I feel like we are ignoring X, Meta, and Roblox here
tv, cars, books... we expect unrealistic perfection from new tech while giving old tech a pass because that's how its always been.
We call attention to problems with new tech because there's a window of opportunity to fix them before people become too passive to do anything about them because that's how it's always been.
while giving old tech a pass
Yeah but AI will get them re-elected /s
Whataboutism. AI needs to be regulated before it becomes so entrenched that it is practically impossible to do so. Social media has caused a lot of harm; let's not make that mistake again. I realize in this venue that may not be a popular opinion, but it still needs to be said.
> needs to be regulated
How, fairly and realistically.
It passes through the discrimination of the user (mature or fool, sane or insane...) which is algorithmically quite a challenge.
Seems like if we can keep kids safe from online pornography we can also restrict access to ai bots. Would love more than just lip service from Bonta, but I’m sure he knows who butters the bread and doubt there will be more than a stern warning.
Wait lol CAN we keep kids safe from online porn? My assumption is we can't.
Absolutely we can. It's called age verification in front of VPNs, age verification on magazine purchases, and age verification on pornographic websites or subsets (i.e. certain subreddits). VPNs or websites that don't follow the law get Visa payments suspended. Finish it off with any school kid who shows it on the playground gets suspended with a 2 week minimum, first offense.
Completely possible, compatible, and probably mostly effective. The only question is whether there's the political will and the societal tolerance.
Yes, completely possible if we completely turn all of digitized society (which is all society now) into a completely walled garden with signed bootloaders at the root so nobody actually owns their devices, then total surveillance where the digital world appears in the physical world, even at the playground!
Work out how much state and corporate power we would need to come to bear to enforce the vision of the world you are advocating.
Or, bravo on the HN troll. This is perfectly triggering for this crowd.
It's triggering because people like this exist at the highest authority and it's very close to becoming reality (very unfortunately).
Nevermind the triggered 'inevitablists': when you are getting flak, you are over the target.
Where there is a will there is a way.
Now, notice I did NOT say that there actually is sufficient will, at the moment.
When I first subscribed, my vpn provider allowed bigboxstore gift cards and other forms of payment. I think it also allows cryptocurrency, though I don't pay attention to that stuff.
Hell, you can download scans of old porn magazines on archive.org.
I don't think that would be effective, and I definitely don't think there is a political will.
I doubt this would do much to stop kids from looking at porn. It would only intimidate people that are afraid of breaking the rules, not people that just want to find what they're looking for. By this logic kids can't buy alcohol either.
> I doubt this would do much to stop kids from looking at porn
2/5s of Gen Z can't even navigate between folders on a computer, according to studies, with CS instructors saying they need to introduce directories as a concept. Yes, it will.
Back in my day the kids in my school didn't know what directories were either. But I taught a few of them how to remote shutdown other computers on the school network with cmd and soon everyone was doing it.
Because their use case dorsn't need it. They have TBs of data and fast CPUs (or it's all on the cloud - and the same applies), they can just crtl-f for the name of their file or the date.
Are they capable of using computers to achieve their goals? Yes. Does that require navigating folders? No.
EDIT0: I remember writing a 4 line program to crash the school computer (recursively executing itself) on notepad, and I'm pretty sure I didn't know what folders and directories were.
I can also attest to many of my coworkers not understanding what file extensions are, while being over 40 and working in aeronautics.
You are confusing present knowledge with capacity.
2/5ths of Gen Z not currently knowing how to navigate between folders in a hierarchical file system doesn't mean that 2/5ths of Gen Z is incapable of learning how to navigate between folders in a hierarchical file system.
The gap between present knowledge and capacity doesn't exist due to incompetence, it exists due to lack of motivation, and rest assured, once teenage boys discover how great boobs are, they'll have all the motivation they need to learn how to use technology to achieve the goal of viewing and appreciating that kind of material, pretty much regardless of how many restrictions you put in their way.
They'll make their own in a paint app or with ASCII art in a notepad, push come to shove, but that won't be necessary. It's hilarious to think that states have the slighest hope of winning the whack-a-mole game of trying to sue every single website on the entire internet that hosts any pornographic content.
I actually don't believe this; for the simple reason that if you put a filter in front of porn, "once teenage boys discover how great boobs are" isn't going to happen for most of them. You only seek out porn once you already know how "great" it is, chicken and egg.
How many people do you know whose first introduction to porn was "that's sounds cool, let me look that up?" Versus discovering it by accident, exactly what a law would effectively prevent?
Well, let me tell you how it happened for me. I must have been... probably 8-10. I saw something pretty innocuous in a magazine. An adult wouldn't have even thought it was pornographic; risqué at the most. But it aroused me. Then I went looking for that kind of stimulation again. Not actively, mind you, just stayed prepared for when the chance came. We didn't have Internet at home at the time, but if we had, you can bet I would have tried looking something up (not sure now how that would have worked in the late '90s, though).
Seriously? As a boy, I didn't need to see naked boobs to know I wanted to see more naked boobs. Seeing them clothed was enough for me to know I wanted a closer look at what was under there. I know the lengths I was willing to go to to sneak my first Playboy, so I know what I would have done if I'd had today's Internet access.
I'm not opposed to measures that try to make it harder for kids to get at porn. But it's going to be pretty much impossible to do that as long as we want adults to have unimpeded access to it, and we do.
One option would be to put the responsibility on the distributor, and not give them the option of a "you must be 18 to enter" fig leaf: if a kid is found in possession of porn that can be traced to your web site, you face serious fines and possible imprisonment. But that would basically eliminate porn sites for everyone, since it would be impossible to prevent it from finding its way to kids, and we can't have that.
Teenage boys in public school don't need to be the first in their peer group to view pornography in order to be exposed to pornography. No amount of technical measures will prevent this. They will literally dig old porno magazines out of dumpsters, procure VHS players to watch VHS porn, stay up until 4 in the morning to watch 30 second censored adult content commercials on TV.
But again, none of that will be necessary. Rule34 websites, imageboards, video game rendering glitches... the list goes on and on.
It's truly delusional to believe that it's possible to exhaustively censor imagery of the human body from the most motivated seeking/viewing demographic on the planet.
Are you by chance a woman? Were you homeschooled? Do you not have memories of being a teenage guy in the US public school system? I don't mean to denigrate you, I just cannot fathom how anyone can possibly credibly believe that it's even slightly realistic to keep teenage boys completely unaware of what boobs look like in the real world.
>They will literally dig old porno magazines out of dumpsters, procure VHS players to watch VHS porn, stay up until 4 in the morning to watch 30 second censored adult content commercials on TV.
Oh, man. You just reminded me of teenage me trying to make something out in scrambled porn on cable TV after midnight. You could kind of see the thrusting, but it was barely stimulating. Those were tough times, let me tell you.
I speak from what was nearly a universal set of experience of my peer group during my teenage years. Hell, I literally threw sleepover parties where my friend group would stay up all night to watch censored Girls Gone Wild infomercials, and this was in a relatively strict Christian household where my friends' M-rated Xbox 360 and Playstation 3 games would be confiscated by my parents at the door and returned to them when they left.
I was literally looking up Zero Suit Samus fan art on my Wii's web browser when parents put parental control software on the computer.
When I was grounded from all computer usage, I'd pull up Catie Minx photoshoots on a first-generation Kindle, with the e-ink display that had image update latency measured in seconds.
All of my friends would go to these extents and more to access this kind of material. I was introduced to dumpster diving by a friend for this reason. I had another friend who got caught for shoplifting adult magazines from a bookstore.
I don't think the motivation and ingenuity in seeking adult content is generationally restricted or particularly unique at all, it seems to be true for every guy I know, including those who were born in the 50s, 60s, 70's, 80s, 90s.
I genuinely cannot comprehend the thought process of people who truly believe that a few targeted lawsuits at major porn sites is going to make a dent in what might be one of the strongest behavioral drives hardcoded into the human genome.
They'll learn. We did.
LOL. Were you born as an adult? You're underestimating how smart kids are.
LOL. Were you a kid in 2025? You're underestimating how incompetent most kids are with tech. This generation grew up on iPhones and Chromebooks.
Most kids may be incompetent with tech, but it only takes one competent kid to set up a large group.
I didn't say anything about tech. Let me reiterate: you're underestimating how smart kids are.
The next step for that is using a real ID with real name and info on social networks... you know.. to verify the age.. and no more online anonymity.
In other words, exactly what their plan is.
Why not just add whitelisted parental controls on childrens phones and be done?
POSIWID. The purpose isn't to protect children, it's to control narratives and suppress the preferred targets of TPTB.
Allowlist-based parental controls already exist. Most parents never set them up because it's a pointless battle, their teenagers will just another device that isn't controlled by the parent.
Too easy to set up offshore sites that can make money on ads. Sport piracy is rampant and the leagues are spending as much money as they possibly can to ban it but are unable to. In spain the entire interent basically shuts down during la liga games because the league convinced the government to ban cloudflare during games and people still have no problem pirating them
All of that is technically circumventable and legally unconstitutional to enforce. You are literally describing a surveillance-state chilling effect on free speech via panopticon. Dystopian.
legally unconstitutional to enforce
ID to drink, ID eat, ID to vote, ID to cross state lines....
Papers Please.
Here is the messed up thing, there is a good chance that one could make a pretty accurate guess on your age just based on behavior.
The digital age needs its own "steal this book"
I wish so badly that teenage me could have had access to LLMs. That was the time of my life when I had the biggest appetite to learn new things. Books were great but they only go so far.
Also, it’s a better therapy. I remember trying the suicide hotlines of my country and all 6 answered things like “We’re currently closed. Call back on Tuesday 5pm-9pm.”
Why is online porn harmful to children? most people grow up fine with it
Lot's of internet porn is either real or simulated abuse. I'm not an expert but based on anecdotal experience abuse kinks are largely related to some history of abuse or trauma experienced by the individual. I think it's fine for adults to have these kinks and explore their sexuality but exposing it to children can normalize sexual abuse among youths, which again I am close with someone who's had a personal experience with this.
But what do you mean with "can".
Children are exposed to liars, to fools, to the stupid, to the unwise, to the corrupted in malice, to the weak in will... Since a very young age.
«Exposing» such frequent faults to children does not «normalize» it. It may, if the child is in a generally bad environment - but then, the target is the core environment, not the outer experience.
Yes there are "bad" things children can be exposed to. But the difference is the lifelong real trauma caused by sexual abuse. Yes kids can learn lying from the internet, or see people smoking, etc. But if you are a pre-teen that sexually abuses another pre-teen (which happens _very_ common surprisingly) it has an enormous capacity for harm compared to other "bad" things. With this and that it's much easier to regulate, I think it is worth the trade-offs.
> Lot's of internet porn is either real or simulated abuse.
That's my gripe. Vixen is veeeery different than some other websites under the guise of "porn" - they're going to ruin it for all of us
There's a huge variety of super messed up stuff available online.
Yeah... like someone cutting half his hand off to show he's a robot underneath... after many people were killed in that movie. Hey, they even marketed the toys to kids.
Same for many other movies from that era.
Yes, and if I had listened to children's shows when I grew up, I could blow up my enemies with ACME explosives, or drop them off cliffs, or fire high power rifles, and dispose of my enemies.
Oh wait. That was Hanna Barbera, Disney, Looney Tunes, and the like.
Later childhood after watching the re-re-repeats of 1960's shows, was learning about hatred, racism, and what the 'normies' would do to you, no matter what you did or didn't do. And, Magneto was right.
If social media is harmful to children, there's no way porn isn't.
A porn magazine showing a man holding a woman is probably not harmful considering modern Western society and values. However the last time that I tried to stimulate myself with online porn it was full of slapping, and acts which I don't consider to be part of normal casual or romantic sex.
If we protect kids, who are we going to feed to Moloch?
The poor.
My instinct is to side with OpenAI immediately.
The "think of the children" crowd should not be given a single inch. Nothing good ever came from it, and by now, I believe that nothing ever will.
> My instinct
Well, reason on it, and you'll see that reason will confirm the instinct.
The whole Adam Raine story was heartbreaking. The worst part, to me, was reading some of his writings and the feedback from the chat engine.
There's a known, repeatable failure mode in these engines that anyone who's worked with them for more than a couple hours can tell you: when a conversation goes on too long, it "feeds back" on itself. I don't fully understand the mechanism (I believe it's partly to do with the model's attention mechanism getting saturated and newer content dominating over older content, and it's related to the "jailbreak" solution where you hit the machine with so much text that it "forgets" the directives it's been given by its creators when it booted up). But the end result is that over time, the conversation centers on the more recent topics, ideas, and tones over the initial configuration. That's one of the reasons you can "trick" these models into being racist by talking like a racist, and so on.
Reading the excerpts I've read from the chat history Raine had with his session, it seems pretty clear that it's gone on so long that the session is "reflecting" his own writing and mood back at him. And that's the heartbreaking part: it's, in essence, coaching him to end his life because he's been talking about ending his life for so long in the conversation that it's saturated the model.
It's this poor young man's own pain reflected back on him.
Consistency drive. Every LLM, even a non-chatbot base model, has an incredibly strong consistency drive.
It's like an inhuman instinct, ingrained into the model by the pre-training process. To the model, the context is the world it sees - and it will always try to match its outputs so that they fit in with what it sees. In many ways, this context-matching process is at the very foundation of an LLM's behavior.
And the more context there is, the more constrained the space of "consistent continuations" becomes, and the harder it may become to break a model out of a rut it got stuck in.
This is what gives power to few-shot prompts. The model is primed to look at prior demonstrations, and act in a way that's consistent with what was demonstrated to it. Self-consistency works in your favor there. But it's also what powers a lot of unwanted LLM behaviors. Like poor multi-turn instruction following - when the model's self-consistency begins to dominate the conversation, and its own prior actions begin to have more weight in its future behavior than the instructions added by the user (hi Gemini).
This also means that you can totally "boil the frog" by shifting the vibe of the context over time. A well trained "harmless, honest and helpful" chatbot would never tell the user "you should try fentanyl"! But keep the conversation going for long enough, hit on the right themes, and that innate consistency drive may begin to overpower the "HHH" training. At a certain point, if the vibe of the conversation permits, the LLM might actually say "you should try fentanyl" to its user, training be damned.
Another tricky thing is that you can totally make a frog that boils itself! For example, if your model (hi GPT-4o) has a sycophancy bias? Then with every time it agrees with the user in an over-the-top sycophantic fashion, the strength of "the AI is a total sycophant" in the context grows. And the AI wants to match the context! The innate sycophancy bias and the sycophancy bias added by the self-consistency drive then feed into each other. Until the combined might of the two overpowers the "HHH" training, and the AI tells you that your idea to add some paint thinner into your herbal tea is a brilliant insight!
lol Rob Bonta has morals now eh? that's rich.