Character.AI, the GenAI site that convinced some children to kill themselves, has gone bankrupt after parents sued them.
we found hordes of chatbots explicitly dedicated to themes of pedophilia, suicide, self-harm, and eating disorder coaching, as well as a thriving community of users creating chatbots designed to simulate school shootings, romanticize real mass shooters, and even impersonate the real child victims of mass shootings.
you are familiar with this history of the open-source/proprietary dialectic yeah? at most deepseek stays a few months behind frontier models. your pessimism feels like a Microsoft windows 7 user’s pessimism about operating systems in 2008 (yes, it will get worse for you specifically because paying for the new model is easier than finding a good free one). If i were you i would probably be pessimistic too, but we would need to ban the open weight models and then VPNs too, and then effectively enforce these bans in order to get the future you predict. I’m not seeing it. And these LLMs aren’t very smart. Ask them about free alternatives and they’ll tell you.
Okay man. We’ll see.