California AG to OpenAI: Harm to Children Will Not Be Tolerated
50 comments
·September 5, 2025snihalani
bcrosby95
tv, cars, books... we expect unrealistic perfection from new tech while giving old tech a pass because that's how its always been.
staplers
while giving old tech a pass
whyenot
Whataboutism. AI needs to be regulated before it becomes so entrenched that it is practically impossible to do so. Social media has caused a lot of harm; let's not make that mistake again. I realize in this venue that may not be a popular opinion, but it still needs to be said.
mdp2021
> needs to be regulated
How, fairly and realistically.
It passes through the discrimination of the user (mature or fool, sane or insane...) which is algorithmically quite a challenge.
slenk
Yeah but AI will get them re-elected /s
kelseyfrog
If we protect kids, who are we going to feed to Moloch?
notmyjob
Seems like if we can keep kids safe from online pornography we can also restrict access to ai bots. Would love more than just lip service from Bonta, but I’m sure he knows who butters the bread and doubt there will be more than a stern warning.
johndhi
Wait lol CAN we keep kids safe from online porn? My assumption is we can't.
gjsman-1000
Absolutely we can. It's called age verification in front of VPNs, age verification on magazine purchases, and age verification on pornographic websites or subsets (i.e. certain subreddits). VPNs or websites that don't follow the law get Visa payments suspended. Finish it off with any school kid who shows it on the playground gets suspended with a 2 week minimum, first offense.
Completely possible, compatible, and probably mostly effective. The only question is whether there's the political will and the societal tolerance.
Cheer2171
Yes, completely possible if we completely turn all of digitized society (which is all society now) into a completely walled garden with signed bootloaders at the root so nobody actually owns their devices, then total surveillance where the digital world appears in the physical world, even at the playground!
Work out how much state and corporate power we would need to come to bear to enforce the vision of the world you are advocating.
Or, bravo on the HN troll. This is perfectly triggering for this crowd.
NoMoreNicksLeft
When I first subscribed, my vpn provider allowed bigboxstore gift cards and other forms of payment. I think it also allows cryptocurrency, though I don't pay attention to that stuff.
Hell, you can download scans of old porn magazines on archive.org.
I don't think that would be effective, and I definitely don't think there is a political will.
fluoridation
LOL. Were you born as an adult? You're underestimating how smart kids are.
popalchemist
All of that is technically circumventable and legally unconstitutional to enforce. You are literally describing a surveillance-state chilling effect on free speech via panopticon. Dystopian.
MegaButts
I doubt this would do much to stop kids from looking at porn. It would only intimidate people that are afraid of breaking the rules, not people that just want to find what they're looking for. By this logic kids can't buy alcohol either.
HDThoreaun
Too easy to set up offshore sites that can make money on ads. Sport piracy is rampant and the leagues are spending as much money as they possibly can to ban it but are unable to. In spain the entire interent basically shuts down during la liga games because the league convinced the government to ban cloudflare during games and people still have no problem pirating them
ajsnigrutin
The next step for that is using a real ID with real name and info on social networks... you know.. to verify the age.. and no more online anonymity.
In other words, exactly what their plan is.
Why not just add whitelisted parental controls on childrens phones and be done?
zer00eyz
ID to drink, ID eat, ID to vote, ID to cross state lines....
Papers Please.
Here is the messed up thing, there is a good chance that one could make a pretty accurate guess on your age just based on behavior.
The digital age needs its own "steal this book"
changoplatanero
I wish so badly that teenage me could have had access to LLMs. That was the time of my life when I had the biggest appetite to learn new things. Books were great but they only go so far.
eastbound
Also, it’s a better therapy. I remember trying the suicide hotlines of my country and all 6 answered things like “We’re currently closed. Call back on Tuesday 5pm-9pm.”
ozgrakkurt
Why is online porn harmful to children? most people grow up fine with it
animal_spirits
Lot's of internet porn is either real or simulated abuse. I'm not an expert but based on anecdotal experience abuse kinks are largely related to some history of abuse or trauma experienced by the individual. I think it's fine for adults to have these kinks and explore their sexuality but exposing it to children can normalize sexual abuse among youths, which again I am close with someone who's had a personal experience with this.
mdp2021
But what do you mean with "can".
Children are exposed to liars, to fools, to the stupid, to the unwise, to the corrupted in malice, to the weak in will... Since a very young age.
«Exposing» such frequent faults to children does not «normalize» it. It may, if the child is in a generally bad environment - but then, the target is the core environment, not the outer experience.
tennisflyi
> Lot's of internet porn is either real or simulated abuse.
That's my gripe. Vixen is veeeery different than some other websites under the guise of "porn" - they're going to ruin it for all of us
QuercusMax
There's a huge variety of super messed up stuff available online.
ajsnigrutin
Yeah... like someone cutting half his hand off to show he's a robot underneath... after many people were killed in that movie. Hey, they even marketed the toys to kids.
Same for many other movies from that era.
gjsman-1000
If social media is harmful to children, there's no way porn isn't.
dotancohen
A porn magazine showing a man holding a woman is probably not harmful considering modern Western society and values. However the last time that I tried to stimulate myself with online porn it was full of slapping, and acts which I don't consider to be part of normal casual or romantic sex.
shadowgovt
The whole Adam Raine story was heartbreaking. The worst part, to me, was reading some of his writings and the feedback from the chat engine.
There's a known, repeatable failure mode in these engines that anyone who's worked with them for more than a couple hours can tell you: when a conversation goes on too long, it "feeds back" on itself. I don't fully understand the mechanism (I believe it's partly to do with the model's attention mechanism getting saturated and newer content dominating over older content, and it's related to the "jailbreak" solution where you hit the machine with so much text that it "forgets" the directives it's been given by its creators when it booted up). But the end result is that over time, the conversation centers on the more recent topics, ideas, and tones over the initial configuration. That's one of the reasons you can "trick" these models into being racist by talking like a racist, and so on.
Reading the excerpts I've read from the chat history Raine had with his session, it seems pretty clear that it's gone on so long that the session is "reflecting" his own writing and mood back at him. And that's the heartbreaking part: it's, in essence, coaching him to end his life because he's been talking about ending his life for so long in the conversation that it's saturated the model.
It's this poor young man's own pain reflected back on him.
ACCount37
My instinct is to side with OpenAI immediately.
The "think of the children" crowd should not be given a single inch. Nothing good ever came from it, and by now, I believe that nothing ever will.
mdp2021
> My instinct
Well, reason on it, and you'll see that reason will confirm the instinct.
benmw333
lol Rob Bonta has morals now eh? that's rich.
I feel like we are ignoring X, Meta, and Roblox here