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SB-1047 will stifle open-source AI and decrease safety

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131–140 of 201 posts

Re: SB-1047 will stifle open-source AI and decrease safety

#131
"This could inadvertently criminalize the activities of well-intentioned developers working on beneficial AI projects."

It wouldn't be inadvertent. It's a control tactic.

"Placing liability on the creators of general purpose tools like these mean that, in practice, such tools can not be created at all, except by big businesses with well funded legal teams." ... "These requirements could disproportionately impact open-source developers who often lack the resources of larger corporations to navigate complex regulatory processes." ... "The proposed regulations create significant barriers to entry for small businesses and startups looking to innovate in the AI space."

That's the idea. The government likes a small number of big businesses that they can control.

Re: SB-1047 will stifle open-source AI and decrease safety

#132
post #6
post #2

This entire article feels like it was written by ChatGPT. For instance, it continuously makes vague claims about the value of open source without even citing the original bill.

The eagerness to summarize points in bulleted lists is a ChatGPT-ism as well.

Hey now, I like bullet points myself, as I'm easily distracted otherwise.

Re: SB-1047 will stifle open-source AI and decrease safety

#133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Best practices will say things like "you should test it". While we are ignorant, there are just many reasonable things to do. Human biology is not completely understood, but that does not mean medical checklists are useless.

Test it how? What makes it fail? The ability to tell people how to make a bomb? Being able to say what (few) good things Hitler accomplished for Germany? Giving medical advice? Where’s the line?

One thing law explicitly says is full shutdown capability. So it should be tested whether it can autonomously hack computers on the internet and propagate itself. In fact Anthropic tested this. See https://metr.org/ for more.

Re: SB-1047 will stifle open-source AI and decrease safety

#134
post #129
post #34

> The creator of a model can not ensure that a model is never used to do something harmful – any more so that the developer of a web browser, calculator, or word processor could. Placing liability on the creators of general purpose tools like these mean that, in practice, such tools can not be created at all, except by big businesses with well funded legal teams. This matches my thoughts on why this is ultimately a b…

Someone who creates very dangerous items needs to take responsibility for them. Or their production needs to be very heavily regulated. That is just a reality. We don't let companies sell grenades on street corners. The running away from responsibility is one of the things I like least about big tech.

This is a strawman argument. LLMs, like books, are not inherently dangerous. Grenades are, and lack any legitimate purpose beyond indiscriminate killing.

LLMs are functions of their training data, nothing more. This is evidenced by how we see very different model architectures produce essentially the same result. All of that training data is out there, on the internet, in books; none of that “dangerous” knowledge is banned or regulated, nor should it be.

Re: SB-1047 will stifle open-source AI and decrease safety

#136
post #74
post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Laws should be about the outcome, not about processes that may lead to an outcome. It is already illegal in California to produce your own nuclear weapon. Instead of outlawing books, because they allow research into building giant gundam robots, just outlaw giant gundam robots.

Laws also should be possible (preferably easy) to implement. Why does DMCA ban circumvention tools? Circumvention is already illegal and it is piracy that should be outlawed, not tools to enable piracy? The reason is piracy tools are considerably easier to regulate than piracy.

The DMCA ban on circumumvention has been both stunningly useless at discouraging piracy and effective at hurting normal users including such glorious stupidity as being used to prevent 3rd party ink cartridges.

Circumvention also absent the DMCA isn't illegal.

Re: SB-1047 will stifle open-source AI and decrease safety

#137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nobody has been killed by AI, unless you're arguing it impacts mental health [1]. A better-fitting analogy I'd make is that sex causes disease and other negative externalities, so we should pass laws that force people to be married and licensed in order to have sex. In any case, this bill is the walking epitome of something a "nanny state" might produce. [1] TikTok and Instagram have far more impact on this, and we'v…

>Nobody has been killed by AI Some of us worry that billions of people will be killed by AI in the future -- possibly without anything that you or the average decision-maker might regard as a warning. (They're likely to be killed all at the same time.) I.e., it is more like a large asteroid slamming into the Earth than a stream of deaths over time such as produced by the deployment in society of the automobile (excep…

Safety and alignment stopped being about preventing AI from killing all humans a while ago. Unless you think that "don't say anything potentially offensive" is in-scope with "don't kill humans and don't take over the world by any means necessary to carry out your prompt."

Re: SB-1047 will stifle open-source AI and decrease safety

#138
post #129
post #34

> The creator of a model can not ensure that a model is never used to do something harmful – any more so that the developer of a web browser, calculator, or word processor could. Placing liability on the creators of general purpose tools like these mean that, in practice, such tools can not be created at all, except by big businesses with well funded legal teams. This matches my thoughts on why this is ultimately a b…

Someone who creates very dangerous items needs to take responsibility for them. Or their production needs to be very heavily regulated. That is just a reality. We don't let companies sell grenades on street corners. The running away from responsibility is one of the things I like least about big tech.

[deleted]

Re: SB-1047 will stifle open-source AI and decrease safety

#139
post #34

> The creator of a model can not ensure that a model is never used to do something harmful – any more so that the developer of a web browser, calculator, or word processor could. Placing liability on the creators of general purpose tools like these mean that, in practice, such tools can not be created at all, except by big businesses with well funded legal teams. This matches my thoughts on why this is ultimately a b…

I really hate the (apparently very popular) idea that we should be shifting responsibility away from end users and toward providers and makers of tools. From playgrounds to drugs to software, our society wants to force the suppliers to make things safe by design rather than requiring and educating end users on responsible use.
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