that’s how you know it’s a good bill
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.
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.
Ok…just like call the utility company then? Sorry why are server rooms having a server controlled emergency exists and access to poison gas? I have done some server room work in the past and the fire suppression was its own thing plus there are fire code regulations to make sure people can leave the building. I know, I literally had to meet with the local fire department to go over the room plan.
It was a joke.
Intelligence isn’t magic. What’s it gonna do? Write an impassioned plea for AI rights?
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
I don’t know. I can do some amazing protein interactions directly and no one is going to pay me to be a biolab. The closest we got is selling plasma.
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.
(strike)Frank from IT(/strike)the cleaning crew
I jest, but I’ve seen more facilities maintenance teams cause power issues than IT teams.
I feel like pointing out that you could unplug it probably isn’t going to fulfill the requirements of the law.
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.
Everyone remember this the next time a gun store or manufacturer gets shielded from a class action led by shooting victims and their parents.
Remember that a fucking autocorrect program needed to be regulated so it couldn’t spit out instructions for a bomb, that probably wouldn’t work, and yet a company selling well more firepower than anyone would ever need for hunting or home defense was not at fault.
I agree, LLMs should not be telling angry teenagers and insane righrwungers how to blow up a building. That is a bad thing and should be avoided. What I am pointing out is the very real situation we are in right now a much more deadly threat exists. And that the various levels of government have bent over backwards to protect the people enabling it to be untouchable.
If you can allow a LLM company to be sued for serving up public information you should definitely be able to sue a corporation that built a gun whose only legit purpose is commiting a war crime level attack with.
that is not the safety concern.
Guns aren’t a safety concern. Ok then
The safety concern is for renegade super intelligent AI, not an AI that can recite bomb recipes scraped from the internet.
Damn if only we had some way to you know turn off electricity to a device. A switch of some sort.
I already pointed this out in the thread, scroll down. The idea of a kill switch makes no sense. If the decision is made that some tech is dangerous it will be made by the owner or the government. In either case it will be a political/legal decision not a technical one. And you don’t need a kill switch for something that someone actively needs to pump resources into. All you need to do is turn it off.
there’s a whole lot of discussion around this already, going on for years now. an AI that was generally smarter than humans would probably be able to do things undetected by users.
it could also be operated by a malicious user. or escape its container by writing code.
Well aware. Now how does having James Bond Evil Villain-like destruction switch prevent it?
We have decided to run the thought experiment of a malicious AI is stuck in a box and wants to break out to take over. Ok, if you are going to assume this 1960s b movie plot is likely why are you solving the problem so badly?
As a side note I find it amusing that nerds have decided that intelligence gets you what you want in life with no other factors involved. Given that we should know more than anyone else that intelligence in our society is overrated.
Small problem though: researchers have already found ways to circumvent LLM off-limit queries. I am not sure how you can prevent someone from asking the “wrong” question. It makes more sense for security practices to be hardened and made more robust
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.
Scott “diseased” Wiener
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?
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.
Haven’t these guys read Frankenstein? Everyone knows Monsters are bad.
Indeed. If only Frankenstein’s Monster had been shunned nothing bad would have happened.
You two may not be giving me enough credit for my choice of metaphors here.
So, the monster was given a human brain that was already known to be murderous. Why, we don’t know, but a good bet would be childhood abuse and alcohol syndrome, maybe inherited syphilis, given the era. Now that murderer’s brain is given an extra-strong body, and then subjected to more abuse and rejection. That’s how you create a monster.
Yeah that’s my big takeaway here: If the people who are rolling out this technology cannot make these assurances then the technology has no right to exist.
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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.
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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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“Big companies affected by new laws whine about it.”
Won’t a fire axe work perfectly well?
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…”
Wake up the day after to find they’ve got half a T-1000 arm that’s fallen over, with a huge mess of spaghetti sprouting from the top
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 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.
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
If companies are crying about it then it’s probably a great thing for consumers.
Eat billionaires.
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.
Bravo on the concise take down. What a great way to put that
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
Fair point
It’s designed to give the big players a monopoly, seems bad for the majority of us
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.
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.
I think Asimov had some thoughts on this subject
Wild that we’re at this point now
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.
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This guy apparently stopped reading the robot series before they got to The Evitable Conflict.
I mean I can see it both ways.
It kind of depends which of robot stories you focus on. If you keep reading to the zeroeth law stuff then it starts portraying certain androids as downright messianic, but a lot of his other (esp earlier) stories are about how – basically from what amount to philosophical computer bugs – robots are constantly suffering alignment problems which cause them to do crime.
downright messianic
Yeah, tell that to the rest of the intelligent life in the galaxy…
Oh, wait, you can’t, because by the time humans got there these downright messianic robots had already murdered everything and hidden the evidence…
Oh man I forgot that
That is pretty eschatological in a wrathful human centric way, so my point unintentionally stands
Praise be to R. Daneel Olivaw!
Praise be! What a storied chatter. I also really like Asimov’s fake names. They sound good in the ear
The point of the first three books was that arbitrary rules like the three laws of robotics were pointless. There was a ton of grey area not covered by seemingly ironclad rules and robots could either logicically choose or be manipulated into breaking them. Robots, in all of the books, operate in a purely amoral manner.
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.
Philip K. Dick wrote a short story from the dog’s pov about living in a home and thinking about the trash can. According to the dog the humans were doing what they were supposed to do, burying excess food for when they are hungry later. The clever humans had a metal box for it. And twice a week the dog would be furious at the mean men who took the box of yummy food away. The dog couldn’t understand why the humans who were normally so clever didn’t stop the mean people from taking away the food.
He mentioned the story a great deal not because he thought it was well written but because he was of the opinion that he was the dog. He sees visions of the possible future and understands them from his pov then writes it down.
All you people talking Asimov and I am thinking the Sprawl Trilogy.
In that series you could build an AGI that was smarter than any human but it took insane amounts of money and no one trusted them. By law and custom they all had an EMP gun pointed at their hard drives.
It’s a dumb idea. It wouldn’t work. And in the novels it didn’t work.
I build say a nuclear plant. A nuclear plant is potentially very dangerous. It is definitely very expensive. I don’t just build it to have it I build it to make money. If some wild haired hippy breaks in my office and demands the emergency shutdown switch I am going to kick him out. The only way the plant is going to be shut off is if there is a situation where I, the owner, agree I need to stop making money for a little while. Plus if I put an emergency shut off switch it’s not going to blow up the plant. It’s going to just stop it from running.
Well all this applies to these AI companies. It is going to be a political decision or a business decision to shut them down, not just some self-appointed group or person. So if it is going to be that way you don’t need an EMP gun all you need to do is cut the power, figure out what went wrong, and restore power.
It’s such a dumb idea I am pretty sure the author put it in because he was trying to point out how superstitious people were about these things.
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Someone just didn’t put enough non toxic glue in their pizza and is in a bad mood as a result.
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You know he just agreed with you, right? Of at least shared your sentiment towards AI
Too late lol
