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Comment by ecshafer | Hacker News Reader

> Use AI to foster or advance deception. For example, the creation of deepfakes, chatbots, and voice clones that appear to represent people, events, and utterances that never existed or occurred would likely be deceptive.4

> Likewise, in many contexts it would likely be deceptive to fail to disclose that AI has been used to create a piece of media.

Under this logic a company making pencils is illegal.

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If these companies were just putting their models up as Open Source, then your "pencil manufacturer" argument might make sense.

But in reality where AI operates the models as well, the analogy is more like "Give me a rough idea and we'll use our pencils to write your letters for you!".

Could you please develop your idea? I don't see the link between pencils and deepfakes.

I can write a letter for propaganda purposes already. I can draw a picture of someone and say "This is the president doing a nefarious act!". They are confusing a tool possibly being used for a purpose as making the tool illegal and not the purpose. If writing propaganda via AI makes AI illegal, then we should ban pencils since they can be used for write propaganda. Pencils can be used to forge documents, but again they are legal.

Firstly, do note that the original text is talking about use of AI, this one line doesn't seem to be about banning AI so much as banning a use.

Secondly:

The implied basis here is that AI isn't just a product, it's also a service. This isn't you buying a pencil, it's you commissioning the drawing. Most of these products are cloud based SaaS.

And there's also the matter that "it's just a tool" doesn't really apply to foreseeable problems. If a suspicious person shows up out of nowhere buying large quantities of fertilizer, you don't get to go "Well he could be using that fertilizer for anything, not my problem". (This is relevant to AI as pretty much all AI services already have heavy restrictions on their output, this isn't a bunch of researchers publishing a paper and having bad actors implement their own AI based on that. We have companies openly advertising deepfake services.)

All governments now think that if data is streaming through you as a company (anything cloud) then you have the LEGAL REQUIREMENT to execute all their arbitrary censorship for them.

AI is a brand new frontier where they can even pre-program their arbitrary censorship into things you download too! For as much offline censorship as possible too. Wow innovation

We have to do peer to peer, and avoid cloud anywhere and everything like we were asleep for 10 years

You can create all kinds of nefarious artworks that are hurtful to protected classes using a pencil, or adobe creative suite or what have you. Doesn't mean those things are illegal.

Charge the creator not the tool. This seemed immediately obvious to me, but apparently not to most layman (including the California AG, apparently).

Do you have a magic pencil that can do all this without human involvement?

Does it matter? A few years ago I had the same concern, but it's been easy for a while now to create photorealistic fakes of anything you'd like, and in practice it doesn't seem to have been more convincing than any other form of lying. There are of course a couple specific areas where the mere existence of a picture matters even if people know it's fake (see e.g. https://www.edweek.org/leadership/students-are-sharing-sexua...).

We're splitting hairs here. Open up the ChatGPT window and have it do something nefarious without you touching the keyboard. Then these AG actions would make sense.

It's not splitting hairs at all. If I ask you to do something illegal and you do it, who do you think is liable?

I am guessing their point is that pencils can be used to create deceptive content.

Beyond that, I don't see any similarity. In a pencil, all of the "intelligence" is offloaded onto the user. With AI, the company providing the service is playing a more substantial role.

What a bullshit argument. Please don't post bait on HN.

Why it's bullshit: the pencil will not help you create an image. It's literally just a carrier for a medium, graphite. AI will create a high quality image in response to a textual prompt, even if the operator has trouble drawing a triangle. It's good enough to fool some people into thinking that images could be real photographs.

I'm sure you understand this just fine. It's very disrespectful to come in here wasting people's times with such specious arguments.

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