Dave Willner

That's not how the End Times work Mike!

Bellingcat’s contact email has always been a magnet for people with fairly unusual views; paranoid delusions, sprawling conspiracies, the works. But recently, the pattern has shifted, we’re seeing more and more emails clearly written with ChatGPT.

this administration, and its congressional allies, are free speech phonies. not warriors. phonies. censors. propagandists.

DHS playing 'whack-a-mole' shooting down made-up ICE stories The Department of Homeland Security is stepping up efforts to combat fake news, viral AI videos, and misinformation on ICE and Border Patrol.

Just wanna re-up in simple terms that when Biden talked to platforms, Jim Jordan launched years of investigations into everybody involved, said it was tyranny, censorship, etc.

And now they just straight up acknowledge that they talk to platforms too.

www.washingtonexaminer.com/news/crime/3...

💸

Totally feel free to point folks to the blog, it won’t poison anything!

Observations on Toxicity We've published Zentropi's toxicity labeler (toxicity-public-s5), which you can integrate with your platform instantly using the Zentropi API. Browse the full policy to see how defining observable fea...

We just wrote an in-depth post about Toxic Content labeling. It presents a new way of defining toxic speech online-- and illustrates the importance of observable features for accurate language model interpretability. Would love to hear how YOU define toxicity, too! blog.zentropi.ai/observations...

Observations on Toxicity We published a novel toxicity labeler (toxicity-public-s5), which you can integrate with your platform instantly using the Zentropi API. Browse the full policy to see how defining observable features ...

I’ve had a very “text-oriented” view of content labeling for a long time, and used the opportunity of our recent launch to lay out some of those ideas in the context of the idea of “toxicity”

Interested to know what others think!

blog.zentropi.ai/observations...

Find these at zentropi.ai and on my profile at zentropi.ai/u/dave. As more folks write and publish policies, we'll be adding the best ones to the featured section to give people more options. 🧵 5/5

Our goal here isn't to provide perfect policies or tell anyone what rules they should have. It's to provide examples of what actually works when writing content policies for LLM interpretation that anyone can then adapt to fit their own needs. 🧵 4/5

To start things off, I've built 7 policies - harassment, hate, violence, self-harm, sexual content, drugs, and toxicity. All created using Zentropi itself, with a touch of editing on my end. Examples of what's possible, starting points to adapt. 🧵 3/5

We're hoping to change this by encouraging more public sharing of people's work. So, today, we're launching policy discovery and sharing on Zentropi. Browse featured policies, find more from authors you like, fork what fits, and adapt for your context. 🧵 2/5

Content policies are usually private, one-off efforts. You build yours, I build mine, we don't share much about what works or why. This makes sense given products can (and should) set different policies based on their communities, but it leaves us reinventing the wheel. 🧵 1/5

You should resign both your leadership position and your seat so that someone who is up to this can take over.

*whispers* you can continue to read me, the pundit who insisted the other pundits were wrong about these conclusions

Go U Bears!

Picture of the East Wing demolition of the White House taken on my flight out of DCA.

It’s recorded iirc, should be up on YouTube!

Automating Content Policy AI is no longer just moderating individual posts — it is learning how to interpret and enforce policy itself. Dave Willner — who has led trust and safety teams at Facebook, Airbnb, and OpenAI — joins ...

I am forgetful about it self-promotion, so dropping a last minute link to note that I’m giving a talk Berkman Klein today. Come check it out if you’re free, or catch the recording later:

cyber.harvard.edu/events/autom...

I feel like some of the difference in reactions here also rests on on frequently you have to do a somewhat complex, but very repetitive, task. Taking the time to get these sort of workflows really dialed in is most useful for stuff you do over and over.

I’ve never understood why, because it’s not like this was a subtle theme!

He would definitely have also hated that 😂

The thing that always gets me is that Tolkien obviously would have hated Silicon Valley generally, and these particular guys specifically.

Tyranny is brittle.

Right? I don’t even know what the current fight is about, but let’s not be silly now.

So, the first part of this is plainly false, both historically and currently. I don’t think it’s a good thing in most cases…but it’s plainly the case that pressuring the people in charge of moderation to either ban (or not ban) people works *All The Time*. It is why people do it!

Moderating is Such Sweet Sorrow - Ctrl-Alt-Speech In this week’s roundup of the latest news in online speech, content moderation and internet regulation, Mike is joined by Dave Willner, founder of Zentropi, and long-time trust & safety expert who...

New Ctrl-Alt-Speech: Moderating is Such Sweet Sorrow with guest host @dwillner.bsky.social who is entirely responsible for bringing up Shakespeare as part of this discussion. (@benwhitelaw.bsky.social will be back next week!)

podcast.ctrlaltspeech.com/2315966/epis...

While terrible, this is entirely unsurprising. If you hold serious safety efforts in contempt, this sort of thing is inevitable.

Disney/ABC have a responsibility to refuse to participate in corruption.

Kimmel must be reinstated. If Disney/ABC agree to this extortion then perhaps creatives + workers should consider collective action to push back. Same w/buying park + cruise tickets if they bow.

People have power. Ask Target

No one who agrees to this is a journalist.