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by klodolph 673 days ago
Think about it like owning a machine gun.

People have been murdering since the beginning of time, but machine guns make it easy to murder a lot of people very fast. So we don’t just have laws against murder, but we have laws restricting access to machine guns.

AI tools make it possible to spread misinformation and disinformation much faster, because you can produce a high quantity of it really quickly. Just like how a machine gun shoots a lot of bullets really quickly. It’s not a fundamentally different type of thing, just a new scale / speed.

2 comments

>It’s not a fundamentally different type of thing, just a new scale / speed.

I disagree, a change in degree can indeed be a change in type. Flashbangs and party poppers are functionally the same thing if you look at them strictly mechanically, but we treat them very very differently.

Parent says basically the same.

Guns and machine guns are the same but we treat them differently.

Fair enough, but what exactly do you want to do? Require an indication like “x% of this book was generated by AI and not competently proof-read”? And how would you enforce it? I have a hard time envisioning a practical way to tackle this. The machine-gun analogy doesn’t quite carry over here.
There're serious lobbying efforts by industry incumbents and authoritarians to actually apply arms-like restrictions for access to AI. You'd need a special license to be able to create/run your own powerful models legally. I presume that's what they're getting at.
They could instead go with increased or specified special liabilities for content spammers.