Debate over whether regulation should protect public or companies
2 Sep 19 4:58 PM · 6d ago · 11 comments · 1 source · development 2 of 2
Commenters dispute whether proposed AI regulation serves public protection or corporate interest, with some arguing that if AI companies themselves acknowledge existential risk, operations should halt immediately rather than be regulated.
“If we take the AI companies fears at face value, they should be shut down immediately. Having thousands of well paid intelligent people working on a technology they themselves say have a 10% chance of ending the human race is insane.”
geriksonLina Khan FTC enforcerAlex Bores Former Congressional candidate
Bernie Sanders U.S. SenatorAnthropic, OpenAI, Google AI firms
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What people said 24 voices · best of 36 · verbatim
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The point of regulatory capture is that the entities being regulated dictate that regulation, unlike regulation imposed on them from the public or representatives of the public. This means that the regulation is less about protecting the public and more about protecting the companies. If we take the AI companies fears at face value, they should be…
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The proposed theory is that the big AI startups demand and get regulation that enforces constraints on them, but crucially, constraints that only they can afford to pay for. This is presented as a reasonable deal which enables them crucially to declare that only companies with these constraints may bid for government contracts. Or that products…
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Because, so far, no jurisdiction has determined that a model trained on copyleft code is itself a derivative work of that code. I think that's a shame, personally.
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Please somebody explain to me why these things and everything they produce are not copyleft?
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They've been trained on things with incompatible licenses so the only two ways out are "any output of an LLM is not redistributable legally" or "license of source material doesn't apply to LLM output". It's pretty clear which way are the governments going.
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Even if (and that's a huge if!) the models are ruled to be derivative works of their training data, this won't happen. Their training data isn't just copyleft code but everything else too. Code under GPL-incompatible FOSS licenses. Code with no license. Code under all kinds of proprietary licenses. Patent-encumbered code. Code that is a national…
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I think it would be the best way out of this entire problem: You can use this stuff but everything you make will be copyleft. Take it or leave it.
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Also, regardless of whether it's politically untenable: at least some of the players in this space (e.g. Meta) have simply chosen to disregard existing laws in order to train their models (e.g. movie piracy). This is probably the most troubling aspect of it all: the blatant disregard for the law displayed by the major players, and the lack of…
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Not directly related but i'm kinda tired of calling these sociocarcinomas "elites" and "billionaires" and other cool sounding titles. They're not something we should deify, they're just dudes who are extremely greedy and a bit lucky.
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What’s the proposed mechanism of action here? Is the theory that they would ban open weights? If so I agree. Otherwise I don’t see how regulation would be in the interest of the large firms. unless you mean that regulation imposes fixed costs on all players that the larger firms are better resourced to absorb. That might be true but it doesn’t…
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> What’s the proposed mechanism of action here? I think... They're trying to regulate the market so that Chinese LLM companies cannot sell services to western corporations and (later maybe) individuals, legally... Without going through these regulations (that they'll control tightly through a consortium or whatever, all this has been done time and…
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Curious how banning open weights might be considered sensible? Especially in a country that won't even ban guns, it seems like "good guy with a gun / open weight LLM" is a clear analogy, especially with the recent cybersecurity events.
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I'm with you on the issue, and I use "oligarchs" for them. I found it easy to transition to that usage.
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There's lots of descriptions of what they are, I'm not suggesting any of them are wrong, I'm suggesting we choose one that doesn't sound cool, because their behavior is decidedly uncool.
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Agreed! We have the same model of regulatory capture. Regulatory capture is meant to describe a mechanism that leads to bad regulation. What I am asking for is for someone to tell me what rules they are pushing that are good for them and bad for the people. I am actually open to being convinced, I’m just annoyed that I keep hearing people gesture…
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Food for thought: the idea that the privileged electorate know best how to run a society is not new. Rather, there is a direct line in both etymology and semantics from [meritocracy](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meritocracy), where the people with the best [talents](https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/talentum) determine how society shall operate…
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Due to managing to sometimes violate even CC-BY via recitals, it is unclear how much license-unencumbered is just a lie that manages to persist so far. Locally available amounts of compute is generally not fast enough for reverse engineering a printer driver in the afternoon. There is typically more garbage in the driver than can be sorted through…
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I know I wrote an overly long comment but, did you only read the first sentence? I addressed this theory. That’s what I mean by fixed costs. This is true for regulation in general. it does not require capture. I agree that regulation could protect large firms from small ones. Why exactly is that bad in this case? How does a low-AI-regulation…
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The degree of individualism that comes with today's somebow makes it worse. The feudal idea that some kind of magic sauce makes some lineages just better(TM) than others at least comes with a bit of responsibility to the everyman. The American ones all think "I did this _all by myself_, I don't owe anyone anything" which is objectively incorrect…
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My current favorite is just "greedy bastards." It's not technically profanity, and it kind of jogs people enough that they stop asking themselves "why would these people do this??"
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Because the end-user cannot modify the tool. Including for not resource-based reasons (fine-tuning is sometimes doable for end-users if they do have access)
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Whether things being generated by the model are derivative works is different question than whether the model itself is a derivative work. Also in response to the comment above, whether you use a copyleft license has no bearing on the resulting model being a derivative work, that's a general concept in copyright. If it were to be deemed that the…
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They are both social elites and (often) billionaires, and it is because of their social position that their greed has more impact than just anyone’s. A description of their social position and the fact that American society has a double standard on enforcing the law does not deify them. It is a description of how things are.
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I don't understand how call for new regulation changes whether it is off topic or not?
All 2 developments of AI firms push self-regulation while enforcement of existing… →
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