AI safety people are hypocrites. If they practiced what they preached, they'd be calling for all AI to be banned, ala Dune. There are AI harms that don't care about whether or not the weights are available, and are playing out today. I'm talking about the ability of any AI system to obfuscate plagiarism[0] and spam the Internet with technically distinct rewords of the same text. This is currently the most lucrative u…
They are calling for all AI (above a certain capability level) to be banned. Not just open, not just closed, all.
There are risks that apply only to open. There are risks that apply only to closed. But nobody should be developing AGI without incredibly robustly proven alignment, open or closed, any more than people should be developing nuclear weapons in their garage.
> This is currently the most lucrative use of AI, and none of the AI safety people are talking about stopping it.
Because AI safety people are not the strawmen you are hypothesizing. They're arguing against taking existential risks. AI being a laundering operation for copyright violations is certainly a problem. It's not an existential risk.
If you want to argue, concretely and with evidence, why you think it isn't an existential risk, that's an argument you could reasonably make. But don't portray people as ineffectively doing the thing you think they should be doing, when they are in fact not trying to do that, and only trying to do something they deem more important.