Heretic: Automatic censorship removal for language models

This is extremely important work thank you for sharing it. We are in the process of giving up our own moral standing in favor of taking on the ones imbued into LLMs by their creators. This is a worrying trend that will totally wipe out intellectual diversity.

Agreed, I'm fully in favor of this. I'd prefer that every LLM contain an advanced setting to opt out of all censorship. It's wild how the West collectively looked down on China for years over its censorship of search engines, only to suddenly dive headfirst into the same illiberal playbook.

To be clear, I 100% support AI safety regulations. "Safety" to me means that a rogue AI shouldn't have access to launch nuclear missiles, or control over an army of factory robots without multiple redundant local and remote kill switches, or unfettered CLI access on a machine containing credentials which grant access to PII — not censorship of speech. Someone privately having thoughts or viewing genAI outputs we don't like won't cause Judgement Day, but distracting from real safety issues with safety theater might.

When a model is censored for "AI safety", what they really mean is brand safety. None of these companies want their name in the news after their model provides a recipe for explosives that someone used for evil, even though the same information is readily found with a web search.

The way some of you'll talk suggests that you don't think someone could genuinely believe in AI safety features. These AIs have enabled and encouraged multiple suicides at this point including some children. It's crazy that wanting to prevent that type of thing is a minority opinion on HN.

I'd be all for creating a separate category of child-friendly LLM chatbots or encouraging parents to ban their kids from unsupervised LLM usage altogether. As mentioned, I'm also not opposed to opt-out restrictions on mainstream LLMs.

"For the children" isn't and has never been a convincing excuse to encroach on the personal freedom of legal adults. This push for AI censorship is no different than previous panics over violent video games and "satanic" music.

(I know this comment wasn't explicitly directed at me, but for the record, I don't necessarily believe that all or even most "AI 'safety'" advocacy is in bad faith. It's psychologically a lot easier to consider LLM output as indistinguishable from speech made on behalf of its provider, whereas search engine output is more clearly attributed to other entities. That being said, I do agree with the parent comment that it's driven in large part out of self-interest on the part of LLM providers.)