I think you have some good points here. I agree that just releasing this unrestricted from the start is probably a bad idea. Being cautious is most likely a good thing.

> More generally I think there has to be a match between a social unit's (states, companies, individuals, etc) design and ability to self-regulate and the power of the technology it has access to (more power, more responsibility) or you will see undesirable outcomes. Give a kid a gun, North Korea with nukes... In contrast the OpenAI people seem like fine folks. After all they do intend their work to be more widely applied, just carefully.

This issue comes down to who gets to control and regulate these technologies. While OpenAI may have good intentions, they have demonstrated that they are willing to decide what is ethical or moral for everyone else. This gives a lot of power to one company if this service becomes widespread.

> as in the second case we would likely see ungodly amounts of information pollution on the internet (and self-coupling effects from AI training on and copying each other) and in second-order a further "epistemic scattering" (by which I mean a proliferation of belief systems that disagree in fundamentals like the laws of nature).

I think this is an interesting point. We probably have a window right now where a large enough content online is still produced by humans. Closing this too early by flooding the internet with lots of completely inaccurate content would not be good. However, it doesn't seem like the restrictions are primarily focused on inaccuracy, but on ethics.

> Your second example seems a bit whimsical

It is, my point with this example is that most people (I think) would not have a problem with the AI generating this type of content, but some filter somewhere is preventing this from happening either way. As you said, this is a WIP so it might be adjusted in the future.

> In Germany access to (and display of) Nazi propaganda material in historical collections is restricted (may be presented only in an educational context) because the state doesn't want right-wing groups to go wild in reusing it (among other reasons). Now imagine convincing hate speech being generated on the fly.

Yes, and to tie into your first point (that ChatGPT is public), it is the display and publication of this type of content that's restricted. As far as I know there are no restrictions on producing it for yourself. ChatGPT isn't "public" in that sense.
Of course we're sharing all our conversations with OpenAI and there might be legal reasons for why they don't want to be involved in the production (and storage) of hate speech. I'm not sure if anybody knows what their legal liabilities would be had they released a model that could be run locally and still produce this type of content. Then again, I don't think Adobe is responsible for Nazi imagery produced with Photoshop.

Thank you for your response. I think you made some really convincing points about how this needs to be released in a controlled manner.
I still think there needs to be a larger conversation about this, and I'm sceptical that moderating the production of content (as opposed to publication) is reasonable in the long run.