It wouldn't be a difficult situation if these guys were ethical shops from the get-go, but they aren't, they're trying to staple minimally required ethics on afterwards, and it shows.
To play devil’s advocate, what ethical safeguards are OpenAI responsible for that they have failed to implement?
This is a wild and difficult to understand technology, even for the people building it. And their safeguards are constantly evolving.
I think you’re attributing to malice what should be attributed to people commercializing a novel technology that is, frankly, being exploited by users.
You dont have to take sides on the political seesaw to understand that mainstream media is becoming more irrelevant to large sects of society. You might have a take that its a bad or good thing.. but it is true. There is no longer a vast mono-culture, and with it's loss, a fractured sense of reality amongst the inhabitants.
Lack of mainstream media doesn't mean the death of monoculture - were seeing a huge resurgence in populist messaging over the past 10 years. Its aided by the distributed nature of the internet.
These are large disparate groups that are rarely exposed to others thoughts and understandings. It is wholly different than the media giants and their control of monoculture prior. It’s rare that we even ever have a tv show that a majority has watched together.
You watch too much TV - there are plenty of decent news sources that publish concerned pieces about OpenAI’s effects on society at large. And it is obviously having an effect on OpenAI as well.
Then OpenAI takes steps to mitigate those risks, and it becomes a salacious story as well.
Society having no idea what to expect from these tools makes this a difficult situation for LLM providers.