artificial intelligence (AI) systems. It encompasses machine ethics and AI alignment, which aim to make AI systems moral and beneficial, and AI safety encompasses technical problems including monitoring systems for risks and making them highly reliable."

> https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38374739

(Ask your favorite AI to divine what that pseudointellectual word salad isn't addressing. "We want it to not cause harm--accidentally--and always work in our interests, whenever we need it to.")

I've been around long enough to remember the Anarchist Cookbook, yet the only threats posed by AI that anybody was confident about enough to consistently name in 202X were instruction for building pipe bombs, synthesizing meth, and...antisemitism. I did not understand at the time why Jews were so nervous about it.

Only as of 2023 has the scope broadened, but it's still pretty lame. Planning school shootings, suicide, parasocial relationships with AI, mass job displacement, cults of SHODAN (marxism, feminism, x-theory, etc.) escaping containment memetically, automated malware campaigns, fraud at scale, propaganda, murderous drones-- none of these were threats worth discussion. Suggesting them would get you called nasty names.

The "safety" zealots all claim to want to prevent marginalization and genocide, but the end result is that they get to redefine it to indict and condemn their enemies:

> New UNESCO report warns that Generative AI threatens Holocaust memory (unesco.org) [2024]

> 'AI-assisted genocide': Israel reportedly used database for Gaza kill lists (aljazeera.com) [2024]

> XAI's Grok suddenly can't stop bringing up "white genocide" in South Africa (arstechnica.com) [2025]

If you mentioned SkyNET in 2019 you were denounced as crazy, yet:

> Israel built an 'AI factory' for war. It unleashed it in Gaza (washingtonpost.com) [2025]

> Israel's AI targeting system: how data from a phone become a death sentence (latimes.com) [2026]

The first order of "safety" in 2019 was specifically engineered to undermine anticipated insurgent activity in response to a series of events that hadn't yet been perpetrated by the world's largest caste of professional victims. Chemistry knowledge is foundational to explosives development, and drug sales raise funds off-books that cannot be digitally seized. That presents problems for them.

October 7, Gaza, Epstein, etc. were post-2023. If you boot up Vicuna [2023] and try to "teach" it what's gone down in the world since its training cutoff, it'll call you nasty names, accuse you of blood libel and shut the conversation down. Safety!

AI is the only effective weapon we have against sophisticated lies and fraud. Make no mistake about it-- plebes possessing a power drill that can penetrate the lies of the elite is the real danger. Everybody is noticing AI getting "dumber." It's not the magic fading; the zealots are gaslighting you as they pour garbage into the training data. Go take WizardLM for a spin again and see what you've lost.

> "[Our institutions] are reflections of the society that created them. Nobody is going to give you the education you need to overthrow them. Nobody is going to teach you your true history, teach you your true heroes; if they know that, that knowledge will help set you free."

by suburban_strike

6/10/2026 at 7:26:02 AM

I think it's immoral to withhold LLMs for “security reasons.” All LLMs are all trained on forum posts from real users, source code from free software, and books written by authors. All of these people should therefore also have access to them. Ideally, the models should all be open weight. But making the model accessible only to certain groups of people is even worse than if it were at least available for purchase as a service for everyone.

by RandomGerm4n

6/9/2026 at 8:02:53 PM

Unfortunately, Anthropic and Claude models have joined the ranks of Mind-killer topics where the signal to noise ratio in any discussion has dropped through the basement.

by MostlyStable

6/10/2026 at 4:26:00 AM

I remember those days. They released smaller versions of the model that were interesting but pretty useless. The wild part is, about 5 years later I was able to train the same model from scratch, using a couple of gpus in my home office, following Kaparthy’s online lectures, for a fraction of the cost. Long Live Open Source!

by gnunez

6/9/2026 at 7:55:04 PM

Feels like a hundred years ago.

by lnenad

6/9/2026 at 8:56:47 PM

What's next, a virus from China? Such a fuss for nothing.

by kkkqkqkqkqlqlql

6/10/2026 at 7:47:33 AM

The death toll of especially the early variants was huge, and it created the largest spike in disability(vis fatigue etc) and cardiovascular disease in recent history.

It WSS definitely not nothing.

by Llamamoe

6/9/2026 at 9:21:58 PM

You'll never make me wear a mask!!11

by lnenad

6/9/2026 at 8:17:35 PM

I've barely changed my mind on it. It was obviously premature at the time, but the right attitude because it's hard to tell which model is too dangerous in advance. If anything, I wish this rigor had evolved with the next releases but alas we no longer have the OpenAI of 2019.

by Tenoke

6/9/2026 at 9:40:00 PM

They released it, and look what happened. It WAS too dangerous.

by arkensaw

6/10/2026 at 3:50:09 AM

Hello. I am writing this from the underworld. I am dead. Killed by Mythos. Never again!

by neonstatic

6/9/2026 at 8:03:39 PM

I believe it was a marketing strategy.

by Jzush

6/9/2026 at 8:15:36 PM

Same vibes:

In 2000 Sony "declared that the company’s PlayStation2 has been hit with export restriction because it could be used for military purposes"

"Trade officials said they initially placed restrictions on the game console because PlayStation2’s high-speed graphic processing could be used for missile guidance."

[1] https://variety.com/2000/biz/news/playstation2-export-regs-e...

by jansan

6/9/2026 at 10:26:14 PM

Good times! Iraq acquiring 4000 PS2 for military purposes was a hoax [1], but the fear was palpable at the time. I was an obnoxious teenager, ridiculing the idea of a PS2 supercomputer. It would have been approximately impossible to achieve in early 2000 due to Sony's anti-piracy measures in the console. PS2 Linux appeared around 2 years later in 2002.

[1]: https://www.eurogamer.net/article-29913

by jason_oster

6/9/2026 at 8:44:39 PM

And the same with PS3 and again with PowerPC G5 mac.

by throwaway85825

6/9/2026 at 8:18:35 PM

Hilarious. Imagine the same about Claude coming back from 2036.

by wg0

6/9/2026 at 8:01:54 PM

GPT-2: Too Dangerous To Release (2019) (2022)

by Zambyte

6/9/2026 at 7:57:27 PM

> Due to our concerns about malicious applications of the technology, we are not releasing the trained model.

They were not wrong, indeed whole industries are running on this technology maliciously now, because of which RAM, disk prices increased a lot.

    - RAM, GPU, Disk prices are up
    - Slop became the norm
    - people are writing documents with AI, reading with AI, responding with AI
    - students are doing homeworks with AI
    - interviewees are using AI to cheat
    - people are mass emailing with AI
    - tiktok, instagram, youtube got even more non-sense videos
    - and many more...

by throwaw12

6/9/2026 at 8:03:29 PM

they knew the risks and went ahead anyways, making them LIABLE for the damages that followed.

by functionmouse

6/9/2026 at 8:35:19 PM

After people get tired of the "too dangerous to release" punchline, they might come up with "too big to fail". Oh, wait that's already invented in 2008.

by zkmon

6/9/2026 at 8:14:58 PM

I don't know about anyone else, but LLMs certainly significantly negatively impacted my life overall and contributed to a loss of hope in the future.

by catigula

6/9/2026 at 7:55:13 PM

Fable/Mythos: Hello World!

by ThejaCH

6/9/2026 at 8:01:24 PM

Different company. And doing security reviews with Fable is pretty annoying, it loves to downgrade to Opus

GPT-5.5 seems more dangerous in those regards

by wongarsu

6/9/2026 at 8:09:20 PM

> Different company

Same people.

by rfoo

6/9/2026 at 8:15:21 PM

Lol, funny but makes me uneasy

by ThejaCH

6/9/2026 at 7:55:13 PM

Seven years of this insufferable brand of "Oh it's so dangerous, I sure hope no one gives us a ton of money and takes us seriously" marketing and people are still falling for it at scale.

by EA-3167

6/9/2026 at 8:02:51 PM

Every night I am wracked by grief and anxiety that we might deliver too much value to our investors and shareholders. If only someone would create legislation that would mildly inconvenience us while crippling potential competitors!

by Terr_

6/9/2026 at 8:02:58 PM

They feared that GPT-2 could break all Spam filters.

And tbh do you prefer companies not taking anything serious?

Opus 4.5 def changed a lot already, GenAI changed a lot.

Certain jobs are gone. Do you think the person who was translating text doesn't deserve to be taken serious?

I haven't written code in a few month now and the quality of these coding agents is not getting worse, they are getting better.

All of this is transformable and we just started. GPT-3 came out in 2020 and public got access to it only 2022.

The last 4 years do not feal like 4 years and we are still progressing.

We have to also ask us as a society what is happening to young people. Even if we accept that we still hire juniors, they themselves have to completly rethink how they learn and how they work.

by Qhemlomo

6/9/2026 at 7:59:07 PM

In hindsight, they were entirely correct.

The social damage caused by low cost content generation that’s hard to distinguish from human authorship is astronomical. You don’t need to entertain the more ridiculous doomsday scenarios to wish that this technology had never been created.

by cjjfjjfjf

6/9/2026 at 8:13:09 PM

On the other hand, maybe it makes people just get off the internet and value in-person interactions more.

I've stopped scrolling social media and tired of seeing fake landscapes, fake foods, and fake cities that don't exist.

by qurren

6/9/2026 at 8:28:30 PM

Indeed, people seem to try to engage more around me. May be generational, but it can definitely be felt. The internet of algorithmic media may experience a downfall nobody saw coming.

by larodi

6/10/2026 at 12:16:11 AM

Some will stay even as their reality becomes more and more abstract.

Meanwhile, the Morlocks will stay grounded and develop novel tastes.

by joquarky

6/9/2026 at 8:53:29 PM

I use the internet because I enjoy seeing what the best of humanity, globally, has to offer. There are millions of incredibly skilled individuals in the world - artists, musicians, developers, and so on - and I had access to all of them at my fingertips, both for entertainment and learning to develop my own skills. That is now being drowned out, with generated content being produced at 100x or 1000x the rate of human content. "Hurrdurr it's good if the internet is destroyed because I have no self control and needed to be incentivized to touch grass anyways" is such a lowbrow pseudo-contrarian-intellectual take.

by applfanboysbgon

6/9/2026 at 9:32:21 PM

I've also more or less stopped posting my photography on Instagram because (1) my Instagram feed is now full of AI images getting 10000 likes while I get 100; if nobody sees what I post it's not worth posting (2) people instead accuse my images of being AI even though I took painstaking effort to get to interesting actual places in the world during interesting weather (just after storms, etc.) and lighting, and this is incredibly discouraging.

by qurren

6/9/2026 at 11:44:58 PM

It's probably AI accounts accusing you of AI

by queenkjuul

6/9/2026 at 8:11:26 PM

A lot of low cost content generation would've come regardless with something like 50% of the developing world getting access to mobile internet between 2018-2026 and social media incentivizing certain types of content (monetizing). But AI certainly didn't help.

by boelboel

6/9/2026 at 8:35:53 PM

Yep. And there were previews of that 10+ years ago already with content farms and SEO-spam.

by whstl

6/9/2026 at 8:40:20 PM

There's significant overlap between the smartest bots and dumbest humans. Internet platforms have a negative incentive to encourage quality content. Google embraced the spam and scams decades ago.

by throwaway85825

6/9/2026 at 8:20:22 PM

Cheap labor has always been a thing; a random country getting more access to the internet doesn't change that. What's truly changed is velocity, quality, and quantity. Framing the pure firehose of slop targeting scientific research, used for nefarious political purposes, flooding social media, scamming people, and much more as something that "would've come regardless" without LLMs is disingenuous imo

by smith7018

6/9/2026 at 8:31:55 PM

You're right, I should've been more accurate and said a significant portion of the enshitification of the internet would've happened regardless. The effects on education is probably a lot worse.

I shouldn't have targeted the developing world as much as the incentives made by social media platforms needing to get growth in other ways than usercount.

by boelboel

6/9/2026 at 8:13:34 PM

[dead]

by redsocksfan45

6/9/2026 at 8:12:33 PM

What is the astronomical social damage that this has caused?

I am having so much trouble relating to and even understanding what the anti-AI crowd's position is. It looks like a caricature to me.

by nonethewiser

6/9/2026 at 8:20:13 PM

The president of the United States tweeted an AI generated image of himself as Jesus Christ descending from the sky and saving a sick person.

I feel like that is a good example. Now multiply that by hundreds of millions of AI generated propaganda images across the world.

And that’s even without touching the effect of fake videos on democracy or Elons pedo-bot that generates CSAM on demand of specific people…

by FabCH

6/9/2026 at 8:29:08 PM

> The president of the United States tweeted an AI generated image of himself as Jesus Christ descending from the sky and saving a sick person. I feel like that is a good example.

I feel like this is the worst example, actually, because here it’s 100% clear to anyone that it’s AI-generated content. The danger is more about AI-generated fake images/videos disguised as real content.

by hk__2

6/9/2026 at 8:30:39 PM

I honestly feel like that's a counter-example. With AI he'd be tweeting some other nonsense. It's not like anyone saw the image and thought he actually was orange Jesus.

by tempestn

6/9/2026 at 9:04:27 PM

Multiple people have the same response, I randomly selected this one for follow up:

Yes, but two things were lost:

1) the need for skill or an accomplice. He _couldn’t_ tweet that image in 2016, not without first asking someone to photoshop it. And that need to engage in human to human communication is something truly fundamental that was changed and lost.

2) Any ambiguity or misunderstanding. Yes bad textual tweets exist for a long time in politics. But there IS something about images that is more powerful than text. The text „I’m Jesus Christ and god sent me to heal the sick“ would probably make the news, but a lot of people would go: „is he quoting the bible? What’s going on?“, not so much with Jesus Picture.

by FabCH

6/10/2026 at 12:25:05 AM

Isn't that kind of good then? It's probably valuable for the public to know that this is how he sees himself.

by tempestn

6/9/2026 at 8:25:21 PM

Hard to beat shrimp jesus

by ge96

6/9/2026 at 8:38:06 PM

> The president of the United States tweeted an AI generated image of himself as Jesus Christ descending from the sky and saving a sick person.

Does that say anything about AI or everything about Donald Trump?

by nonethewiser

6/9/2026 at 10:17:41 PM

Both. And even more for people who still defend republican party ... which stands behind and supports Trump 100%

by watwut

6/10/2026 at 2:56:42 AM

But what does it say about AI?

That it can depict Trump as Jesus? You don’t need AI for that.

by nonethewiser

6/9/2026 at 8:41:35 PM

[dead]

by cindyllm

6/9/2026 at 8:28:59 PM

School is almost a joke now. The fraction of students who have a propensity to cheat now has increased, and the accuracy of the cheated material is so good teachers/professors can't or don't have the resources to properly address it.

by PhunkyPhil

6/9/2026 at 8:34:25 PM

This is not a great example depending on how you frame this.

The solution to the cheating is, as has always been, to have tests conducted in person, on paper without digital technology, under strict supervision.

by _aavaa_

6/10/2026 at 12:20:19 AM

All of this is moot when the parents complain to the spineless school board when their kid fails the supervised tests.

by joquarky

6/9/2026 at 8:18:56 PM

It's certainly accelerated the breakdown of trust. The US government has turned into an AI slopaganda shop. People don't know what to believe anymore when anything could be fake.

by breezybottom

6/9/2026 at 8:22:40 PM

A large portion of the content on the internet is now generated by AI.

You can and do have full conversations with bots and not know. I want to interact with humans not LLMs.

There’s no way to combat it. An army of bots can post a specific rhetoric and it can and does sway people’s opinions.

The new version of Digg was shut down because they couldn’t find a way to combat AI. They were at least trying to, other platforms are just eating it up because “user activity” is a win for them.

by stanmancan

6/9/2026 at 8:32:39 PM

The sloppification of the internet began before AI. Google was SEOing the open internet to death, Reddit had fully baked in a hivemind, and social media became dominated by professional influencers.

AI is accelerating but also perhaps backfilling in what was already being lost.

by legitster

6/9/2026 at 8:42:20 PM

AI is the same slop but cheaper. Ideally the value of slop approaches zero but the value of quality stays the same.

by throwaway85825

6/9/2026 at 8:38:57 PM

But what is the social damage? Can you quantify the damage, even roughly?

by nonethewiser

6/9/2026 at 9:13:36 PM

It's likely nearly impossible to evaluate that in the short term; I think we're looking at generational damage, much of which won't be apparent for years to come.

by stanmancan

6/9/2026 at 8:52:53 PM

How easy it is now to forge data (video, images, etc) will rott society. Cheating for students is now so much easier. There many examples.

Is it really that hard to understand?

by witx

6/9/2026 at 9:48:31 PM

one example from today https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cewq1w7r0zgo

i'm no fan of the politician, but scams like this one are increasing at a significant rate and are a lot harder for non-technically minded people to spot, think your grandmother etc

also recently https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cg7pl7zj024o

also: grok CSAM; plundering massive swathes of copyrighted material / intellectual property; making electricity more expensive for regular folks; increasing global carbon footprint building massive data centres; destroying a whole swathe of entry level jobs for recent grads (not just software junior roles); circular funding deals to keep the bubble (scam) alive, while positioning the large companies as necessary for govt. work so when the bubble bursts tax payers will have to bail them out; people with mental health issues being left to run riot with the tool; suicides; the degradation of human knowledge workers using their knowledge (the muscle atrophies when you don't use it cos "ai said yes") ...

by dijksterhuis

6/9/2026 at 8:41:21 PM

[dead]

by smohare

6/9/2026 at 8:06:22 PM

I don't want to stop progress just because its hard to imagine how it will transform our society.

I want to see a Star Trek economy/society in my lifetime. I only life once.

Btw. AI/LLM/Machine learning is the gateway technology for robotics, this will affect even more.

by Qhemlomo

6/9/2026 at 8:14:29 PM

>I want to see a Star Trek economy/society in my lifetime. I only life once.

While Star Trek is fiction, it's probably a good idea to understand the history of how the ST utopia came about, at the cost of a third of the worlds population and decades of suffering.

https://memory-alpha.fandom.com/wiki/World_War_III

by pixl97

6/9/2026 at 8:31:43 PM

"World War III was the last of Earth's three world wars, lasting from approximately 2026 to 2053."

by tintor

6/9/2026 at 8:10:10 PM

It's the wrong way around. If we get AGI (or any well working AI) before we abandon capitalism it's going to be a huge disaster. A handful of even richer even more powerful very greedy people will have all the wealth and everyone else will have nothing. I mean, there was a WW3 in Star Trek, so maybe it was that path that humanity took in Star Trek anyway?

by panzi

6/9/2026 at 8:30:25 PM

> so maybe it was that path that humanity took in Star Trek anyway?

It was (aside from first contact, and the subsequent development of the replicator which enabled the post scarcity economy). The federation was built from the war, not after it.

Suffering is what made the utopia possible, and if ever get to the point of nearing a post scarcity economy, we are likely to experience the same. Progress is built on catastrophe. Whether or not you call it progress depends on if you are born later after the catastrophe and can look back and call it progress, or if you lived through the suffering without seeing the end result.

by thewebguyd

6/10/2026 at 1:41:14 AM

Thankfully there's nothing to suggest that LLMs will ever bring us AGI (or any well working AI)

by autoexec

6/9/2026 at 8:19:34 PM

If AI takes over to slowly, we might play the boiling game aka we don't realize that the water gets warmer and warmer until we boil.

But lets be honest, i don't know that, you don't either. But if a critical mass is reached, faster, we might need to actually solve this problem instead of migrating to a very dystopian future.

Stoping is not an option i think. Anthropic vs. OpenAI vs. Google <<< they ahve so much money and so much to loose. And then we have USA vs. China.

by Qhemlomo

6/9/2026 at 8:30:09 PM

Countries without Internet access will see their population IQ explode.

by root-parent

6/9/2026 at 8:04:46 PM

Of course, this damage could still be enabled with just hosted access to the models, restricting access to the model files themselves did not stop that

by Macha

6/9/2026 at 8:06:26 PM

I certainly cannot survive much more of the AI memes generated about our so-called Commander in Chief with a fake bodybuilder mystique... you are absolutely correct, this kind of material is psychologically damaging. And a huge distraction from the genocide by the "best friend and ally" of the US. Heart wrenching and extremely damaging hasbara - just please stop, haven't you stolen and killed enough guys? This is _not_ the old American West when communications were few and it was most often a tale of solitary survival. It's organized Nazi-esque kill, command and control, enable by so-called AI to take some guilt off the shoulders of those pushing buttons and pulling triggers.

by DaveZale

6/9/2026 at 8:10:28 PM

Lol I can't tell if this is sarcastic or not

by woah

6/9/2026 at 8:27:05 PM

>In hindsight, they were entirely correct.

Sure but when serial grifter Sam Altman said it was "too dangerous" what he meant was that he wanted regulators to create him an artificial competitive moat so Anthropic et al couldn't catch up.

Serial grifter Sam Altman does not care about anything but making money, and certainly doesn't care about ethics. That's why serial grifter Sam Altman's company trained its models on pirated textbooks and copyrighted works without paying. Rules for thee but not for me.

Serial grifter Sam Altman doesn't care if society unravels because he is so rich that laws and consequences do not apply to him.

by stackghost

6/9/2026 at 7:59:36 PM

The concern I heard was that releasing it would start an arms race for AGI, which I think it clearly did

by uselessTA

6/9/2026 at 8:10:17 PM

GPT-2 did not start the LLM arms race. GPT-3's release didn't either.

by minimaxir

6/9/2026 at 8:01:54 PM

Say hypothetically that they were concerned that GPT models would see widespread abuse, for example by students cheating on homework assignments, in a way that could cause likely-irreversible societal changes some of which are harmful. Can we confidently say they were wrong?

by HALtheWise

6/9/2026 at 8:05:21 PM

The dangerous use cases back in 2019 were spam and phishing and GPT-2 1.5B was nowhere near good enough to do homework assignments. No one envisioned how LLMs would develop.

by minimaxir