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.
Both have ups and downs, but I think we're allowed to compare the experiences and speculate what the consequences might be.
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.
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.
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-...
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!
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.
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.
She was forced to resign because she leaked, the content of the leak was utterly immaterial. The simple fact she leaked was an automatically fireable offence, it doesn’t matter a jot if she lied or not. Customer privacy is non-negotiable when you’re bank. Banks aren’t number 10, the basic expectation is that customer information is never handed out, except to the customer, in response to a court order, or the belief that there is an immediate threat to life.
Do you honestly think that it’s okay for banks to discuss the private banking details of their customers with the press?
Because they want to perform political censorship without us knowing about it? You'll forgive me if I'm not too sympathetic to that.
I happen to be familiar with that case, and that is exactly what happened. The Coutts report explicitly found that he met the economic criteria for retention [0], but was dropped due to political reasons, among others his friendship with Novak Djokovic, and re-tweeting an allegedly transphobic joke by Ricky Gervais ("old fashioned women. You know, the ones with wombs.") [1].
To top it off, the BBC did their best to aid in this deception, reporting: Farage says he was effectively "de-banked" for his political views and that he is "far from alone" [2]
Contrary to the BBC's portrayal, this was not an unsupported opinion coming from Farage - he directly quoted what the bank itself wrote in their internal discussions on this matter, that he obtained through a subject access request.
Further, in their apology for getting the story wrong, the BBC wrote: "On 4 July, the BBC reported Mr Farage no longer met the financial requirements for Coutts, citing a source familiar with the matter. The former UKIP leader later obtained a Coutts report which indicated his political views were also considered." [3]
This is misleading past the point of deceit. The BBC tried to give the impression that financial requirements were the primary reason for the account closure, and his politics were just an at-best secondary "also". But the Coutts report explicitly said that he “meets the EC [economic contribution] criteria for commercial retention”, so his politics were the primary and only reason.
Most of this information is absent in the BBC's reporting, which uses only vague, anodyne phrases like "political views" and "politically exposed person", avoids specifics, but does find time to cite Labour MP accusations that it is hypocritical how quickly the government reacted to banks trying to financially deplatform the enemy political faction, when the government hasn't yet rid itself of corruption.
So yes, you sure present a difficult "dilemma": Do we want powerful commercial and media interests to team up and lie to us, or do we want at least some degree of transparency and honesty in their dealings? Really there are no easy answers, and the choice would keep anyone up at night...
[0] https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2023/07/18/nigel-farage-cou...
[1] https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2023/07/18/nigel-farage-cou... (Ignore Farage's hyperbole that collecting information posted to public Twitter accounts is "Stasi-style")
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.
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.
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.
https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2018/12/republicans-in-c...
But no one actually believes Google is politically neutral do they?
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.
