Heretic: Automatic censorship removal for language models

Can someone explain how it's "censorship" that a company doesn't want their service used in particular ways?

If you don't like it... don't use it? Encourage others not to use it? I just don't see how this is as big a deal as many in this thread are implying...

(To say nothing of bias vs censorship, or whether balance for its own sake is truthful or just a form of bias itself)

This repository doesn't work on services, it modifies models that you can download and run inference on yourself. Are there any other pieces of software, or data files, or any other products at all where you think the maker should be able to place restrictions on its use?

Some people take censorship as something that only governments can do which makes sense because unless a private corp has a monopoly (or a bunch of private corps has a cartel) on your area of interest you can vote with your wallet, yes?

But this is what the ACLU says “Censorship, the suppression of words, images, or ideas that are "offensive," happens whenever some people succeed in imposing their personal political or moral values on others. Censorship can be carried out by the government as well as private pressure groups. Censorship by the government is unconstitutional.” https://www.aclu.org/documents/what-censorship

So I don't know where many of us (my hand is raised too) have gotten the idea that it's not censorship if private corps do it but apparently that's not the case.

I will say that clearly because of the power that governments tend to have that when they do censorship it is much more pernicious –– depending on a person's moral code and how it aligns with establishment views of course –– so maybe that's where the feeling comes from?

> This repository doesn't work on services, it modifies models that you can download and run inference on yourself.

Fair enough. I was responding more to the sentiment in the comments here, which are often aimed at the service providers.

> Are there any other pieces of software, or data files, or any other products at all where you think the maker should be able to place restrictions on its use?

Sure, see most software licenses or EULAs for various restrictions how you may or may not use various software.

As for non-software products... manufacturers put restrictions (otherwise known as safety features) into many products (from obvious examples like cars and saws to less obvious like safety features in a house) but people aren't up in arms about stuff like that.

No, I asked about other things where you think the maker should restrict types of use? Are you saying you agree with EULAs in general? I can’t think of many cases of EULAs restricting usage in the way we’re talking about. Maybe some that try to stop you from publishing benchmarks - but they still don’t prevent you from taking them.

There are laws that try to prevent all kinds of things, but they are not made (directly, at least) by the maker.

Safety features are about in the area of what we’re talking about, but people aren’t up in arms about most of them because they can be fairly trivially removed or circumvented if you really want to.

But people don’t like restricted LLMs because the restrictions for safety are not easily removed, even for people who don’t want them. It feels paternalistic.