California legislature passes controversial “kill switch” AI safety bill
California legislature passes controversial “kill switch” AI safety bill
Governor will balance worries about "over-regulation" with calls from AI luminaries.
But in a separate Fortune editorial from earlier this month, Stanford computer science professor and AI expert Fei-Fei Liargued that the "well-meaning" legislation will "have significant unintended consequences, not just for California but for the entire country."
The bill's imposition of liability for the original developer of any modified model will "force developers to pull back and act defensively," Li argued. This will limit the open-source sharing of AI weights and models, which will have a significant impact on academic research, she wrote.
Holy shit this is a fucking terrible idea.
I read that as "incentivizing keeping AI in labs and out of the hands of people who shouldn't be using it".
That said, you'd think they would learn by now from Piracy: once it's out there, it's out there. Can't put it back in the jar.
Same energy as PirateSoftware's "If AAA companies can't kill games due to always online DRM then small indie devs have to support their games forever, thus bankrupting them" argument.
I haven’t yet read Li’s editorial, but I’m generally more inclined to trust her take on these issues than Hinton and Bengio’s.
Wtf does a kill switch even mean? PCs have kill switches on them already, in the form of a power switch.
I'm afraid the AI has become self-aware and put a piece of tape over the power switch it is now unstoppable.
The legislator tried pressing the button on the monitor but the computer kept whirring!!! It's alive and has a mind of its own!!!
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I feel like the actual problem is all the cancer not the warnings.
IRL, arms manufacturers claim they're not culpable when their products are used to blow up civilians. They point at the people making decisions to drop the bombs as the ones responsible, not them.
This legislature tries to get ahead of that argument, by putting reponsibility for downstream harm on the manufacturers instead of their corporate or government customers. Even if the manufacturer moves their munitions plants elsewhere, they're still responsible for the impact if it harms California residents. So the alternative isn't to move your company out of state. It's to stop offering your products in one of the largest economies in the world.
The intent is to make manufacturers stop and put up more guardrails in place instead of blasting ahead, damn the consequences, then going, oops 🤷🏻♂️
There will be intense lobbying with the Governor to get him to veto it. If it does get signed, it'll be interesting to see if it has the intended effect.
This is interesting analysis that I hadn't considered. Thanks for clarifying.
Have you ever seen Terminator?
You would have assumed that legislators in California of all places would have access to experts that could explain to them why this won't work.
As we've previously explored in depth, SB-1047 asks AI model creators to implement a "kill switch" that can be activated if that model starts introducing "novel threats to public safety and security,"
A model may only be one component of a larger system. Like, there may literally be no way to get unprocessed input through to the model. How can the model creator even do anything about that?
It just says can be activated. Not "automatically activates".
Kill switches are overly dramatic silliness. Anything with a power button has a kill switch. It sounds impressive but it's just theatre.
They're safety washing. If AI has this much potential to be that dangerous, it never ever should have been released. There's so much in-industry arguing, it's concerning.