Comment by akprasad
2 years ago
The AFR piece that underlies this article [1] [2] has more detail on Ng's argument:
> [Ng] said that the “bad idea that AI could make us go extinct” was merging with the “bad idea that a good way to make AI safer is to impose burdensome licensing requirements” on the AI industry.
> “There’s a standard regulatory capture playbook that has played out in other industries, and I would hate to see that executed successfully in AI.”
> “Just to be clear, AI has caused harm. Self-driving cars have killed people. In 2010, an automated trading algorithm crashed the stock market. Regulation has a role. But just because regulation could be helpful doesn’t mean we want bad regulation.”
[1]: https://www.afr.com/technology/google-brain-founder-says-big...
[2]: https://web.archive.org/web/20231030062420/https://www.afr.c...
> “There’s a standard regulatory capture playbook that has played out in other industries
But imagine all the money bigco can make by crippling small startups from innovating and competing with them! It's for your own safety. Move along citizen.
Even better if (read: when) China, who has negative damns for concerns, can take charge of the industry that we willingly and expediently relinquish.
…and the problem with that is what, exactly?
The only meaningful thing in this discussion is about people who want to make money easy, but can’t, because of the rules they don’t like.
Well, suck it up.
You don’t get to make a cheap shity factory that pours its waste into the local river either.
Rules exist for a reason.
You want the life style but also all the good things and also no rules. You can’t have all the cake and eat it too.
/shrug
If China builds amazing AI tech (and they will) then the rest of the world will just use it. Some of it will be open source. It won’t be a big deal.
This “we must out compete China by being as shit and horrible as they are” meme is stupid.
If you want to live in China, go live in China. I assure you you will not find it to be the law less free hold of “anything goes” that you somehow imagine.
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China doesn't innovate, it copies, clones, and steals. Without the West to innovate, they won't take charge of anything.
A price paid, I think, due a conformant, restrictive culture. And after all, even if you do excel, you may soon disappear.
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Ok, we've changed the URL to that from https://www.businessinsider.com/andrew-ng-google-brain-big-t.... Thanks!
Submitters: "Please submit the original source. If a post reports on something found on another site, submit the latter." - https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Here's what makes it worse imo.
Imagine someone invents a machine that can give infinite energy.
Do you
a) sell that energy, or b) give the technology to build the machine to everyone.
Clearly b is better for society, a is locking up profits.
The answer is c) sell that energy and use your resulting funds to deeply root yourself in all other systems and prevent or destroy alternative forms of energy production, thus achieving total market dominance
This non-hypothetical got us global warming already
In this case the machine also has negative and yet unknown side effects. We don't give nuclear power to everyone.
This analogy of course is close to nuclear energy. I think most people would say that regulation is still broadly aligned with the public interest there, even though the forces of regulatory capture are in play.
I read that book. No, you deny your gift to the world and become a recluse while the world slowly spins apart.
Technically: a solar panel is just such a machine. You'll have to wait a long, long time but the degradation is slow enough that you can probably use a panel for more than several human life times at ever decreasing output. You will probably find it more economical to replace the panel at some point because of the amount of space it occupies and the fact that newer generations of solar panels will do that much better in that same space. But there isn't any hard technical reason why you should discard one after 10, 30 or 100 years. Of course 'infinite' would require the panel to be 'infinitely durable' and likely at some point it will suffer mechanical damage. But that's not a feature of the panel itself.
And I strongly agree with pointing out a low hanging fruit for "good" regulation is strict and clear attribution laws to label any AI generated content with its source. That's a sooner the better easy win no brainer.
Why would we do this? And how would this conceivably even be enforced? I can't see this being useful or even well-defined past cartoonishly simple special cases of generation like "artist signatures for modalities where pixels are created."
Requiring attribution categorically across the vast domain of generative AI...can you please elaborate?
> Why would we do this?
i think it's a reasonable ask to enforce attribution of AI generated content. We enforce food labels, why not content?
I would go further and argue that AI generated content do not get granted the same copyright as human generated content, but with that, AI generated content using existing copyrighted training data does not violate copyright.
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Where is the line drawn? My phone uses math to post-process images. Do those need to be labeled? What about filters placed on photos that do the same thing? What about changing the hue of a color with photoshop to make it pop?
Generative AI. Anything that can create detailed content out of a broad / short prompt. This currently means diffusion for images, large language models for text. That may change as multi-modality and other developments play out in this space.
This capability is clearly different from the examples you list.
Just because there may be no precise engineering definition does not mean that we cannot arrive at a suitable legal/political definition. The ability to create new content out of whole cloth is quite separate from filters, cropping, and generic "pre-AI" image post-processing. Ditto for spellcheck and word processors for text.
The line actually is pretty clear here.
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Yes to all of the above, and airbrushed pictures in old magazines should have been labeled too. I'm not saying unauthorized photoediting should be a crime, but I don't see any good reason why news outlets, social media sites, phone manufacturers, etc. need to be secretive about it.
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Please define "AI generated content" in a clear and legally enforceable manner. Because I suspect you don't understand basic US constitutional law including the vagueness doctrine and limits on compelled speech.
human-driven cars kill people all the time too. and the stock thing from 2010 isn't AI, just algorithmic trading.
not the most convincing of arguments