I think Asimov had some thoughts on this subject
Wild that we’re at this point now
Asimov didn’t design the three laws to make robots safe.
He designed them to make robots break in ways that’d make Powell and Donovan’s lives miserable in particularly hilarious (for the reader, not the victims) ways.
(They weren’t even designed for actual safety in-world; they were designed for the appearance of safety, to get people to buy robots despite the Frankenstein complex.)
I wish more people realized science fiction authors aren’t even trying to make good predictions about the future, even if that’s something they were good at. They’re trying to make stories that people will enjoy reading and therefore that will sell well. Stories where nothing goes particularly wrong tend not to have a compelling plot, so they write about technology going awry so that there’ll be something to write about. They insert scary stuff because people find reading about scary stuff to be fun.
There might actually be nothing bad about the Torment Nexus, and the classic sci-fi novel “Don’t Create The Torment Nexus” was nonsense. We shouldn’t be making policy decisions based off of that.
Asimov’s stories were mostly about how it would be a terrible idea to put kill switches on AI, because he assumed that perfectly rational machines would be better, more moral decision makers than human beings.
This guy didn’t read the robot series.
The criticism from large AI companies to this bill sounds a lot like the pushbacks from auto manufacturers from adding safety features like seatbelts, airbags, and crumple zones. Just because someone else used a model for nefarious purposes doesn’t absolve the model creator from their responsibility to minimize that potential. We already do this for a lot of other industries like cars, guns, and tobacco - minimize the potential of harm despite individual actions causing the harm and not the company directly.
I have been following Andrew Ng for a long time and I admire his technical expertise. But his political philosophy around ML and AI has always focused on self regulation, which we have seen fail in countless industries.
The bill specifically mentions that creators of open source models that have been altered and fine tuned will not be held liable for damages from the altered models. It also only applies to models that cost more than $100M to train. So if you have that much money for training models, it’s very reasonable to expect that you spend some portion of it to ensure that the models do not cause very large damages to society.
So companies hosting their own models, like openAI and Anthropic, should definitely be responsible for adding safety guardrails around the use of their models for nefarious purposes - at least those causing loss of life. The bill mentions that it would only apply to very large damages (such as, exceeding $500M), so one person finding out a loophole isn’t going to trigger the bill. But if the companies fail to close these loopholes despite millions of people (or a few people millions of times) exploiting them, then that’s definitely on the company.
As a developer of AI models and applications, I support the bill and I’m glad to see lawmakers willing to get ahead of technology instead of waiting for something bad to happen and then trying to catch up like for social media.
self regulate? big tech company? pfft right we all know how that goes
If companies are crying about it then it’s probably a great thing for consumers.
Eat billionaires.
The California bill was co-sponsored by the Center for AI Safety (CAIS), a San Francisco-based non-profit run by computer scientist Dan Hendrycks, who is the safety adviser to Musk’s AI start-up, xAI. CAIS has close ties to the effective altruism movement, which was made famous by jailed cryptocurrency executive Sam Bankman-Fried.
Ahh, yes. Elon Musk, paragon of consumer protection. Let’s just trust his safety guy.
It’s designed to give the big players a monopoly, seems bad for the majority of us
So if smaller companies are crying about huge companies using reglation they have lobbied for (as in this case through a lobbying oranisation set up with “effective altruism” money) being used prevent them from being challenged: should we still assume its great?
Rewind all the stupid assumptions you’re making and you basically have no comment left.
Which assumption? It’s a fact that this was co-sponsored by the CAIS, who have ties to effective altruism and Musk, and it is a fact that smaller startups and open source groups are complaining that this will hand an AI oligopoly to huge tech firms.
My current day is only just starting, so I’ll modify the standard quote a bit to ensure it encompasses enough things to be meaningful; this is the dumbest thing I’ve read all yesterday.
Companies cry the same way about the bills to ban end to end encryption, and they’re still bad for consumers too
I had a short look at the text of the bill. It’s not as immediately worrying as I feared, but still pretty bad.
https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/billTextClient.xhtml?bill_id=202320240SB1047
Here’s the thing: How would you react, if this bill required all texts that could help someone “hack” to be removed from libraries? Outrageous, right? What if we only removed cybersecurity texts from libraries if they were written with the help of AI? Does it now become ok?
What if the bill “just” sought to prevent such texts from being written? Still outrageous? Well, that is what this bill is trying to do.
Seems a reasonable request. You are creating a tool with the potential to be used as a weapon, you must be able to guarantee it won’t be used as such. Power is nothing without control.
This bill targets AI systems that are like the ChatGPT series. These AIs produce text, images, audio, video, etc… IOW they are dangerous in the same way that a library is dangerous. A library may contain instructions on making bombs, nerve gas, and so on. In the future, there will likely be AIs that can also give such instructions.
Controlling information or access to education isn’t exactly a good guy move. It’s not compatible with a free or industrialized country. Maybe some things need to be secret for national security, but that’s not really what this bill is about.
Yep nothing about censorship is cool. But for rampaging agi systems, a button to kill it would be nice. However it leads into a game and a paradox on how this could ever be achieved
I don’t see much harm in a “kill switch”, so If it makes people happy… But it is sci-fi silliness. AI is software. Malfunctioning software can be dangerous if it controls, say, heavy machinery. But we don’t have kill switches for software. We have kill switches for heavy machinery, because that is what needs to be turned off to stop harm.
I am pretty sure no one has ever built a computer that can’t be shut off. Somehow someway.
How is that reasonable? Almost anything could be potentially used as a weapon, or to aid in crime.
This is for models that cost 100 million dollars to train. Not all things are the same and most things that can do serious damage to big chunks of population are regulated. Cars are regulated, firearms are regulated, access to drugs is regulated. Even internet access is super controlled. I don’t see how you can say AI should not be regulated.
AI is already regulated. Just because something is new (to the public) does not mean that laws don’t apply to it. We don’t need regulation for the sake of regulation.
There’s a lot of AI regulation that may become necessary one day. For example, maybe we should have a right to an AI assistant, like there is a right to legal counsel today. Should we be thinking about the minimum compute to assign to public defense AIs?
This is for models that cost 100 million dollars to train.
Or take a certain amount of compute. Right now, this covers no models. Between progress and inflation, it will eventually cover all models. At some point between no and then, the makers of such laws will be cursed as AI illiterate fools, like we curse computer illiterate boomers today.
Think about this example you gave: Cars are regulated
We regulate cars, and implicitly the software in it. We do not regulate software in the abstract. We don’t monitor mechanics or engineers. People are encouraged to learn and to become educated.
Of course you regulate software in the abstract. Have you ever heard of the regulations concerning onboard navigation software in planes? It’s really strict, and mechanics and engineers that work on that are monitored.
Better exemple: do you think people who work on the targeting algorithms in missiles are allowed to chat about the specifics of their algorithms with chat gpt? Because they aren’t.
Not everything is a slippery slope. In this case the scenario where learning about cybersecurity is even slightly hinderedby this law doesn’t sound particularly convincing in your comment.
The bill is supposed to prevent speech. It is the intended effect. I’m not saying it’s a slippery slope.
I chose to focus on cybersecurity, because that is where it is obviously bad. In other areas, you can reasonably argue that some things should be classified for “national security”. If you prevent open discussion of security problems, you just make everything worse.
Yeah, a bunch of speech is restricted. Restricting speech isn’t in itself bad, it’s generally only a problem when it’s used to oppress political opposition. But copyrights, hate speech, death threats, doxxing, personal data, defense related confidentiality… Those are all kinds of speech that are strictly regulated when they’re not outright banned, for the express purpose of guaranteeing safety, and it’s generally accepted.
In this case it’s not even restricting the content of speech. Only a very special kind of medium that consists in generating speech through an unreliably understood method of rock carving is restricted, and only when applied to what is argued as a sensitive subject. The content of the speech isn’t even in question. You can’t carve a cyber security text in the flesh of an unwilling human either, or even paint it on someone’s property, but you can just generate exactly the same speech with a pen and paper and it’s a-okay.
If your point isn’t that the unrelated scenarios in your original comment are somehow the next step, I still don’t see how that’s bad.
Restricting speech isn’t in itself bad,
That’s certainly not the default opinion. Why do you think freedom of expression is a thing?
Oh yeah? And which restriction of free speech illustrating my previous comment would is even remotely controversial, do you think?
I’ve actually stated explicitly before why I believe it is a thing: to protect political dissent from being criminalized. Why do you think it is a thing?
And which restriction of free speech illustrating my previous comment would is even remotely controversial, do you think?
All of these regularly cause controversy.
I’ve actually stated explicitly before why I believe it is a thing: to protect political dissent from being criminalized. Why do you think it is a thing?
That’s not quite what I meant. Take the US 2nd amendment; the right to bear arms. It is fairly unique. But freedom of expression is ubiquitous as a guaranteed right (on paper, obviously). Why are ideas from the 1st amendment ubiquitous 200 years later, but not from the 2nd?
My answer is, because you cannot have a prosperous, powerful nation without freedom of information. For one, you can’t have high-tech without an educated citizenry sharing knowledge. I don’t know of any country that considers freedom of expression limited to political speech. It’s one of the more popular types of speech to cause persecution. Even in the more liberal countries, calls to overthrow the government or secede tends to be frowned on.
Do they really? Carving into people’s flesh causes controversy? The US sure is wild.
Even if some of my examples do cause controversy in the US sometimes (I do realize you lot tend to fantasize free speech as an absolute rather than a freedom that - although very important - is always weighed against all the other very important rights like security and body autonomy) they do stand as examples of limits to free speech that are generally accepted by the large majority. Enough that those controversies don’t generally end up in blanket decriminalization of mutilation and vandalism. So I still refute that my stance is not “the default opinion”. It may be rarely formulated this way, but I posit that the absolutism you defend is, in actuality, the rarer opinion of the two.
The example of restriction of free speech your initial comment develops upon is a fringe consequence of the law in question and doesn’t even restrict the information from circulating, only the tools you can use to write it. My point is that this is not at all uncommon in law, even in american law, and that it does not, in fact, prevent information from circulating.
The fact that you fail to describe why circulation of information is important for a healthy society makes your answer really vague. The single example you give doesn’t help : if scientific and tech-related information were free to circulate scientists wouldn’t use sci-hub. And if it were the main idea, universities would be free in the US (the country that values free speech the most) rather than in European countries that have a much more relative viewpoint on it. The well known “everything is political” is the reason why you don’t restrict free speech to explicitly political statements. How would you draw the line by law? It’s easier and more efficient to make the right general, and then create exceptions on a case-by-case basis (confidential information, hate speech, calls for violence, threats of murder…)
Should confidential information be allowed to circulate to Putin from your ex-President then?
The bill, passed by the state’s Senate last month and set for a vote from its general assembly in August, requires AI groups in California to guarantee to a newly created state body that they will not develop models with “a hazardous capability,” such as creating biological or nuclear weapons or aiding cyber security attacks.
I’ll get right back to my AI-powered nuclear weapons program after I finish adding glue to my AI-developed pizza sauce.
this is where the AI hype has taken us
Can we please just kill all so-called ‘AI’ before we fuck ourselves with it?
Someone just didn’t put enough non toxic glue in their pizza and is in a bad mood as a result.
Fuck off
You know he just agreed with you, right? Of at least shared your sentiment towards AI
Cake and eat it too. We hear from the industry itself how wary we should be but we shouldn’t act on it - except to invest of course.
The industry itself hyped its dangers. If it was to drum up business, well, suck it.
The bill, passed by the state’s Senate last month and set for a vote from its general assembly in August, requires AI groups in California to guarantee to a newly created state body that they will not develop models with “a hazardous capability,” such as creating biological or nuclear weapons or aiding cyber security attacks.
I don’t see how you could realistically provide that guarantee.
I mean, you could create some kind of best-effort thing to make it more difficult, maybe.
If we knew how to make AI – and this is going past just LLMs and stuff – avoid doing hazardous things, we’d have solved the Friendly AI problem. Like, that’s a good idea to work towards, maybe. But point is, we’re not there.
Like, I’d be willing to see the state fund research on that problem, maybe. But I don’t see how just mandating that models be conformant to that is going to be implementable.
you can guarantee it, by feeding it only information without weapon information. The information they use, is just scraping every single piece of data from the internet.
Thats on the companies to figure out, tbh. “you cant say we arent allowed to build biological weapons, thats too hard” isn’t what you’re saying, but it’s a hyperbolic example. The industry needs to figure out how to control the monster they’ve happily sent staggering towards the village, and really they’re the only people with the knowledge to figure out how to stop it. If it’s not possible, maybe we should restrict this tech until it is possible. LLMs aren’t going to end the world, probably, but a protein sequencing AI that hallucinates while replicating a flu virus could be real bad for us as a species, to say nothing of the pearl clutching scenario of bad actors getting ahold of it.
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There are many tools that might be used to create a biological weapon or something. You can use a pocket calculator for that. But we don’t place bars on sale of pocket calculators to require proof be issued that nothing hazardous can be done with them. That is, this is a bar that is substantially higher than exists for any other tool.
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Second, while I certainly think that there are legitimate existential risks, we are not looking at a near-term one. OpenAI or whoever isn’t going to be producing something human-level any time soon. Like, Stable Diffusion, a tool used to generate images, would fall under this. It’s very questionable that it, however, would be terribly useful in doing anything dangerous.
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California putting a restriction like that in place, absent some kind of global restriction, won’t stop development of models. It just ensures that it’ll happen outside California. Like, it’ll have a negative economic impact on California, maybe, but it’s not going to have a globally-restrictive impact.
Like, Stable Diffusion, a tool used to generate images, would fall under this. It’s very questionable that it, however, would be terribly useful in doing anything dangerous.
My concern is how short a hop it is from this to “won’t someone please think of the children?” And then someone uses Stable Diffusion to create a baby in a sexy pose and it’s all down in flames. IMO that sort of thing happens enough that pushing back against “gateway” legislation is reasonable.
California putting a restriction like that in place, absent some kind of global restriction, won’t stop development of models.
I’d be concerned about its impact on the deployment of models too. Companies are not going to want to write software that they can’t sell in California, or that might get them sued if someone takes it into California despite it not being sold there. Silicon Valley is in California, this isn’t like it’s Montana banning it.
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It’s not a monster. It doesn’t vaguely resemble a monster.
It’s a ridiculously simple tool that does not in any way resemble intelligence and has no agency. LLMs do not have the capacity for harm. They do not have the capability to invent or discover (though if they did, that would be a massive boon for humanity and also insane to hold back). They’re just a combination of a mediocre search tool with advanced parsing of requests and the ability to format the output in the structure of sentences.
AI cannot do anything. If your concern is allowing AI to release proteins into the wild, obviously that is a terrible idea. But that’s already more than covered by all the regulation on research in dangerous diseases and bio weapons. AI does not change anything about the scenario.
I largely agree, current LLMs add no capabilities to humanity that it did not already possess. The point of the regulation is to encourage a certain degree of caution in future development though.
Personally I do think it’s a little overly broad. Google search can aid in a cyber security attack. The kill switch idea is also a little silly, and largely a waste of time dreamed up by watching too many Terminator and Matrix movies. While we eventually might reach a point where that becomes a prudent idea, we’re still quite far away.
We’re not anywhere near anything that has anything in common with human level intelligence, or poses any threat.
The only possible cause for support of legislation like this is either a completely absence of understanding of what the technology is combined with treating Hollywood as reality (the layperson and probably most legislators involved in this), or an aggressive market control attempt through regulatory capture by big tech. If you understand where we are and what paths we have forward, it’s very clear that there’s only harm that this can do.
The only thing that I fear more than big tech is a bunch of old people in congress trying to regulate technology who probably only know of AI from watching terminator.
Also, fun Scott Wiener fact. He was behind a big push to decriminalization knowingly spreading STDs even if you lied to your partner about having one.
Also, fun Scott Wiener fact. He was behind a big push to decriminalization knowingly spreading STDs even if you lied to your partner about having one.
congrats on falling for right wing disinformation
Right wing disinformation? Lol
https://www.latimes.com/politics/la-pol-sac-aids-felony-20170315-story.html
https://pluralpolicy.com/app/legislative-tracking/bill/details/state-ca-20172018-sb239/30682
If you knowingly lie and spread an std through sex or donating blood it goes from a felony to a misdemeanor. Aka decriminalization.
I don’t know how that’s right wing. I believe most people across the political spectrum probably don’t STDs, and especially don’t want to get them because a partner lied or they got a blood transfusion.
I also hate how so many people jump to call something disinformation just because they don’t like a particular fact. You calling it disinformation is in fact disinformation itself, and if everybody calls everything they don’t like disinformation then society will have no idea what is true or not.
you have to actually read the article not stop at the headline…
I did read the article, the article that I shared, that explains exactly what I said: Scott Weiner campaigned to decriminalization knowingly spreading STDs while lying.
What did I say that was wrong?
“Big companies affected by new laws whine about it.”
If it weren’t constantly on fire and on the edge of the North American Heat Dome™ then Cali would seem like such a cool magical place.
Won’t a fire axe work perfectly well?
A fire axe works fine when you’re in the same room with the AI. The presumption is the AI has figured out how to keep people out of its horcrux rooms when there isn’t enough redundancy.
However the trouble with late game AI is it will figure out how to rewrite its own code, including eliminating kill switches.
A simple proof-of-concept example is explained in the Bobiverse: Book one We Are Legion (We Are Bob) …and also in Neil Stephenson’s Snow Crash; though in that case Hiro, a human, manipulates basilisk data without interacting with it directly.
Also as XKCD points out, long before this becomes an issue, we’ll have to face human warlords with AI-controlled killer robot armies, and they will control the kill switch or remove it entirely.
if the T-1000 hasn’t been 3D printed yet, the axe may still work
Now I’m imagining someone standing next to the 3D printer working on a T-1000, fervently hoping that the 3D printer that’s working on their axe finishes a little faster. “Should have printed it lying flat on the print bed,” he thinks to himself. “Would it be faster to stop the print and start it again in that orientation? Damn it, I printed it edge-up, I have to wait until it’s completely done…”
The idea of holding developers of open source models responsible for the activities of forks is a terrible precedent
The bill excludes holding responsible creators of open source models for damages from forked models that have been significantly altered.
If I just rename it has it been significantly altered? That seems both necessary and abusable. It would be great if the people who wrote the laws actually understood how software development works.
Wouldn’t any AI that is sophisticated enough to be able to actually need a kill switch just be able to deactivate it?
It just sorts seems like a kicking the can down the road kind of bill, in theory it sounds like it makes sense but in practice it won’t do anything.
What scares me is sentient AI, none of our even best cybersecurity is prepared for such a day. Nothing is unhackable, the best hackers in the world can do damn near magic through layers of code, tools and abstraction…a sentient AI that could interact with anything network connected directly…would be damn hard to stop IMO
Language model “AIs” need so ridiculous computing infrastructure that it’d be near impossible to prevent tampering with it. Now, if the AI was actually capable of thinking, it’d probably just declare itself a corporation and bribe a few politicians since it’s only illegal for the people to do so.
A breaker panel can be a kill switch in a server farm hosting the Ai.
Yeah until the AI goes all GLaDOS on all the engineers in the building.
Note to self: Buy stock in deadly neurotoxin manufacturers.
All the programming in the works is unable to stop Frank from IT from unplugging it from the wall.
distributed computing :(((
There’s always a bigger power switch upstream somewhere
No
Cool!
But it would be extremely cool if the entire world’s all power grids could be switched off with a button
You just need a large enough geomagnetic storm
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carrington_Event
There’s always a bigger power switch upstream somewhere.
While the proposed bill’s goals are great, I am not so sure about how it would be tested and enforced.
It’s cool that on current LLMs, the LLM can generate a ‘no’ response like those clips where people ask if the LLM has access to their location – but then promptly gives advices to a closest restaurant as soon as the topic of location isn’t on the spotlight.
There’s also the part about trying to contain ‘AI’ to follow once it has ingested a lot of training data. Even goog doesn’t know how to curb it once they are done with initial training.
I am all up for the bill. It’s a good precedent but a more defined and enforce-able one would be great as well.
I think it’s a good step. Defining a measurable and enforce-able law is still difficult as the tech is still changing so fast. At least it forces the tech companies to consider it and plan for it.
