Comment by BrenBarn

The dangerous thing about amplifying is that bad people are often more willing to amplify their activities, because they don't care about the negative effects. We are seeing this now as AI companies (and large companies of all kinds) rush to secure whatever advantages they can, regardless of the negative externalities. Meanwhile people who actually care about doing the right thing get trampled.

We need to shift the incentives by adding ruinous penalties for things that are currently quite commonplace if they are done by large players. Some dude training his own AI on his own computer can scrape and train. The fine for OpenAI or Meta using a single copyrighted book without permission should be in the tens or hundreds of millions.

What we're seeing currently in our society is a "loophole inversion" where the rules have an effect mainly via their loopholes. The most profitable activity is to find loopholes and exploit them as frenetically as possible to gain as much advantage as you can before the loophole is closed, or get people hooked on the loophole so it's retroactively legalized. Entities that are big enough to do this are big enough because they have lots of money behind them. Entities doing the same kinds of things without lots of money are not really doing much harm. So the best approach is to adopt a "sliding scale" in which even tiny violations by wealthy actors result in penalties enormously greater than fairly large violations by small players.