They're responding to a hysterical, Luddite portion of the public that would make them pay a PR cost if they didn't at least make a sloppy attempt at "safety".

They're responding to a hysterical, Luddite portion of the public that would make them pay a PR cost if they didn't at least make a sloppy attempt at "safety". It's idiotic and futile, but blessedly short-lived. Thanks to the miracle of open-source, it took me about 20 minutes yesterday to get Stable Diffusion up and running on my laptop's CPU, with no content filter. SD inference has low enough compute needs that using cloud GPU compute is cheap as hell (for now, perhaps), and discrete GPUs aren't that expensive in the grand scheme of things. Ultimately, reality often does win. It's just not a stable equilibrium for companies to continue these laughable attempts at "filtering", any more than physical media formats were able to withstand the arrival of digital formats in the presence of piracy. Combine this with the cultural headwinds against the influence of mentally-ill hysterics on social media, and I don't expect the current level of filtering to last very long.