I know nothing about this bill other than what's in this tweet, but oh my gosh, criminal accountability for AI developers?? What a horrifying idea.
If you merely fail to submit such a report, you're only liable for civil penalties. (see section 2606, https://legiscan.com/CA/text/SB1047/id/2919384).
One could use Photoshop prior to generative models to create misleading content, but we didn't expect the developers at Adobe to face jailtime. Why should the developers of stable diffusion 8 (or whatever passes the 10^26 line in the sand they've drawn)?
Does anyone have more thorough resources for this? I realize I can go read the bill, but I’m not sure how much I could grok from that.
https://legiscan.com/CA/text/SB1047/id/2919384
and a helpful definition as you parse this:
(f) “Covered model” means an artificial intelligence model that meets either of the following criteria: (1) The artificial intelligence model was trained using a quantity of computing power greater than 10^26 integer or floating-point operations in 2024, or a model that could reasonably be expected to have similar performance on benchmarks commonly used to quantify the performance of state-of-the-art foundation models, as determined by industry best practices and relevant standard setting organizations. (2) The artificial intelligence model has capability below the relevant threshold on a specific benchmark but is of otherwise similar general capability.
My lane is this: I think we're producing new and powerful tools. Some of those tools can be used as weapons. Some of those tools seem to be footguns. But they're relatively broad tools that can be used for many purposes, and the idea that the toolmakers need special oversight because one day someone might figure out how to get the tool to produce a plan for a chemical weapon (Sec 3 (n)(1)(A)) seems misguided to me.
Lots of kinds of tools are powerful. SMT solvers, logic engines, finite element simulators, are all powerful, and it seems about as plausible that a team of smart people with a giant cluster of GPUs could use 10^26 operations to design a weapon with one of these other approaches ... or perhaps they could discover something really valuable! I don't think ML is actually in principle more dangerous than any of these other flexible computational tools, it's just changing the most and getting the most resources right now.
You do realize you're undermining your own point here? Photoshop isn't remotely similar to your description here...
But also, note that I'm not arguing this is a great bill. Again: I haven't had a chance to read it yet. Maybe it's terrible regardless. I'm just saying that if I take the (terse...) commentary I'm reading about it online at face value, they very much achieve the opposite of "convince the reader this is a terrible idea".
Your initial reaction, which I think comes off as snide and flippant, is that it's fine for AI developers face criminal penalties for building AI, presumably because it's capable of doing harmful things, even if those developers do not use them for harmful purposes. You don't seem to attempt any positive argument for why those developers in particular should be criminally liable, but developers of other broadly applicable tools should not.
In any case, perhaps it's all moot bc the person that was repeatedly downvoted to death was correct: I did look at the text and don't actually see criminal penalties anywhere. There are civil penalties though, and I don't think AI developers in particular should have to convince regulators that their work is 'safe' to avoid fines, but at least the stakes are lower.
Personally, I think the people that released these tools should be held to account for the harm they are causing. I get that it was a cool thing to do, but the harm of their release is far, far greater than the benefit to humanity. As the developers of these tools clearly aren't considering the consequences of their release to the general public, there is a need for governments to step in and regulate.
Furthermore, this isn't a new phenomenon in the tech industry. The checks and balances that existed in advertising prior to online advertising taking over the world were irresponsibly discarded by companies like Google. Organizations like the various Advertising Standards bodies serve a purpose: to protect the public from harmful content, including scams. Instead we have a tech platform that has completely removed humans from the ad sales loop, which has resulted in ads for scams showing up higher in search results than the actual content. Combined with the decision to blur the visual differences between ads and legitimate search results, it is very difficult for less discerning individuals to avoid phising and other scam websites. I've seen this with my own eyes where my elderly father gets highly targeted ads online for scams that don't show up when I do the exact same search from the same local network.
Maybe computer scientists need to be required to take ethics and sociology courses to teach them why these things are bad.