> I cannot help but feel that discussing this topic under the blanket term "AI Regulation" is a bit deceptive. I've noticed that whenever this topic comes up, almost every major figure remains rather vague on the details. Who are some influential figures actually advancing clearly defined regulations or key ideas for approaching how we should think about AI regulation?

There's a vocal minority calling for AI regulation, but what they actually want often strikes me as misguided:

"Stop AI from taking our jobs" - This shouldn't be solved through regulation. It's on politicians to help people adapt to a new economic reality, not to artificially preserve bullshit jobs.

"Stop the IP theft" - This feels like a cause pushed primarily by the 1%. Let's be realistic: 99% of people don't own patents and have little stake in strengthening IP protections.

> "Stop the IP theft" - This feels like a cause pushed primarily by the 1%. Let's be realistic: 99% of people don't own patents and have little stake in strengthening IP protections.

This is being screamed from the rooftops by nearly the entire creative community of artists, photographers, writers, and other people who do creative work as a job, or even for fun.

The difference between the 99% of individual creatives and the 1% is that the 1% has entire portfolios of IP - IP that they might not have even created themselves - as well as an army of lawyers to protect that IP.

> This shouldn't be solved through regulation. It's on politicians to help people adapt to a new economic reality, not to artificially preserve bullshit jobs.

They already do this[1]. Why should there be an exception carved out for AI type jobs?

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[1] What do you think tariffs are? Show me a country without tariffs and I'll show you a broken economy with widespread starvation and misery.

> "Stop the IP theft" - This feels like a cause pushed primarily by the 1%. Let's be realistic: 99% of people don't own patents and have little stake in strengthening IP protections.

Artists are not primarily in the 1% though, it's not only patents that are IP theft.

It's less about who is right and more about economic interests and lobbying power. There's a vocal minority that is just dead set against AI using all sorts of arguments related to religion, morality, fears about mass unemployment, all sorts of doom scenarios, etc. However, this is a minority with not a lot of lobbying power ultimately. And the louder they are and the less of this stuff actually materializes the easier it becomes to dismiss a lot of the arguments. Despite the loudness of the debate, the consensus is nowhere near as broad on this as it may seem to some.

And the quality of the debate remains very low as well. Most people barely understand the issues. And that includes many journalists that are still getting hung up on the whole "hallucinations can be funny" thing mostly. There are a lot of confused people spouting nonsense on this topic.

There are special interest groups with lobbying powers. Media companies with intellectual properties, actors worried about being impersonated, etc. Those have some ability to lobby for changes. And then you have the wider public that isn't that well informed and has sort of caught on to the notion that chat gpt is now definitely a thing that is sometimes mildly useful.

And there are the AI companies that are definitely very well funded and have an enormous amount of lobbying power. They can move whole economies with their spending so they are getting relatively little push back from politicians. Political Washington and California run on obscene amounts of lobbying money. And the AI companies can provide a lot of that.

>There's a vocal minority calling for AI regulation, but what they actually want often strikes me as misguided:

There's a ton other points intersecting with regulation. Either directly related by AI, or made significantly more relevant by it.

Just from the top of my head:

- information processing: Is there private data AI should never be able to learn from? We restrict collection but it might be unclear whether model training counts as storage.

- related to the former, what kind of dystopian practices should we ban? AI can probably create much deeper profiles inferring information from users than our already worrrying tech, even without storing sensitive data. If it can use conversations to deduce I'm in risk of a shorter lifespan, can the owners communicate that data to insurance companies?

- healthcare/social damage: what is the long term effects of people having an always available yes men, a substitution for social interaction, a cheating tool, etc? should some people be kept from access? (minors, mentally ill, whatever). Should access, on the other hand, become a basic right if it realistically makes a lef-behind person unable to compete with others who have it?

- National security. Is a country's economy being reliant in a service offered somewhere else? Worse even, is this fact draining skills from the population that might not able to be easily recovered when needed?

- energy/resources impact: Are we ready to have an enormous increase in usage of energy and/or certain goods? should we limit usage until we can meet the demand without struggle?

- consumer protections: Many companies just offer 'flat' usage, freely being able to change the model behind the scenes for a worse one when needed or even adapt user limits on their server load. Which of these are fair business practices?

- economy risks: What is the maximum risk we can take of the economy being made dependent to services that aren't yet profitable? Is there any steps that need to be taken to keep us from the potential bust if costs can't be kept up with?

- monopoly risks: we could end up with a single company being able to offer literally any intellectual work as a service. Whoever gets this tech might become the most powerful entity in the world. Should we address this impact through regulation before such an entity rises and becomes impossible to tame?

- enabling crime: can an army of AI hackers disrupt entire countries? how is this handled?

- impact on job creation: If AIs can practically DDOS job offer forms, how is this handled to keep access fair? Same for a million other places that are subjected to AI spam.

your point "It's on politicians to help people adapt to a new economic reality" brings a few:

- Should we tax AI using companies? if they produce the same employing fewer people, tax extraction suffers and the non-taxed money does not make it back to the people. How do we compensate? And how do we remake - How should we handle entire professions being put to pasture at once? Lost employment is a general problem if it's a large enough amount of people. - how should the push of intellectual work be rethought if it becomes extremely cheap relative to manual work? is the way we train our population in need of change?

You might have strong opinions on most of these issues, but there is clearly A LOT of important debates that aren't being addressed.

"Stop AI from taking our jobs" - This shouldn't be solved through regulation. It's on politicians to help people adapt to a new economic reality, not to artificially preserve bullshit jobs.

So politicians are supposed to create "non bullshit" jobs out of thin air?

The job you've done for decades is suddenly bullshit because some shit LLM is hallucinating nice sounding words?

> "Stop AI from taking our jobs" - This shouldn't be solved through regulation. It's on politicians to help people adapt to a new economic reality, not to artificially preserve bullshit jobs.

This is a really good point. If a country tries to "protect" jobs by blocking AI, it only puts itself at a disadvantage. Other countries that don't pass those restrictions will produce goods and services more efficiently and at lower cost, and they’ll outcompete you anyway. So even with regulations the jobs aren't actually saved.

The real solution is for people to upskill and learn new abilities so they can thrive in the new economic reality. But it's hard to convince people that they need to change instead of expecting the world around them to stay the same.