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Why is this wrong? Applying special treatment to politically exposed persons has been standard practice in every high risk industry for a very long time. The s

Why is this wrong? Applying special treatment to politically exposed persons has been standard practice in every high risk industry for a very long time. The simple fact is that people get extremely emotional about politicians, politicians both receive obscene amounts of abuse, and have repeatedly demonstrated they’re not above weaponising tools like this for their own goals. Seems perfectly reasonable that Apple doesn’t want to be unwittingly draw into the middle of another random political pissing contest. Nobody comes out of those things uninjured.

bigyabai 1y ago
The criticism is still valid. In 1984, the Macintosh was a bicycle for the mind. In 2025, it's a smart-car that refuses to take you certain places that are considered a brand-risk. Both have ups and downs, but I think we're allowed to compare the experiences and speculate what the consequences might be.
- avianlyric 1y ago
  I think gen AI is radically different to tools like photoshops or similar. In the past it was always extremely clear that the creator of content was the person operating the computer. Gen AI changes that, regardless of if your views on authorship of gen AI content. The simple fact is that the vast majority of people consider Gen AI output to be authored by the machine that generated it, and by extension the company that created the machine. You can still handcraft any image, or prose, you want, without filtering or hinderance on a Mac. I don’t think anyone seriously thinks that’s going to change. But Gen AI represents a real threat, with its ability to vastly outproduce any humans. To ignore that simple fact would be grossly irresponsible, at least in my opinion. There is a damn good reason why every serious social media platform has content moderation, despite their clear wish to get rid of moderation. It’s because we have a long and proven track record of being a terribly abusive species when we’re let loose on the internet without moderation. There’s already plenty of evidence that we’re just as abusive and terrible with Gen AI.
  - bigyabai 1y ago
    All I heard was a bunch of excuses.
  - furyofantares 1y ago
    > The simple fact is that the vast majority of people consider Gen AI output to be authored by the machine that generated it They do? I routinely see people say "Here's an xyz I generated." They are stating that they did the do-ing, and the machine's role is implicitly acknowledged in the same was as a camera. And I'd be shocked if people didn't have a sense of authorship of the idea, as well as an increasing sense of authorship over the actual image the more they iterated on it with the model and/or curated variations.
    - avianlyric 1y ago
      Yes people will happily claim authorship over AI output when it’s in their favour. They will equally disclaim authorship if it allows them to express a view while avoiding the consequences of expressing that view. I don’t think it’s hard to believe that the press wouldn’t have a field day if someone managed to get Apple Gen AI stuff to express something racist, or equally abusive. Case in point, article about how Google’s Veo 3 model is being used to flood TikTok with racist content: https://arstechnica.com/ai/2025/07/racist-ai-videos-created-with-google-veo-3-are-proliferating-on-tiktok/ https://arstechnica.com/ai/2025/07/racist-ai-videos-created-...
twoodfin 1y ago
I dunno. Transpose something like the civil rights era to today and this kind of risk avoidance looks cowardly. We really need to get over the “calculator 80085” era of LLM constraints. It’s a silly race against the obviously much more sophisticated capabilities of these models.
pyuser583 1y ago
It’s not wrong, it just requires transparency. This is extremely untransparent. A while back a British politician was “de-banked” and his bank denied it. That’s extremely wrong. By all means: make distinctions. But let people know it! If I’m denied a mortgage because my uncle is a foreign head of state, let me know that’s the reason. Let the world know that’s the reason! Please!
- avianlyric 1y ago
  > A while back a British politician was “de-banked” and his bank denied it. That’s extremely wrong. Cry me a river. I’ve worked in banks in the team making exactly these kinds of decisions. Trust me Nigel Farage knew exactly what happened and why. NatWest never denied it to the public, because they originally refused to comment on it. Commenting on the specifics details of a customer would be a horrific breach of customer privacy, and a total failure in their duty to their customers. There’s a damn good reason the NatWests CEO was fired after discussing the details of Nigel’s account with members of the public. When you see these decisions from the inside, and you see what happens when you attempt real transparency around these types of decisions. You’ll also quickly understand why companies are so cagey about explaining their decision making. Simple fact is that support staff receive substantially less abuse, and have fewer traumatic experiences when you don’t spell out your reasoning. It sucks, but that’s the reality of the situation. I used to hold very similar views to yourself, indeed my entire team did for a while. But the general public quickly taught us a very hard lesson about cost of being transparent with the public with these types of decisions.
  - pyuser583 1y ago
    > NatWest never denied it to the public, because they originally refused to comment on it. Are you saying that Alison Rose did not leak to the BBC? Why was she forced to resign? I thought it was because she leaked false information to the press. This isn’t a diversion. It’s exactly the problem with not being transparent. Of course Farage knew what happened, but how could he convince the public (he’s a public figure), when the bank is lying to the press? The bank started with a lie (claiming he was exited because the account was too low), and kept lying! These were active lies, not simply a refusal to explain their reasons.
goopypoop 1y ago
What's bad to do to a politician but fine to do to someone else?
- avianlyric 1y ago
  Most normal people aren’t represented well enough in training sets for Gen AI to be trivially abused. Plus there will 100% be filters to prevent general abuse targeted at anyone. But politicians are particularly big target, and you know damn well that people out there will spent lots of time trying to find ways around the filters. There’s not point making the abuse easy, when it’s so trivial to just blocklist the set of people who are obviously going to targets of abuse.
- t-3 1y ago
  There are many countries where it's illegal to criticize people holding political office, foreign heads of state, certain historical political figures etc., while still being legal to call your neighbor a dick.
tjwebbnorfolk 1y ago
I can Google for any of these people, and I can get real results with real information.
- avianlyric 1y ago
  You would hope that search would be a politically safe space to operate. But politicians find a way to ruin everything for short term political gain. https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2018/12/republicans-in-congress-grill-google-ceo-over-liberal-bias/ https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2018/12/republicans-in-c...
  - SV_BubbleTime 1y ago
    I would hope! But no one actually believes Google is politically neutral do they?
    - avianlyric 1y ago
      Evidence suggests they’re about as neutral as you could hope. It’s not like Google search is some kind special tool used only by the elite. It’s pretty trivial for political scientists to pump queries into Google and measure the results. Which is exactly what many have done. There’s been plenty of independent research into political bias of Google search results, and plenty of lawsuits that have gone fishing via discovery for internal evidence of bias. As yet, nobody has found a smoking gun, or any real evidence of search result bias (on a political axis, the same can be said for commercial gain). There are many problems with Google, and Google search. Google as an org isn’t politically neutral (although I have no idea how they could be). But political bias in their results isn’t one of those problems.
      - SV_BubbleTime 1y ago
        Maybe you haven’t followed… The CEO hosted a cry session about broken hearts and how they as a company would resist when Trump won in 2016. The black nazis, female popes, etc. No, Google isn’t neutral.
echelon 1y ago
You can buy a MacBook and fashion the components into knives, bullets, and bombs. Apple does nothing to prevent you from doing this. In fact, it's quite easy to buy billions of dangerous things using your MacBook and do whatever you will with them. Or simply leverage physics to do all the ill on your behalf. It's ridiculously easy to do a whole lot of harm. Nobody does anything about the actually dangerous things, but we let Big Tech control our speech and steer the public discourse of civilization. If you can buy a knife but not be free to think with your electronics, that says volumes. Again, I don't care if this is Republicans, Democrats, or Xi and Putin. It does not matter. We should be free to think and communicate. Our brains should not be treated as criminals. And it only starts here. It'll continue to get worse. As the platforms and AI hyperscalers grow, there will be less and less we can do with basic technology.
raxxorraxor 1y ago
What do you mean reasonable? I know that some Apple users tend to outsource "possibilities" to their favorite company, but I would obviously want an AI to not be affected by the political bitching du jours. Not that getting the latest trash talk is the main vocation of pretrained AIs anyway. The only risk here is that some third grade journalist of a third grade newspaper writes another article about how outrageous some generated AI statement is. An article that should be completely ignored instead of it leading to more censorship. And Apple flinches here, so in the end it means it cannot provide a sensible general model. It would be affected by their censorship.

bigyabai 1y ago

The criticism is still valid. In 1984, the Macintosh was a bicycle for the mind. In 2025, it's a smart-car that refuses to take you certain places that are considered a brand-risk. Both have ups and downs, but I think we're allowed to compare the experiences and speculate what the consequences might be.

avianlyric 1y ago
I think gen AI is radically different to tools like photoshops or similar. In the past it was always extremely clear that the creator of content was the person operating the computer. Gen AI changes that, regardless of if your views on authorship of gen AI content. The simple fact is that the vast majority of people consider Gen AI output to be authored by the machine that generated it, and by extension the company that created the machine. You can still handcraft any image, or prose, you want, without filtering or hinderance on a Mac. I don’t think anyone seriously thinks that’s going to change. But Gen AI represents a real threat, with its ability to vastly outproduce any humans. To ignore that simple fact would be grossly irresponsible, at least in my opinion. There is a damn good reason why every serious social media platform has content moderation, despite their clear wish to get rid of moderation. It’s because we have a long and proven track record of being a terribly abusive species when we’re let loose on the internet without moderation. There’s already plenty of evidence that we’re just as abusive and terrible with Gen AI.
- bigyabai 1y ago
  All I heard was a bunch of excuses.
- furyofantares 1y ago
  > The simple fact is that the vast majority of people consider Gen AI output to be authored by the machine that generated it They do? I routinely see people say "Here's an xyz I generated." They are stating that they did the do-ing, and the machine's role is implicitly acknowledged in the same was as a camera. And I'd be shocked if people didn't have a sense of authorship of the idea, as well as an increasing sense of authorship over the actual image the more they iterated on it with the model and/or curated variations.
  - avianlyric 1y ago
    Yes people will happily claim authorship over AI output when it’s in their favour. They will equally disclaim authorship if it allows them to express a view while avoiding the consequences of expressing that view. I don’t think it’s hard to believe that the press wouldn’t have a field day if someone managed to get Apple Gen AI stuff to express something racist, or equally abusive. Case in point, article about how Google’s Veo 3 model is being used to flood TikTok with racist content: https://arstechnica.com/ai/2025/07/racist-ai-videos-created-with-google-veo-3-are-proliferating-on-tiktok/ https://arstechnica.com/ai/2025/07/racist-ai-videos-created-...

twoodfin 1y ago

I dunno. Transpose something like the civil rights era to today and this kind of risk avoidance looks cowardly. We really need to get over the “calculator 80085” era of LLM constraints. It’s a silly race against the obviously much more sophisticated capabilities of these models.

pyuser583 1y ago

It’s not wrong, it just requires transparency. This is extremely untransparent. A while back a British politician was “de-banked” and his bank denied it. That’s extremely wrong. By all means: make distinctions. But let people know it! If I’m denied a mortgage because my uncle is a foreign head of state, let me know that’s the reason. Let the world know that’s the reason! Please!

avianlyric 1y ago
> A while back a British politician was “de-banked” and his bank denied it. That’s extremely wrong. Cry me a river. I’ve worked in banks in the team making exactly these kinds of decisions. Trust me Nigel Farage knew exactly what happened and why. NatWest never denied it to the public, because they originally refused to comment on it. Commenting on the specifics details of a customer would be a horrific breach of customer privacy, and a total failure in their duty to their customers. There’s a damn good reason the NatWests CEO was fired after discussing the details of Nigel’s account with members of the public. When you see these decisions from the inside, and you see what happens when you attempt real transparency around these types of decisions. You’ll also quickly understand why companies are so cagey about explaining their decision making. Simple fact is that support staff receive substantially less abuse, and have fewer traumatic experiences when you don’t spell out your reasoning. It sucks, but that’s the reality of the situation. I used to hold very similar views to yourself, indeed my entire team did for a while. But the general public quickly taught us a very hard lesson about cost of being transparent with the public with these types of decisions.
- pyuser583 1y ago
  > NatWest never denied it to the public, because they originally refused to comment on it. Are you saying that Alison Rose did not leak to the BBC? Why was she forced to resign? I thought it was because she leaked false information to the press. This isn’t a diversion. It’s exactly the problem with not being transparent. Of course Farage knew what happened, but how could he convince the public (he’s a public figure), when the bank is lying to the press? The bank started with a lie (claiming he was exited because the account was too low), and kept lying! These were active lies, not simply a refusal to explain their reasons.

goopypoop 1y ago

What's bad to do to a politician but fine to do to someone else?

avianlyric 1y ago
Most normal people aren’t represented well enough in training sets for Gen AI to be trivially abused. Plus there will 100% be filters to prevent general abuse targeted at anyone. But politicians are particularly big target, and you know damn well that people out there will spent lots of time trying to find ways around the filters. There’s not point making the abuse easy, when it’s so trivial to just blocklist the set of people who are obviously going to targets of abuse.
t-3 1y ago
There are many countries where it's illegal to criticize people holding political office, foreign heads of state, certain historical political figures etc., while still being legal to call your neighbor a dick.

tjwebbnorfolk 1y ago

I can Google for any of these people, and I can get real results with real information.

avianlyric 1y ago
You would hope that search would be a politically safe space to operate. But politicians find a way to ruin everything for short term political gain. https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2018/12/republicans-in-congress-grill-google-ceo-over-liberal-bias/ https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2018/12/republicans-in-c...
- SV_BubbleTime 1y ago
  I would hope! But no one actually believes Google is politically neutral do they?
  - avianlyric 1y ago
    Evidence suggests they’re about as neutral as you could hope. It’s not like Google search is some kind special tool used only by the elite. It’s pretty trivial for political scientists to pump queries into Google and measure the results. Which is exactly what many have done. There’s been plenty of independent research into political bias of Google search results, and plenty of lawsuits that have gone fishing via discovery for internal evidence of bias. As yet, nobody has found a smoking gun, or any real evidence of search result bias (on a political axis, the same can be said for commercial gain). There are many problems with Google, and Google search. Google as an org isn’t politically neutral (although I have no idea how they could be). But political bias in their results isn’t one of those problems.
    - SV_BubbleTime 1y ago
      Maybe you haven’t followed… The CEO hosted a cry session about broken hearts and how they as a company would resist when Trump won in 2016. The black nazis, female popes, etc. No, Google isn’t neutral.

echelon 1y ago

You can buy a MacBook and fashion the components into knives, bullets, and bombs. Apple does nothing to prevent you from doing this. In fact, it's quite easy to buy billions of dangerous things using your MacBook and do whatever you will with them. Or simply leverage physics to do all the ill on your behalf. It's ridiculously easy to do a whole lot of harm. Nobody does anything about the actually dangerous things, but we let Big Tech control our speech and steer the public discourse of civilization. If you can buy a knife but not be free to think with your electronics, that says volumes. Again, I don't care if this is Republicans, Democrats, or Xi and Putin. It does not matter. We should be free to think and communicate. Our brains should not be treated as criminals. And it only starts here. It'll continue to get worse. As the platforms and AI hyperscalers grow, there will be less and less we can do with basic technology.

raxxorraxor 1y ago

What do you mean reasonable? I know that some Apple users tend to outsource "possibilities" to their favorite company, but I would obviously want an AI to not be affected by the political bitching du jours. Not that getting the latest trash talk is the main vocation of pretrained AIs anyway. The only risk here is that some third grade journalist of a third grade newspaper writes another article about how outrageous some generated AI statement is. An article that should be completely ignored instead of it leading to more censorship. And Apple flinches here, so in the end it means it cannot provide a sensible general model. It would be affected by their censorship.