It seems like a whole bunch of unnecessarily liability. Once you place yourself in the position of moderator of what people may use their computers for, you are arguably liable for failures of moderation.
To put it another way, nobody's ever sued Canon for making cameras which are used to take illegal photos, but if Canon suddenly started screening your photos to make sure they were acceptable per local laws or whatnot, they suddenly are actually a responsible party in the creation and distribution of whatever it is people use their cameras for.
You and the oil paint commenter are missing a very obvious difference. Oil paints and canon lenses are just tools. Dumb objects even. They do not suggest or create from thin air something. The lens just directs photons in front of it to a sensor. The oil paint just is and gets smeared around into whatever the painter does with it. This is totally different in that you can draw a simple stick figure, and it creates the realistic work on its own. It did it, not you. Thinking that paint and a lens are on the same level is farcical.
Also the oil paint doesn't have its own memory banks that someone could accuse of being trained on c---- p---. But still, I also wonder if Microsoft's liability would be less if it weren't screening images.
I wonder why nobody is asking where do the images used to produce output come from? Have their creators been asked for permission to use them? I'm guessing they come from the Bing data lake of images scraped off the internet. Better add Bing robot to your robots.txt.
You’re stuffing “wow” into a new tech. Cameras were wow too at the time. Now generative ai is real and common like lens and paint.
Regulating it is as absurd as regulating Skyrim or a similar moddable game to prevent users from having it rough with elfs or whatever. It’s all corporate interests covering behind ethics, nothing more.
It would be cheaper for them if they thought on those two things as similar. A dumb tool does not need a team of lawyers and bunch of moderators/reviewers to make sure there's no legal or PR blowback when someone draws a penis and the tool produces an image of a girthy member.
If they want that they could easily have a local classifier and only upload suspected images for review. The fact that they're willing to slow down the experience for everyone implies that they're doing training or something.
If we're going to compare apples and onions, then sure, you can state this comparison with a straight face. For those of us with a bit of seriousness about the conversation, these are not even close to being the same.
It would be better for them if they said it's like a bottle of pouring ink--it forms random swirls and shapes and if someone sees a penis then it's not the problem of the ink manufacturer. The fact that they are sending images to their server means they are doing content screening and model training. That creates potential liability for them. They are already potentially exposed, because someone will sooner or later ask them to reveal the sources of images used for training their models and if it's their Bing image lake then they may have a problem of using other people's content without permission beyond research applications.
Yeah that too. Sure plenty of tools could be used to retouch illegal pics and so on, but a court would probably see it differently if the model distributed by Microsoft is able to produce that on its own.
At the same time... F that, I don't want Microsoft nannying me.
To put it another way, nobody's ever sued Canon for making cameras which are used to take illegal photos, but if Canon suddenly started screening your photos to make sure they were acceptable per local laws or whatnot, they suddenly are actually a responsible party in the creation and distribution of whatever it is people use their cameras for.