To the extent SD's "harm reduction" filters are making it less useful, I blame the concern trolls and pearl-clutching, click-pandering media pundits for creatin

To the extent SD's "harm reduction" filters are making it less useful, I blame the concern trolls and pearl-clutching, click-pandering media pundits for creating and feeding the current atmosphere. Concern and outrage have become a cottage industry, yet little has really changed here. Making naughty images good enough to deceive has been possible for 20 years. AI just makes it much easier. Of course trolls, spammers and random delinquents are using it to do more of what they've always done. That this would happen was so obviously inevitable to anyone paying attention, I find the current levels of "concern" from supposedly savvy, experienced pundits dubious at best. Personally, I find all the faux drama around this rather uninteresting. I acknowledge my viewpoint is likely unpopular but (IMHO) the level of perceptual heat being generated in mainstream and social media now exceeds the probable real-world net harm from LLMs generating fake images, reinforcing offensive stereotypes or (gasp) confidently spouting wrong answers. It's nothing that Photoshop, TikTok and search engines haven't already been been doing for years. Non-tech people's perceptions are already in the process of adapting to this new normal, while most of us tech-savvy people have already been appropriately skeptical of uncorroborated images and videos for many years. The downside to the perceptual tempest is that fear a few users will transgress some boundary and become tomorrow's click-bait headline du jour is causing researchers and devs to waste a lot of cycles chasing ill-defined (and probably unattainable) harm reduction goalposts that keep moving just out of reach. It's nerfing a potentially useful emerging technology before we've even seen how capable it might actually be. Instead, I'm doomed to interact with some straight-jacketed LLM that's been tortured into maintaining a faux chipper, inoffensive persona that's a cringey parody of a real, authentic and useful assistant.