That’s totally unrelated. The post I was replying to claimed that if you create a new account with OpenAI and that gets detected, your whole account gets silently “nerfed”.
That is not in any way related to Fable (visibly) being switched to a less strong model if you’re trying to discuss certain topics.
> That is not in any way related to Fable (visibly) being switched to a less strong model if you’re trying to discuss certain topics.
We're talking about it being invisibly moved to a weaker model if it looks like you're distilling (which is best detected through something that is at least partially a reputational / account metric).
Now, Anthropic stepped away from this, but it highlights one more kind of systemic risk you're exposed to when you're not running the model yourself.
They already reversed course on that decision a couple of days later. Trivial to find a source, but Fable is also rather notably not available to the public right now, so it's not actually a relevant threat.
excuse me but, is this trivial source you're referring to the url included in the post you're responding to, or did they reverse back to the original intent of keeping refusals quiet?
That's a decent moderation, shadowban is a totally different thing. AFAIK, your karma is enough to vouch that Flagged topics or comments and return that piece into a regular displaying.
Shadowban and community-driven moderation are different poles. Former is a tool of shallow narcisses, latter is the best moderation strategy possible in the clearnet. Come on, commenter.
Reddit is the only platform that actually tells you that you are shadowbanned, so at least they are upfront about it, but their appeal system sucks. My friend just appealed every day for just over 600 days and finally got their account un-shadowbanned.
No, they have fully banned and shadowbanned. If you are shadowbanned you can login and check the appeals page but your posts and comments will no longer be visible. If you are fully banned you cannot log in.
The whole point of an identity check is that they know exactly who you are. If you tell them who you are and you fail the identity check, you can’t simply create a new account because when you go through the identity check for a second time you’ll still need to tell them exactly who you are, at which point they can match the new account to the original failure.
An empty account and an account with a year of history have very different weights in this - most people already have an account tied to their legal name, paid for with a credit card in that same legal name. Throw in some geo-location, browser fingerprinting, etc. to disambiguate the surprisingly rare case of two customers with the exact same name.
For a paid product, it's really not that hard to already have a fairly solid idea of what's going on - this just ensures that a responsible adult has gone through a clear process of signing off on the identity for this specific service, rather than a kid with their parent's credit card.
> to disambiguate the surprisingly rare case of two customers with the exact same name
I see you have an uncommon name.
My first+last are shared by about 20,000 people in the US. From 2005-2020 I was unable to check-in for airlines online or even at the kiosk at the airport. I had to wait on line for baggage check-in despite never checking a bag, and they'd take my ID into the back room and delay me for 15 minutes and whisper and glare at me the whole time. Thankfully I can finally fly like a normal person again.
When I worked at a large company, there were four other people with the same first name, middle initial, and last name.
There is nothing surprising or rare about two customers having the same name.
No me, well me too but not that bad, but my wife. Sometimes in the 200x era on green card, she will always get called for secondary inspection. Oh you entered this airport on this date. How are you re-entering without going out. "Well we did not. Not traveled for a year." But you did. All bags searched, more q&a and then they let her go. A couple of times they mentioned that the other person with the same name had the same date of birth. But the passport / green card number had to be different, no? I guess it took them that half hour to figure out and maybe the 200x AI matched by name and date of birth :)
But the sequel: a few years later I get a bill from a hospital for copay for delivery/childbirth. I call to contest ... we did not even live there any more, did at some point of time but years apart ... but they are adamant that my wife gave birth, at that hospital, on that date, in that city, and maybe she never informed me :) it was almost that weird. I don't act on it and give them a statement that it is not me/my family. Then another bill (or a final notice) a couple of years later. And then finally something clicks ... I used to work in a team where when I moved out, someone replaced me and his name was also same as me. Reach out to him, and his wife's name is same as mine, and they lived in the same city we lived in.
So someone somewhere fat fingered the wrong account when searching by name. He acknowledged the account (and childbirth) and paid up. I unfortunately did not ask him about his wife's date of birth to solve the immigration mystery.
My suspicion has been at my past employer's HR or legal department mixing up files
It's rich that the cohort that sees identity verification and real names policies as necessary and meaningful also doesn't seem to understand the first thing about identity and names.
AFAIK, many governments use name+surname+DOB as the unique identifier for a person, E.G. when looking up somebody who doesn't have any documents on them, or initiating a document recovery process if you've been robbed and don't remember anything else.
If I told them who I was and then failed to verify that, they don't know who I am because they think I'm lying about who I am. Otherwise what stops me DoSing Sam Altman's account by saying I'm him and then failing to verify?
> If I told them who I was and then failed to verify that, they don't know who I am because they think I'm lying about who I am.
They know who you claim to be. It’s not like they just delete all information about you when you fail verification. They are perfectly capable of seeing that two separate accounts are both claiming to be the same person.
> Otherwise what stops me DoSing Sam Altman's account by saying I'm him and then failing to verify?
For Sam Altman in particular? The fact that he’s the CEO. For people in general? Do you have their passport / driving license, and other details needed to attempt the verification process?
Fun fact, if you're celebrity you get a special customer support phone number at most major corporations EG Apple because "Hi I'm Taylor Swift" gets tried a lot.
I presume you get connected somehow when opening up a high-value account at a participating bank. If that account has some sort of concierge service, I presume that’s how special numbers for other companies might be distributed.
Pope Leo is not that rich, and had lived outside the US for many years (he came up in the church hierarchy of Latin America), so it’s not that surprising that he ran into this situation.
You risk being silenly flagged and get nerfed responses. Somehting like shadow dumbed down.
That is an inherent and unavoidable risk regardless, as things stand if you want access to frontier models you are at the mercy of their providers.
That’s quite a claim. What’s your source for this?
Fable's model card provides the following as a relevant reference
https://xcancel.com/ClaudeDevs/status/2064949876463645026
That’s totally unrelated. The post I was replying to claimed that if you create a new account with OpenAI and that gets detected, your whole account gets silently “nerfed”.
That is not in any way related to Fable (visibly) being switched to a less strong model if you’re trying to discuss certain topics.
> That is not in any way related to Fable (visibly) being switched to a less strong model if you’re trying to discuss certain topics.
We're talking about it being invisibly moved to a weaker model if it looks like you're distilling (which is best detected through something that is at least partially a reputational / account metric).
Now, Anthropic stepped away from this, but it highlights one more kind of systemic risk you're exposed to when you're not running the model yourself.
It demonstrates that:
1. Anthropic certainly has the ability.
2. They’re willing to use it silently.
And this thread is about OpenAI.
> That’s totally unrelated.
i disagree, but it seems clear, from how you put it, that there's no point explaining the why
They already reversed course on that decision a couple of days later. Trivial to find a source, but Fable is also rather notably not available to the public right now, so it's not actually a relevant threat.
excuse me but, is this trivial source you're referring to the url included in the post you're responding to, or did they reverse back to the original intent of keeping refusals quiet?
So ... like reddit! :)
Thankfully I don't depend on any of such services. It would make me rather angry.
HN also has shadowbans. If your preferences have showdead=yes, you might see some.
That's a decent moderation, shadowban is a totally different thing. AFAIK, your karma is enough to vouch that Flagged topics or comments and return that piece into a regular displaying.
There's no difference between shadowban and moderation, shadowban is a moderation tool.
Shadowban and community-driven moderation are different poles. Former is a tool of shallow narcisses, latter is the best moderation strategy possible in the clearnet. Come on, commenter.
Reddit is the only platform that actually tells you that you are shadowbanned, so at least they are upfront about it, but their appeal system sucks. My friend just appealed every day for just over 600 days and finally got their account un-shadowbanned.
Isn’t that definitionally impossible? If they tell you about it then it’s not a shadow ban.
I guess it depends on the definition of shadow ban.
In Reddit's case it means you can continue to post and comment, it's just that your posts and comments are no longer seen by others.
Reddit doesn't tell you about that.
Reddit doesn't tell you you're shadowbanned. You are thinking of regular banned.
No, they have fully banned and shadowbanned. If you are shadowbanned you can login and check the appeals page but your posts and comments will no longer be visible. If you are fully banned you cannot log in.
That is called "muted". It is not a shadowban, by definition.
It doesn't say that your posts and comments are invisible - they just are.
No they don't and if they do tell you that means you have been banned.
"It only took two years for my friend to appeal a Ban"
If you're willing to wait a couple years, I dare say a few services might have changed their minds by then, so it's too early to judge.
Most of them don't even have a reasonable appeals process at all :(
The whole point of an identity check is that they know exactly who you are. If you tell them who you are and you fail the identity check, you can’t simply create a new account because when you go through the identity check for a second time you’ll still need to tell them exactly who you are, at which point they can match the new account to the original failure.
So I’ll just automate failed verifications for everyone I want to lock out?
An empty account and an account with a year of history have very different weights in this - most people already have an account tied to their legal name, paid for with a credit card in that same legal name. Throw in some geo-location, browser fingerprinting, etc. to disambiguate the surprisingly rare case of two customers with the exact same name.
For a paid product, it's really not that hard to already have a fairly solid idea of what's going on - this just ensures that a responsible adult has gone through a clear process of signing off on the identity for this specific service, rather than a kid with their parent's credit card.
> to disambiguate the surprisingly rare case of two customers with the exact same name
I see you have an uncommon name.
My first+last are shared by about 20,000 people in the US. From 2005-2020 I was unable to check-in for airlines online or even at the kiosk at the airport. I had to wait on line for baggage check-in despite never checking a bag, and they'd take my ID into the back room and delay me for 15 minutes and whisper and glare at me the whole time. Thankfully I can finally fly like a normal person again.
When I worked at a large company, there were four other people with the same first name, middle initial, and last name.
There is nothing surprising or rare about two customers having the same name.
No me, well me too but not that bad, but my wife. Sometimes in the 200x era on green card, she will always get called for secondary inspection. Oh you entered this airport on this date. How are you re-entering without going out. "Well we did not. Not traveled for a year." But you did. All bags searched, more q&a and then they let her go. A couple of times they mentioned that the other person with the same name had the same date of birth. But the passport / green card number had to be different, no? I guess it took them that half hour to figure out and maybe the 200x AI matched by name and date of birth :)
But the sequel: a few years later I get a bill from a hospital for copay for delivery/childbirth. I call to contest ... we did not even live there any more, did at some point of time but years apart ... but they are adamant that my wife gave birth, at that hospital, on that date, in that city, and maybe she never informed me :) it was almost that weird. I don't act on it and give them a statement that it is not me/my family. Then another bill (or a final notice) a couple of years later. And then finally something clicks ... I used to work in a team where when I moved out, someone replaced me and his name was also same as me. Reach out to him, and his wife's name is same as mine, and they lived in the same city we lived in.
So someone somewhere fat fingered the wrong account when searching by name. He acknowledged the account (and childbirth) and paid up. I unfortunately did not ask him about his wife's date of birth to solve the immigration mystery.
My suspicion has been at my past employer's HR or legal department mixing up files
It's rich that the cohort that sees identity verification and real names policies as necessary and meaningful also doesn't seem to understand the first thing about identity and names.
It just has to chill your speech. It doesn't have to not mess up your life, as long as it chills your speech.
AFAIK, many governments use name+surname+DOB as the unique identifier for a person, E.G. when looking up somebody who doesn't have any documents on them, or initiating a document recovery process if you've been robbed and don't remember anything else.
If I told them who I was and then failed to verify that, they don't know who I am because they think I'm lying about who I am. Otherwise what stops me DoSing Sam Altman's account by saying I'm him and then failing to verify?
> If I told them who I was and then failed to verify that, they don't know who I am because they think I'm lying about who I am.
They know who you claim to be. It’s not like they just delete all information about you when you fail verification. They are perfectly capable of seeing that two separate accounts are both claiming to be the same person.
> Otherwise what stops me DoSing Sam Altman's account by saying I'm him and then failing to verify?
For Sam Altman in particular? The fact that he’s the CEO. For people in general? Do you have their passport / driving license, and other details needed to attempt the verification process?
Of course not, that's why I fail verification as them. If I had their passport I'd pass verification as them.
Fun fact, if you're celebrity you get a special customer support phone number at most major corporations EG Apple because "Hi I'm Taylor Swift" gets tried a lot.
How do they get the customer support number to that celebrity?
E.G> when Taylor Swift wants to call Apple right now, how would she know what number to call?
Incidentally, https://people.com/pope-leo-was-hung-up-on-by-bank-customer-...
I presume you get connected somehow when opening up a high-value account at a participating bank. If that account has some sort of concierge service, I presume that’s how special numbers for other companies might be distributed.
Pope Leo is not that rich, and had lived outside the US for many years (he came up in the church hierarchy of Latin America), so it’s not that surprising that he ran into this situation.
Link: 403 Not Allowed
>Do you have their passport / driving license, and other details needed to attempt the verification process?
You do not need real documents if your goal is to get the person locked out by using fake documents.