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You are entirely free to build a cocaine making machine in most countries. It is actually using it to produce cocaine that is a crime.

In reasonable countries, this is exactly how it works. You can own lockpicks, practice picking locks, and even publish detailed instructions on how to pick locks. It's only when you pick someone else's lock that a crime is committed.

Limiting access to tools and knowledge benefits the wealthy and privileged. Knowledge should proliferate, that is how the world has worked long before I was born and god willing that is how it will work long after I die.

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> You are entirely free to build a cocaine making machine in most countries. It is actually using it to produce cocaine that is a crime.

That's not true. It's certainly legal to own lab equipment, but when you start combining equipment with the intent to make cocaine, you're committing a crime long before any drug is produced.

Any country who's a party to the 1988 UN Convention Against Illicit Traffic in Narcotic Drugs has such laws, including the US, UK, and most of Europe.

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You are entirely free to build a cocaine making machine in most countries. It is actually using it to produce cocaine that is a crime.

In reasonable countries, this is exactly how it works. You can own lockpicks, practice picking locks, and even publish detailed instructions on how to pick locks. It's only when you pick someone else's lock that a crime is committed.

Limiting access to tools and knowledge benefits the wealthy and privileged.

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I have some bad news for you about what happens if the cops find you with lockpicking tools.
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Nothing happens, dude. Having lockpicking tools is not enough on its own to make an arrest, and a few dumb cops doing it anyways and having their cases get thrown out only proves the system works.
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You can program a computer to do things and they can interact with tools to do things too. Doesn't justify restricting what you can do with them.

If you program a computer to make cocaine for you, you're the one violating the law. If you ask an LLM to do the same for you, you're the one violating the law. The LLM's capabilities are irrelevant.

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You sweet summer child.

Cool, so I'll have you make an LLM that can make cosine, then I'll provide you paid access to the machine to can ask the right question to do it illegally. Then when you get caught and blame me we'll both be in court defending ourselves.

You're argument is "doesn't justify". This is a private corporation, not a government. There is no freedom of speech law involved here if the corporation says no. Now, when the government tells LLM corporations that there are limits they will gladly agree.

Next, the government will classify the LLMs as munitions and you'll be spending the next 50 years fighting on reversing that when a big chunk of the population is anti-AI enough to let them do it. After that will be bans and registration on hardware.

There are two things that you are confusing. One is what you'd like to happen in an open data world like existed after the cold war. And then there is what is going to happen, and it's going to be messy, authoritarian, and closed. And you will lose the openness that had been occurring up to this point.

There is no world in which the general public agrees to wide open access to info-hazards, and there are people that will ensure enough disasters happen to close that future.

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> Cool, so I'll have you make an LLM that can make cosine

The last thing we need is more math addicts roaming the streets

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