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12 points

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.

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4 points

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.

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7 points

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.

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1 point
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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.

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-5 points
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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.

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5 points

How is that reasonable? Almost anything could be potentially used as a weapon, or to aid in crime.

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1 point

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.

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-1 points

I guess let’s deregulate guns then. Oh wait.

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4 points

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.

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1 point

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

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4 points

I am pretty sure no one has ever built a computer that can’t be shut off. Somehow someway.

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