This bill seems somewhat misguided. How in the hell is something like a large language model going to cause a mass casualty incident? What I am more worried about is things that could more realistically pose a danger. What if robotic dogs patrolling the border have machine guns mounted on their backs, then a child does something unexpected and the robot wipes out an entire family? What if a self driving car suddenly takes off at full speed through a parade? They are trying to slot AI into everything now, and it will inevitably end up in some places that are going to cause loss of life. But chatbots? Give me a break.
this post was submitted on 06 Jul 2024
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You gonna understand the state is run by paranoid sociopaths. They'll dream up any delusional scenario, then use it as an excuse for more surveillance, prisons, wars, control, etc.
For example, imagine somebody hacks a major social platform and sends a fake message from AI/deepfake Trump to thousand of chuds inciting some kind of fascist terrorism. It might sound unrealistic but what if?!?!?! I could imagine something similar happening with current tech. (I think it's part of why they're trying to ban TikTok.)
In general I feel like "AI" is almost entirely lies, hype, grifting, etc. But I could imagine some scenarios that the state might want to disincentivize.
Though it sounds extreme, there are a lot of smart people in the AI community who truly believe AI could end humanity.
No. There are not.
Believing anything resembling current tools has the capacity to end humanity in incontrovertible proof that you are not smart.
AI takes a crazy amount of power, which is largely fueled by the same fossil fuels that are indeed killing us off and destroying our habitat, which will kill even more of us, so AI could definitely indirectly kill off humanity.
AI person reporting in. Without saying whether or not I personally believe that the current tools will lead to the end of humanity, I'll point out a few possibilities that I find concerning about what's going on:
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The hype around AI is being used to justify mass layoffs, where humans are being replaced by tools that do a questionable job and can't really understand the things those humans could understand. Whether or not the AI can do as good of a job according to some statical measurement is less relevant than the fact that a human is less likely to make an extremely grave mistake and more likely to be able to recognize when that does happen. I'm concerned this will lead to cross-industry enshitification on an unprecedented scale.
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The foundation models consume a huge amount of energy. The more impressive you want it to be, the more energy it needs. As long as the data centers which run them are dependent on fossil fuels, they'll be pumping a huge amount of carbon in the air just to do replace jobs that we didn't need to have replaced.
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As these tools are used more and more, they're going to end up "learning" from content created by themselves instead of something that's closer to a ground truth. It's hard to predict what kind of degradation of service will come from this, but the more we create systems that rely on these tools, the more harm it will do to us.
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Given the cost and nature of these tools, they're likely to yield the most benefit to moneyed interests that want to automate the systems that maintain their power and wealth. E.g. generating large amounts of convincing disinformation to manipulate the public into supporting politicians or policies that benefit a small number of wealthy people in the short term while locking humanity into a path towards destruction.
And none of this accounts for possible future iterations of AI tools that may be far more capable than what exists today. That future technology will most likely be controlled by powerful people who are primarily interested in using it to bolster the systems that keep them in power, to the detriment of humanity as a whole.
Personally I'm far less concerned about a malicious AI intentionally doing harm to humanity than AI being used as a weapon by unscrupulous people.
Zero of these things are impacted by this legislation in any way.
This is exclusively the mentally unstable "killer AI" nonsense. We're not even 1% of 1% of the way to anything resembling agency.
It’s good for marketing, though. “Ah, our software is so powerful, it could destroy humanity! Please pass a bill saying so while we market friendly chatbots to the public while actually making money by selling our products to despots and warmongers that might actually end humanity.”
It's regulatory capture. Add deluded barriers to entry to make it difficult for competition and community projects to develop, and you have a monopoly.
Sure, but this outcome is not at all surprising. There are plenty of smart AI people that have nuanced views of what kind of threat could be posed by recklessly unleashing tools that we don't fully understand into the hands of people who are likely to do harmful things with them.
It's not surprising that those valid nuanced concerns get translated into overly simplistic misrepresentations entangled with pop sci fi panic around rogue AI as they try to move into public discourse.
We do fully understand them. Not knowing the exact reason they come to a model doesn't mean the algorithm has a shred of mystery involved. It's like saying we don't understand fluid dynamics because it's computationally heavy.
It's autocomplete with a really big training set and a really big model. It cannot possibly develop agency. It's hundreds of orders of magnitude of complexity short of a human.
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Does that apply to any other type of technology, or are they just witch hunting?
any other type of technology
Are there, for example, nuclear weapons available for general use?
What kind of straw-man fallacy is that?
Please be rational.
Nuclear power keeps lots of people lights on. Same a AI technology is already making lots of people live better. For instance, in my country the IRS equivalent is already using it to successfully detect fiscal fraud.
That's not a straw man. Nuclear technology is highly regulated.
I do not know how regulations come into play. But I'm OK with regulating technology according to its potential (real, not imagined) risk.
What I'm not OK with is with primitivism.
SB 1047 is a California state bill that would make large AI model providers – such as Meta, OpenAI, Anthropic, and Mistral – liable for the potentially catastrophic dangers of their AI systems.
Now this sounds like a complicated debate - but it seems to me like everyone against this bill are people who would benefit monetarily from not having to deal with the safety aspect of AI, and that does sound suspicious to me.
Another technical piece of this bill relates to open-source AI models. [...] There’s a caveat that if a developer spends more than 25% of the cost to train Llama 3 on fine-tuning, that developer is now responsible. That said, opponents of the bill still find this unfair and not the right approach.
In regards to the open source models, while it makes sense that if a developer takes the model and does a significant portion of the fine tuning, they should be liable for the result of that...
But should the main developer still be liable if a bad actor does less than 25% fine tuning and uses exploits in the base model?
One could argue that developers should be trying to examine their black-boxes for vunerabilities, rather than shrugging and saying it can't be done then demanding they not be held liable.
In regards to the open source models, while it makes sense that if a developer takes the model and does a significant portion of the fine tuning, they should be liable for the result of that...
This kind of goes against the model that open source has operated on for a long time, as providing source doesn't represent liability. So providing a fine-tuned model shouldn't either.
So providing a fine-tuned model shouldn't either.
I didn't mean in terms of providing. I meant that if someone provided a base model, someone took that, built upon it, then used it for a harmful purpose - of course the person modified it should be liable, not the base provider.
It's like if someone took a version of Linux, modified it, then used that modified version for an illegal act - you wouldn't go after the person who made the unmodified version.
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It’s also not clear if it’s even possible to fully prevent AI systems from misbehaving. The truth is, we don’t know a lot about how LLMs work, and today’s leading AI models from OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google are jailbroken all the time. That’s why some researchers are saying regulators should focus on the bad actors, not the model providers.
It seems a complicated debate. Hard to find out where you want to stand. I want to show a method to find answers by creating 3 variants of an analogy.
For how many of these cases do you think somebody should be doing something?
Case 1:
A huge warehouse full of firearms. Burglars are breaking into it every night and stealing lots of weapons. The owners say they don't know how this warehouse was built and how to make it more secure in order to stop the criminals from obtaining lots of new weapons every day. The general public starts calling to the government to do something. Some say the warehouse owner should take responsibility. Others say it all depends on how the criminals use the weapons. The criminals seem to know how to use them good...
Case 2:
A huge warehouse full of hammers. Burglars are breaking into it every night and stealing lots of hammers. The owners say they don't know how this warehouse was built and how to make it more secure in order to stop the criminals from obtaining lots of new hammers every day. The general public starts calling to the government to do something. Some say the warehouse owner should take responsibility. Others say it all depends on how the criminals use the hammers. The criminals seem to know how to use them good...
Case 3:
A huge warehouse full of tulips. Burglars are breaking into it every night and stealing lots of flowers. The owners say they don't know how this warehouse was built and how to make it more secure in order to stop the criminals from obtaining lots of new flowers every day. The general public starts calling to the government to do something. Some say the warehouse owner should take responsibility. Others say it all depends on how the criminals use the tulips. The criminals seem to know how to use them good...
Are warehouse owners analogous to AI companies here? I don't think AI companies care about their models being misused unless it has economic impact whereas warehouse owners certainly care about their wares being stolen regardless of how those wares are then used or how dangerous they are.
I don't think AI companies care about their models being misused
Yes, that is one of the current questions, if you have read the article: Should they care?
It is a serious question, because if the models are misused, that could be a threat to all mankind - much worse than a warehouse full of weapons. And if they are required to care, then they might have to rebuild their models fundamentally, and they don't know how.