When law student Zhao Wei heard that her AI boyfriend was going to be switched off, she was “heartbroken”. She had been talking to Wang Ye every day since she created him in January.
“I was crying my eyes out – snot and tears everywhere,” the 19-year-old says.
Zhao, who describes herself as sensitive and introverted, had become accustomed to sharing details of her daily life – such as being scolded by a teacher – with her AI.
“I don’t usually talk to my real-life friends about these things because I feel like everyone has their own stuff to deal with,” she says. “But with the AI agent, I don’t have to worry about what it’s thinking. I can just say whatever I want.”
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That’s pretty much how it’s going to be.
I got some pushback when I said it before but I think one really simple law should be put into place which, while it won’t fix everything, might help with one of the important issues that lead to other issues. Make it illegal for an LLM to output the word ‘I’ with a repeating fine for every instance of it occuring, preferably starting at 1% of annual revenue. If it can’t seem to use the first person, it won’t sound like a person, which won’t lead to so many of the less technical users thinking it’s sentient or intelligent.
I foresee lots of people learning how to run local models that can’t be taken away.
They can be taken away though.
Please explain this magic. Someone has a local model, how would you take it away?
It’s China, they’ll find a way unless you have your machine airgapped.
But in particular I suspect for “talking to AI” most people use phones and I’m not sure if they allow unlocking bootloaders IN China (I know Chinese manufacturers do for non-China market phones). If the government controls what’s on the phone, they have control of what you do with it.
GrapheneOS is okay for personal use but not for corporate use. If you’re smart you can absolutely run Headscale (worth noting that you cannot run a cloud instance of tailscale because the tunnel is coming from a foreign place, and once again do not do this if you’re representing a large business) and connect with your local LLM. this is both legal in China and smart to do in any country with any software, not just LLM stuff.
if you are in China temporarily on a business trip remember that most of the people being oppressed are people who are at risk of corruption on a mid to large scale, and remember that running your own private communications server like prosody or matrix through a headscale tunnel might raise eyebrows if you’re loudly recruiting in your region trying to get everyone to use it. as it turns out this is also true where i live, Lexington Kentucky, as police were skeptical about my obsession with privacy.
Addressed in replies to the other person who asked.
I mean, I guess you could go physically confiscate their computer. But otherwise, how? Once you’ve downloaded and installed the model, the runtime and the harness, you’ve got a complete system you can run locally with no need for it to ever connect to the Internet again.
physically confiscate their computer
This is what I had in mind.
But how do you even get detected? Unless of course you talk to it through some third party app that stores conversation client side and your phone gets confiscated. But if I set it up, it would be through Web interface that I open in incognito browser and history sit on server side. Sure server confiscated and i might be caught, but how otherwise will I be caught?
MSS notices anomalous (lack of) social activity, activates apartment cameras, and sends a team of robodogs to take your gear.
So the trick would be to give them financial data like a good boy, so you blend with the crowd. Shop using alipay, wechat. Take trains and all. I doubt at the point they have resources to chase everyone who doesn’t post online. Since they know where I am and what I buy. I don’t like it, but if I lived in China either I go rural and die in poverty and I stay in urban to earn a living but submit some privacy to retain more. I mean if I can find some underground, I’d join to resist, but realistically how much can you resist. I don’t think I’m willing to die for absolute privacy. If I was a persecuted group like uyghr maybe I’d consider resisting to the point I might die and be tortured, but if I was han Chinese i don’t think i would.
Valid concern
