OpenAI asks White House for relief from state AI rules

Agreed!

Though if you think about it laws typically change after we agree (at the grassroots level) they are irrelevant, not before.

35 years is a press release sentence. The way DOJ calculates sentences when they write press releases ignores the alleged facts of the particular case and just uses for each charge the theoretically maximum possible sentence that someone could get for that charge.

To actually get that maximum typically requires things like the person is a repeat offender, drug dealing was involved, people were physically harmed, it involved organized crime, it involved terrorism, a large amount of money was involved, or other things that make it an unusual big and serious crime.

The DOJ knows exactly what they are alleging the defendant did. They could easily looks at the various factors that affect sentencing for the charge and see which apply to that case and come up with a realistic number but that doesn't make it sound as impressive in the press release.

Another thing that inflates the numbers in the press releases is that defendants are often charged with several related charges. For many crimes there are groups of related charges that for sentencing get merged. If you are charged with say 3 charges from the same group and convicted on all you are only sentenced for whichever one of them has the longest sentence.

If you've got 3 charges from such a group in the press release the DOJ might just take the completely bogus maximum for each as described above and just add those 3 together.

Here's a good article on DOJ's ridiculous sentence numbers [1].

Here's a couple of articles from an expert in this area of law that looks specifically at what Swartz was charged with and what kind of sentence he was actually looking at [2][3].

Why do you think Swartz was downloading the articles to learn from them? As far as I've seen know one knows for sure what he was intending.

If he wanted to learn from JSTOR articles he could have downloaded them using the JSTOR account he had through his research fellowship at Harvard. Why go to MIT and use their public JSTOR WiFi access, and then when that was cut off hide a computer in a wiring closet hooked into their ethernet?

I've seen claims that he wanted to do was meta research about scientific publishing as a whole which could explain why he needed to download more than he could download with his normal JSTOR account from Harvard, but again why do that using MIT's public WiFi access? JSTOR has granted more direct access to large amounts of data for such research. Did he talk to them first to try to get access that way?

[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20230107080107/https://www.popeh...

[2] https://volokh.com/2013/01/14/aaron-swartz-charges/

[3] https://volokh.com/2013/01/16/the-criminal-charges-against-a...

I've heard so many ridiculous stories about 'AI' that I'm at the point where I initially took this to mean the LLM and not the company had made the request.

I expect that interpretation won't seem outlandish in the future.

> No one said they "don't want it".

Your own words suggest this. Many others are more explicit. There are calls for models to be forcibly deleted. Your own statements here about lack of consent are still in this vein.

> No one said "it's scary".

Many, including me, find it so.

> No one is "dismissing them".

You, specifically you, are — "feeling or showing that something is unworthy of consideration".

> if you don't understand the argument about consent and the extremely obvious difference between Python programs and humans that I already pointed out, then no one can help you.

Consent is absolutely an argument I get. It's specifically where I'm agreeing with you.

The other half of that…

Python, like all programming languages, is universal. Python programs can implement physics, so trying to use the argument "because it's implemented on silicon rather than chemistry" is a distinction without a difference.

Quantum mechanics is linear algebra.

> I'll keep making these arguments, because they are good ones, and they are obvious to any human being who isn't stuck in tech-bro fairy land blabbering about how human consciousness is completely identical to Python linear algebra libraries when any 6 year old child knows with certainty they are not.

(An example of you "dismissing" AI).

Then you'll keep being confused and enraged about why people disagree with you.

And not just because you have a wildly wrong understanding of what 6 year olds think about. I remember being 6, all the silly things I believed back then. What my classmates believed falsely. How far most of us were from understanding what algebra was, let alone distinguishing linear algebra from other kinds.

I've got a philosophy A-level, which is enough to know that "consciousness" is a completely unsolved question and absolutely nobody agrees what the minimum requirements are for it. 40 different definitions, we don't even all agree what the question is yet, much less then answer.

But I infer from you bring it up, that you think "consciousness" is an important thing that AI is missing?

Well perhaps it is something current AI miss, something their architecture hasn't got — when we can't agree what the question is, any answer is possible. We evolved it, but just because it can pop up for no good reason doesn't mean it must be present everywhere. (I say much the same to people who are convinced AI must have it: we don't know). So, what if machines are not conscious? Why does that matter?

And you've not answered one of my examples. To repeat:

I'm following a YouTube channel where they're growing mouse neurons on electrode grids to train them to play video games. It's entirely plausible, given the current rate of progress, that 15 years from now, GPT-4 could be encoded onto a brain organoid the size of a living mouse's brain — does it magically become OK then? And in 30 years, that same thing as an implant into a human?

I don't think that is meaningfully distinct, morally speaking, from doing this in silicon. Making the information alive and in my own brain makes it not python, but all the consent issues remain.