Sounds more like you're asking about digital make-up, which can range from instagram filters to virtual avatars. And yeah, we can't tell how much of their presented look is real without a reference.

But does it matter? These people create an identity that only exists in the digital world. Who cares what they look like in the real world if you're never going to see them in the real world?

It's weird how getting married then divorced makes that true.

None of those concerns have to do with the intrinsic nature of machine learning, though. Right now it's another tool that can automate tasks previously thought impossible to automate, and sometimes it does that task much better than humans could. It's another wave like the Industrial Revolution and the assembly line.

Some people will inevitably use this technology to destroy things on a greater scale than ever before, like using the assembly line to mass produce missiles and tanks. But trying to put a leash on the technology won't accomplish anything because technology isn't inherently good or evil.

Now, if the state of ML were such that sentient AI was actually on the horizon, not only would this way of thinking be wrong, we'd need to rethink the concepts of humanity and morality altogether. But it's not. Not until these models manage to improve at tasks it was not trained to do. Not until these models become capable of accurate self-evaluation of its own performance without human input.

If there are people willing to moderate with an iron fist, an academic focused subreddit can work well. An open forum always get derailed, real name or no.

The whole assessing its own success is the bottleneck for most interesting problems. You can't have a feedback loop unless it can accurately evaluate if it's doing better or worse. This isn't a trivial problem either, since humans aren't all that great at using absolute metrics to describe quality, once past a minimum threshold.

The main context people seem to be missing is that Singapore is a very small country with little diversity in demographics. Democracy in a country where everyone already agrees on all the important issues obviously looks very different from democracy in a country where parties have to take turns being in power. It'd be like if some Californians or Texans formed a city-state and formed their own country, except in a tiny land mass with like 10% of the population.

Maybe for like childrens' libraries.

The real dystopia is if those books are actually banned. That implies there's enough power in whatever's written that it would sway the worldviews of your citizens. Or your citizens are that easily manipulated.

In reality, banned books are more like unpopular books that aren't worth shelving much less printing.