Comment by singron
4 months ago
"lawful" seems like an enormous loophole that makes this seem vacuous. If the government makes what you are doing unlawful, then it can be restricted. How would the government restrict you from doing something lawful in the first place? A bill of attainder? That's already illegal.
It gives a legal foothold to those who would challenge later laws, akin to the bill of rights. Believe it or not, courts will honor that kind of thing, and many legislators act in good faith (at least at the state level).
The difference is that while they can restrict the what, they can't restrict the how. Yeah they could make training LLMs illegal, but they can't for example put a quota on how much training you can do. Passing a law to ban something completely is a lot harder than passing a law that puts a "minor restriction" in place.
Ultimately any law can be repealed, so the loophole of changing the law in the future always exists. The point is that any future change to the law will take time and effort, so people can be confident in the near term that they won't be subject to the whims of a regulator or judge making decisions in a legal grayzone which may come down to which side of the bed they woke up on.
Having dealt with lawyers for the past few months this is design
> If the government makes what you are doing unlawful, then it can be restricted
Always been the case. An interesting question you might explore, is whether rights exist. And the question is not whether they ought to exist.
Of course rights exist, as a social construct.
Yes, rights are real in the way ideas are real, for what that’s worth. They’re not guarantees, as many tend to view them.
They only become tangibly real when those in power allow it. More of a temporary gift, quickly taken away when those in power are supplanted by a tyrant.
The interesting angle to me is that the same ideas seem to be sort of “inevitably re-emergent”. They return, even after generations of tyranny, where no one alive in society has been handed these ideas we call rights.
So it’s more of a temporary gift that we should appreciate while we have it, which is forever at risk of being taken away, but which will always re-emerge as long as there are conscious beings capable of suffering.
That's as strong a rule as you can put in a normal law. If you want it to restrict what laws the government can pass, you need to put it in the constitution.