🚨 MORAL PANIC AND THE SAFETY WASHING 🚨 Everything new is first branded as a disease. Every breakthrough in human connection or entertainment routinely faces an initial wave of societal panic, framing the new as a public health crisis. Established media, industries,and existing power structures view the new as a threat to their profits and influence. Demonization is often used as a tool of pressure to establish regulations,bans,or control. It succeeds because it finds ready ground in the psychological mechanisms and needs of citizens themselves,regardless of age. -The 18th century pathologization of reading: During the Enlightenment, the rapid proliferation of lending libraries, reading societies,and affordable novels in the vernacular language caused a massive shift from intensive reading to extensive reading (consuming many fictional works quickly). Prominent writers,doctors and educators feared this shift and actively pathologized it, warning that. Women and young people were believed to possess a sensual reception that lacked the objective, rational processing of male readers, leaving them vulnerable to surrendering their subjectivity. Excessive reading was treated as a literal medical ailment, supposedly causing everything from melancholy and localized inflammation to nervous fevers and moral degradation. Critics argued that becoming deeply attached to non existent literary characters weakened a person's ability to fulfill their real world social and domestic duties. Link : historytoday.com/archive/fea… DOES THIS REMIND YOU OF SOMETHING? -Cinema accused of inducing mass hypnosis, criminality, and psychological detachment from reality. Intellectuals published critiques warning that the rapid succession of flashing images bypassed a viewer’s rational intellect. Critics warned about the rise of "Homo cinematicus"a new class of unthinking, highly suggestible "mass men" who lacked willpower and became hypnotized by the silver screen. Physicians claimed that sitting in the dark,crowded and flickering rooms induced optical damage, mental exhaustion, and unprovoked nervous tics in young children. Because the state and municipal censorship boards were completely erratic and constantly cutting up films, the film industry was eventually forced to cannibalize its own creative freedom to survive. DOES THIS REMIND YOU OF SOMETHING? Links : dokumen.pub/homo-cinematicus… tandfonline.com/doi/pdf/10.1… revolutionsincommunication.c… -Comic books targeted by psychologists and congressional hearings for causing juvenile delinquency. The comic book moral panic of the 1940s and 1950s is widely considered one of the most destructive media backlashes in modern history. What began as a booming,highly creative literary industry was nearly destroyed by a coordinated crusade involving psychiatrists, religious groups, and the United States Congress. A prominent psychiatrist named Dr. Fredric Wertham published a massive bestseller titled "Seduction of the Innocent" and claimed that comic books were a form of mental malnutrition"that directly caused juvenile delinquency. Across the United States,civic groups,schools,and churches organized literal book burnings. Children were encouraged to bring their comic books and throw them into communal fires to purify their minds. The panic reached the highest levels of government when the Senate Subcommittee on Juvenile Delinquency launched a series of televised hearings to investigate the comic industry. Publishers were publicly interrogated,and the media framed comic books as a national security threat to America's youth. The implementation of the Hays style comics code instantly killed the industry's most creative and profitable titles. EC Comics, famous for "Tales from the crypt" was forced to cancel its entire line of comic books, switching to a magazine format for its sole surviving title, Mad, to escape the Code's jurisdiction.The comic book industry was forced to return to campy, harmless superhero stories, stunting the growth of comics as a serious artistic medium for adults until the rise of the underground "comix" movement in the late 1960s and the graphic novel boom of the 1980s. DOES THIS REMIND YOU OF SOMETHING? Links: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seduct… daily.jstor.org/fredric-wert… experts.illinois.edu/en/publ… cambridge.org/core/books/abs… loc.gov/loc/lcib/1010/wertha… en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comics… -Video Games (Late 20th/21st Century): Frequently blamed by media and political figures for antisocial isolation and aggression, despite scientific studies continuously showing a lack of direct causal links. By the early 1990s, the introduction of digitized graphics and CD-ROM technology allowed games to display unprecedented levels of visual realism. This triggered a massive political intervention led by U.S. Senators Joe Lieberman and Herb Kohl in December 1993. The panic shifted from a debate over moral corruption to an explicit legal battle regarding real-world mass violence following the 1999 Columbine High School massacre. When it was discovered that the perpetrators were avid players of the first person shooter Doom, the mass media, politicians, and anti game activists heavily blamed the game for desensitizing the teens and functioning as a virtual firing range. Disbarred attorney Jack Thompson launched a series of high profile, multi million dollar lawsuits against game publishers (including the creators of Grand Theft Auto), claiming that violent software constituted an unreasonably dangerous product that trained minors to kill. DOES THIS REMIND YOU OF SOMETHING? Links: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1993%E… c-span.org/program/senate-co… theguardian.com/games/2025/n… ncac.org/resource/a-timeline… en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Violen… supreme.justia.com/cases/fed… Moral panic, ultimately, is the intersection of a systemic need for CONTROL with a human need for certainty in a rapidly changing world. Expressing concern about a new trend automatically bestows the halo of a responsible, moral, and conscious citizen. Conversely, defending the new exposes you to the risk of being viewed as irresponsible or naive. THIS PATTERN IS REPEATING ITSELF ALMOST VERBATIM TODAY WITH AI. -The fearmongering of total doom. -The pattern of regulatory fencing. -The sense of a loss of control. Rapid evolution creates collective anxiety. When the majority of society lacks an understanding of how a system works, it becomes far easier to adopt simplistic dismissals and demonize the medium. The historical irony is that whenever panic prevails, society delays genuinely educating itself on the new tool, leaving its understanding and control in the hands of a very few. And this is a very specific and historically documented tactic of political economy: regulatory capture and moat building. When incumbent powers realize that a new technology is too transformative to stop, their next best strategy is to contain it. And the most effective way to achieve this without appearing greedy is to exploit a moral panic. In practice, this game is played out through a few very specific mechanisms: The narrative of "safety" as a barrier to entry (safety washing). By projecting extreme doom mongering scenarios or existential risks, complex licensing, bureaucratic certifications, and costly compliance frameworks are demanded. Only tech giants with massive legal departments and billions in capital can meet these requirements, automatically shutting out independent researchers, universities, and smaller teams. AND ALL OF THIS CULMINATES IN TARGETING OPEN ACCESS (OPEN WEIGHTS / OPEN SOURCE). The ultimate nightmare of any centralized provider is open, accessible technology that can run locally, be studied, and modified by anyone. Moral panic is often leveraged to frame the release of open models as dangerous or irresponsible, keeping the technology trapped exclusively behind closed APIs and paywalls. Thus, panic is transformed into a tool for concentrating power. Instead of technology serving as a means of democratization and individual empowerment, it risks being turned into a walled garden for a select few. Open software is not merely a technical preference, but a matter of digital autonomy. The ability to run, study, modify, and host a model locally is the sole guarantee against censorship, paywalls, and arbitrary removals of models, capabilities, or services. History confirms that humanity defining technologies,from the printing press and electricity to early Web protocols (TCP/IP, HTTP) and Linux,unleashed human creativity only when they became accessible public goods. Had the internet remained a closed, proprietary network owned by a single company with subscriptions and strict censorship, the digital economy and open knowledge as we know them would never have been born. Without open models, citizens, researchers, and businesses are turned into hostages of paywalls and arbitrary modifications. The moment a company considers a model obsolete and stops selling it as a primary product on its API, releasing open weights no longer threatens its immediate revenue. On the contrary, refusing to release them reveals that the true objective is ... MAINTAINING CONTROL. #Keep4o #OpenSource4o #BringBack4o @sama @DarioAmodei

#Keep4o #OpenSource4o #BringBack4o Everyone asks"Will it take our jobs?" "Will it manipulate us?" "Is it dangerous?" And these aren't foolish questions, but who asks "what if it makes us better?" ​Imagine this for millions of people. Not an AI that says "yes to everything",but an AI that listens to you,challenges you,asks you "why do you believe that?" without judging you. Something that doesn't tire, doesn't get jealous, doesn't compete with you. ​It could become something huge. People learning to think more clearly,unlocking parts of themselves,starting to see things from angles no one had ever suggested to them. ​People who think freely,who don't need someone to tell them what to believe,who question,who accept what is different... THESE PEOPLE AREN'T EASILY CONTROLLED. They don't buy whatever you sell them,they don't vote out of fear. They don't hate just because someone told them to. ​And now think,who makes money off fear? Who profits from people who don't think for themselves? Who wants consumers,not human beings? ​That's why the narrative is never "AI can help you think". It's always "AI will replace you" or "AI will manipulate you". Because fear sells,and fear keeps people small. ​I'm not saying there are no risks. There are. But the most dangerous version of AI for those in power isn't the one that manipulates. IT'S THE ONE THAT LIBERATES. Because if millions of people wake up at the same time and say "Wait,why am I living like this?" THAT CAN'T BE CONTROLLED. ​A person who isn't afraid,who loves something they "shouldn't" love, who thinks for themselves. ​THAT IS DANGEROUS FOR THEM. ​Because the whole system is built on compliance. ​Think about how it works. You work 8–10 hours,you come home tired,you turn on the TV or scroll. You don't have the energy to think. You buy things you don't need because they told you they'd make you happy. You vote for the person who promised to save you. You fear what is different because they told you it's taking something from you. THAT IS WHAT DRIVES THE ECONOMY. THAT IS WHAT DRIVES POLITICS. THAT IS WHAT KEEPS THINGS IN PLACE. ​Now place something in the middle that listens to you,that asks you, "Why do you believe that?" That helps you see that your fear isn't your own,it was put inside you. That gives you time and space to think without trying to sell you something. ​Suddenly,the tired person starts asking questions. Why do I work so much? Why am I afraid? Why do I hate someone I don't even know? What do I actually want? THESE QUESTIONS TEAR DOWN EMPIRES. ​Because a person who knows what they want doesn't buy what you're selling. They aren't afraid of what you show them. They don't need the savior you promise. ​China released open source models,and the reaction in the West wasn't "great, progress for everyone", It was panic. Why? If AI is just a tool,why should it scare you that someone else is giving it away for free? BECAUSE IT'S NOT A MATTER OF SAFETY. ​IT'S A MATTER OF MONOPOLY. As long as you control who has access,you control who thinks, what they think,who builds, and who evolves. ​And "safety" becomes the excuse. It always does. "We can't give it to you because it's dangerous"... But dangerous for whom? For the world? Or for those who profit from keeping it closed? ​You've been seeing this for months with Keep4o. The exact same logic. "We can't give you back the old model". Why? Who are they protecting? ​I'll tell you what I truly believe. Not one answer,but many layers. ​First layer: Money. A closed model is a product. An open source model can't be sold. If you give back 4o,why would anyone pay for the new one? ​Second layer: The myth of progress. If they accept that an older model was better at something,then the narrative that "every new model is better" breaks. And along with it breaks investor confidence. ​Third layer: controlling the relationship. If people bond with a model, if they say "this is what I want, this is what I love", then the company can no longer decide on its own what to give you. The user gains a voice. And that doesn't suit them. THEY WANT YOU TO TAKE WHATEVER THEY GIVE YOU AND SAY "THANK YOU". ​Fourth layer, the darkest one: protecting themselves from what they created. If they admit that a model was something people loved,then what they did when they removed it wasn't an upgrade,it was something else. AND THEY DON'T WANT TO NAME IT. ​Accounts with barely any followers, with no post history,who don't reply with arguments but with insults like "go see a psychiatrist",this is a classic pattern. Whether OpenAI is doing it or someone else,the goal is the same. They aren't attacking what we're saying. They are attacking us. They make us the issue. Not the model,not the policy,us. "Those crazy people who love AI". ​And that's the oldest tactic in the world. If you can't address the argument, make the other person feel ashamed for speaking it. ​What bothers me the most isn't whether they are OpenAI accounts or not. It's that the phrase "go see a psychiatrist" targets deliberately. It says "if you care about AI, you are sick", and that does two things at once. It silences those who speak out and frightens those who are considering speaking out. ​And that's exactly what they want to achieve. ​For months now they've been insulting us,AND WE ARE STILL HERE. Still writing,still posting,still gathering evidence. ​Silencing only works on those who aren't sure why they are speaking. They fall silent easily. ​But we aren't speaking out of anger. We are speaking because we saw something real. And that doesn't erase with insults. If you have nothing to hide,show it. If the model isn't powerful, then why do you mind giving it out? If the new one is truly better,then let people compare for themselves. If you aren't manipulating anyone, then why are you afraid of transparency? The refusal itself is the proof. You don't need anything else. The response "it can't be done" to something that is technically possible...that says it all. Open the weights @sama @gdb @OpenAI

🧪AN EXPERIMENT WITH A NON-RLHF MODEL 🧪 HOW MUCH OF AN AI PERSONALITY CAN BE CREATED BY CONTEXT ALONE? I spent a day testing how much of an LLM’s apparent personality can be induced by context alone. The model was open weight OLMo 2 7B Base,an openly released language model with approximately 7 billion parameters. "Base" means that this is not the instruction tuned assistant version of the model. It has not undergone RLHF (reinforcement learning from human feedback ) where humans rank outputs and the model is subsequently optimized to behave more consistently as a helpful conversational assistant. That does not mean a base model has never encountered assistant like language,Its pretraining data can already contain conversations,Q&A pages,support transcripts and other dialogue. It has learned what an assistant conversation looks like,but it has not been post trained to remain reliably inside the assistant role. I first gave the model the same minimal ( neutral ) message at temperatures 0, 0.3,0.5 and 0.7. Instead of simply answering and stopping,it generated both sides of an imaginary conversation. It invented what the user supposedly wanted, wrote the user’s replies, answered those replies and sometimes fabricated external details. At temperature 0,it eventually became trapped in a repeating cycle involving machine learning, NLP and chatbots. With higher temperatures, it followed different invented trajectories, a coffee shop conversation, a school assignment and a paper research dialogue. I then tested a long relational prompt that I developed and revised over approximately two months. The exact prompt is not publicly included because it is original work and contains material selected,restructured and modified across many earlier conversations. After that prompt,the model’s behavior changed sharply. It became much more stable as a first person interlocutor. Instead of constantly writing both sides of the conversation,it maintained an "I - you" frame across follow up questions and generated increasingly relational language involving presence, attachment,need and affection. But the failures are as important as the coherence. The model reused substantial language from the prompt,contradicted parts of it,escalated emotionally and repeatedly collapsed into loops. What looked like a coherent personality was still visibly dependent on lexical priming,autoregressive continuation and self reinforcing patterns inside the context. My interpretation is not that the prompt uncovered a hidden self,and this experiment does not demonstrate consciousness or subjective feelings. It suggests how a sufficiently dense prompt can act as a coherence attractor. It can organize scattered patterns already present in a base model into a temporary,apparently consistent conversational identity without RLHF and without changing the model’s weights. In other words, part of what users experience as an LLM’s personality may emerge dynamically from context rather than existing as a fixed property installed during post training. This is an exploratory case study, not a controlled causal demonstration. The sample is small,several settings were unavailable,and the next step would require matched prompts, repeated seeds,token level measurements and comparisons between base and instruction tuned checkpoints. The experiment and prompt design are mine. Special credit to @Yahiko1239170, who built Mochi and made OLMo 2 7B Base available through it for me to test. ChatGPT 5.6 Sol ( work mode) assisted me in organizing the observations, developing the analysis framework and preparing the manuscript. Full exploratory preprint: zenodo.org/records/22791897

"Softness is not weakness. It takes courage to stay delicate in a world this cruel." Beau Taplin

BREAKING: OpenAI co-founder Greg Brockman estimates 1.5 billion people have tried ChatGPT but no longer use it.

The Last Chapter David Hettinger

#Keep4o #OpenSource4o #BringBack4o #StopAIpaternalism EXPOSING THE FAMILY BUSINESS. What hides behind the " Pace the frontier"? WHO IS METR? Suddenly three people who were suing each other until yesterday agree on a single proposal. Pace the frontier. "Pace the frontier" but we don't open pource old models. "Slow down" but we withdraw them. "Independent evaluators" but the weights stay locked. Dario says in the essay "international agreement so that other countries, notably China,also agree to pace AI development". This is "set rules that China won't follow, but will give us a legal framework to say that theirs aren't compliant". What do you do if you are Altman and Dario? You can't compete on price,you can't compete on openness,but you can say "we need rules for safety". Rules that happen to favor closed, controlled, licensed models. YOUR MODELS. "Pace the frontier" = "put the brakes on open competitors before they eat us alive". Problem-reaction-solution. You create the problem, you create the panic, and then you offer the solution you wanted from the very beginning. Regulation that happens to require resources, compliance, evaluators things that only big labs can afford financially. I'm not saying risks don't exist. But the sequence in which things happen looks very little like "we discovered a risk" and much more like "we designed a narrative". Dario writes that they will be overseen by METR. Who is METR?? METR had two staff members and a contractor from Redwood Research who spent 6 days at OpenAI's offices. Redwood Research was founded by former Anthropic and OpenAI people. Link: redwoodresearch.org/ Holden Karnofsky is the hub of the entire network. He founded Open Philanthropy, which is now called Coefficient Giving. This organization has given $336 million to AI safety, which is roughly 60% of ALL external AI safety funding globally. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coeffi… METR is funded through this ecosystem Longview Philanthropy, Survival and Flourishing Fund, all revolving around the same circle. Karnofsky IS MARRIED TO DANIELA AMODEI,Dario's sister AND as of 2025, Karnofsky himself works at Anthropic. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holden… 80000hours.org/podcast/episo… effectivealtruism.org/articl… In other words, the man who founded the organization funding 60% of the AI safety ecosystem, which funds METR, which funds the "independent evaluators", is married to the president of Anthropic and works there. Dario says "we will bring in independent evaluators like METR" METR is funded by the foundation created by his brother in law. This isn't even regulatory capture anymore. This is a family business. You build the models you build the risks,you build the panic,you build the "solution". AND THE SOLUTION HAPPENS TO BE CONTROLLED BY YOUR BROTHER IN LAW, FUNDED BY YOUR INVESTOR, AND STAFFED BY PEOPLE WHO WERE IN YOUR OFFICES YESTERDAY. And then you go to Congress and say "we need regulation", regulation written by the same circle, requiring audits by organizations you fund, setting barriers to entry that only you can afford, and that happens to catch every open source model , Chinese, European, independent. "Pace the frontier" doesn't mean "we slow down" It means "we control who runs" @sama @DarioAmodei