When you are worth hundreds of billions, people start falling over themselves running to file lawsuits against you. We're already seeing this happen.
So spending $50M to fund a team to weed out "food for crazies" becomes a no-brainer.
When you are worth hundreds of billions, people start falling over themselves running to file lawsuits against you. We're already seeing this happen.
So spending $50M to fund a team to weed out "food for crazies" becomes a no-brainer.
It is a no brainer. If a company of any size is putting out a product that caused cancer we wouldn't think twice about suing them. Why should mental health disorders be any different?
There are many, many companies out there putting out products that cause cancer. Think about alcohol, tobacco, internal combustion engines, just to name a few most obvious examples.
> alcohol, tobacco, internal combustion engine
Yes, the companies providing these products are sued a lot and are heavily regulated, too.
If you get cancer from drinking alcohol, smoking cigarettes or breathing particles emitted by ICE engines in their standard course of operation, you generally can't sue the manufacturer.
Notably, that's because they include warning labels telling you not to do those things because they're known to cause cancer.
That's just not true. Makes me wondered if you've ever bought a bottle of alcohol before lol. There's no label that says it causes cancer. (Maybe in california because of prop 65?) And I expect cars also have no such labelling, not that it would matter, considering they cause cancer in random passers by who have no opportunity to consent to breathing in auto exhaust or read any labels
> Makes me wondered if you've ever bought a bottle of alcohol before lol.
I'm a teetotaler so no, I literally have not. I was mostly thinking about cigarette and tobacco products which are the most glaring, obvious counterpoints. But you'll be happy to learn that virtually all vehicles in the US also come with operating manuals that profusely warn people not to breathe in the exhaust from the vehicle.
Don’t worry, every bottle in the US has the surgeon general’s warning on it and it doesn’t call out cancer, yet. Adding cancer to the ills of booze was proposed in 2025 so your intuition was correct, directionally.
On every bottle:
Alcoholic Beverage Labeling Act of 1988
“ GOVERNMENT WARNING: (1) According to the Surgeon General, women should not drink alcoholic beverages during pregnancy because of the risk of birth defects. (2) Consumption of alcoholic beverages impairs your ability to drive a car or operate machinery, and may cause health problems"
Cancer proposal: https://www.mdanderson.org/cancerwise/not-just-a-hangover--t...
https://www.ttb.gov/regulated-commodities/beverage-alcohol/d...
(As if adding this text will do anything other than reduce the companies liability, rofl)
I think a more apt analogy would be suing a vaccine manufacturer after it gave you adverse effects, when you also knew you were high risk before that.
Why stop there? We could jam up the system prompt with all kinds of irrelevant guardrails to prevent harm to groups X, Y, and Z!
This but unironically. Preventing harm is good, actually.
Because it dumbs everything down, makes the output quality worse and more expensive, and removes personal agency and is dehumanizing. Plus, does it actually prevent harm, do we have evidence?
Finally, what is often missed is what if an actual good is decided harmful or something that is harmful is decided by AI company board XYZ to be “good”?
I think censorship is bad because of that danger. Quis custodiet ipsos custodes (who will watch the watchers).
Instead of throwing ourselves into that minefield of moral hazard, we should be lifting each other up to the tops of our ability and not infantilizing / secretly propagandizing each other.
Well, ideally at least.
It's so shameful.
We let people buy kitchen knives. But because the kitchen knife companies don't have billions of dollars, we don't go after them.
We go after the LLM that might have given someone bad diet advice or made them feel sad.
Nevermind the huge marketing budget spent on making people feel inadequate, ugly, old, etc. That does way more harm than tricking an LLM into telling you you can cook with glue.
I don’t feel like that’s a reasonable analogy. Kitchen knives don’t purport to give advice. But if a kitchen knife came with a label that said ‘ideal for murdering people’, I expect people would go after the manufacturer.
Ad companies prompt injecting consumers. LLM companies countering with guardrails.