Comment by Topfi | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Topfi | Hacker News Reader

Quoting the original bill [0]:

> "Critical harm" means the death or serious injury of 100 or more people or at least $1,000,000,000 of damages to rights in property caused or materially enabled by a frontier model, through either: (1) the creation or use of a chemical, biological, radiological, or nuclear weapon; or (2) engaging in conduct that: (A) acts with no meaningful human intervention; and (B) would, if committed by a human, constitute a criminal offense that requires intent, recklessness, or negligence, or the solicitation or aiding and abetting of such a crime.

I don't know what I expected from this title, but I was hoping it was more sensationalized. No need in this case unfortunately.

> (a) A developer shall not be held liable for critical harms if the developer did not intentionally or recklessly cause the critical harms and the developer: (1) published a safety and security protocol on its website that satisfies the requirements of Section 15 and adhered to that safety and security protocol prior to the release of the frontier model; (2) published a transparency report on its website at the time of the frontier model's release that satisfies the requirements of Section 20. The requirements of paragraphs (1) and (2) do not apply if the developer does not reasonably foresee any material difference between the frontier model's capabilities or risks of critical harm and a frontier model that was previously evaluated by the developer in a manner substantially similar to this Act.

However or if one thinks regulation for this should be drafted, I doubt providing a PDF is what most have in mind.

[0] https://trackbill.com/bill/illinois-senate-bill-3444-ai-mode...

I think my favorite part is that, because it only applies to "frontier models", if a smaller model is blamed for such harm, it seemingly doesn't immunize the creators at all. That makes very little sense unless you specifically want to make it illegal to not be OpenAI (et al).

Similarly, if a frontier model kills merely 99 people, they aren't covered by this. So go big or go home I guess?

> unless you specifically want to make it illegal to not be OpenAI [...]

If that is an "unintended" consequence, I am certain OpenAI wouldn't be opposed. Preventing competition whilst keeping any potentially profit risking regulations at bay has been a clear throughline in OAIs lobbying efforts.

> because it only applies to "frontier models", if a smaller model is blamed for such harm, it seemingly doesn't immunize the creators at all

Oof. If you're an Illinois resident, please call your elected and at least ensure they understand this loophole is there. In all likelihood, nobody other than OpenAI's lobbyists have noticed this.

    > "Frontier model" means an artificial intelligence model that:

    > (1) is trained using greater than 10^26 computational operations, such as integer or floating-point operations; or

    > (2) has a compute cost that exceeds $100,000,000

Such a strange regulation, usually large thresholds like this are made to only apply burdening regulation to very-big-players (if you're spending 100 million on training, you can afford a dedicated team to follow such regulation).

But here it seems to be an anti- competitive move for market entrants who haven't made it into the big league yet...

Sounds like the saga for some players pushing for Biden's EO 14110 but this time at the state level?

That doesn't say much other than the rules are over in section 15.

To be protected they not only have to publish their security protocol, but adhere to it.

That's not just 'providing a PDF'

That particular section is entirely appropriate. A company can't do everything necessary to prevent every bad thing. They should do everything that they reasonably can. Someone else should decide what is reasonable.

The regulators are saying we've decided the what you have to do to be considered to have done all you could to be safe. Follow those rules, tell us how you've followed those rules, and if something bad happens and we find out that you didn't follow the rules you said we're going to nail you to the wall.

This hinges on Section 15. Which I think is inadequate because it does not meet the criteria of someone else deciding what is reasonable. Publishing their safety plans and adhering to them should be enough to grant protection from liability of harm directly to users, since the publication give individuals the ability to make an informed decision, provided they have done the safety work that they have said, a user deciding that is sufficient for them and choosing to use it should be allowable.

That should not extend to harm done to others. They don't get to choose. Consequently the standard required to be protected against claims of negligence has to be decided by a third party (experts hired by regulators ideally).

Blanket liability and blanket indemnity both go too far.

If someone makes a YoYo that blow's someone up because they made it out of explosives then they should be held liable.

If someone makes a YoYo that blow's up a city because it contained particles unknown and undetectable to any science we have, they shouldn't be to blame.

The key is that they have to have done what we think is required. Legislators get to decide what it is that is required. If a company does all of that, then they shouldn't be held responsible, because they have done all they were asked to do.

The problem is not that a law provides indemnity, the problem is that it sets the standard to qualify too low.

Shifting liabilities from corporations to the public coffer is what companies do. You'll often hear this described as "privatizing profits and socializing losses". Let me introduce you to the Price-Anderson Act of 1957 [1]. It's been repeatedly extended, most recently with the ADVANCE Act [2]. This limits liability for the nuclear power industry in a whole range of ways:

- It removes jurisdiction from state courts to the federal court. In recent weeks, the part of "states' rights" is doing similar to stop states regulating prediction markets, as an aside [3];

- All actions are consolidated into a single claim;

- That claim has an inflation-adjusted absolute limit, which is somewhere around $500 million (I'm not sure of the exact 2026 figure);

- Any damages beyond that are partially sharead by the industry and an industry self-funded insurance program;

- The industry as a whole has a total liability limit, also inflation-adjusted. I believe this is around $10 billion.

For context, the clean up from Fukushima is likely to take a century and the cost may well exceed $1 trillion for a single incident [4]. So if this happened in the US, the government would be on the hook for almost all of it.

So I have two points here:

1. If you oppose any effort to shift liability from AI companies to the government (as I do) with legislation such as this, how do you feel about the nuclear industry doing the exact same thing? and

2. Minor point but I noticed in searching for the latest details, Gemini made factual errors, stating that "the Act is set to expire in 2025" when it was extended in 2024 until 2045. Always check AI's work, people.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Price%E2%80%93Anderson_Nuclear...

[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ADVANCE_Act

[3]: https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/federal-government-sue...

[4]: https://cleantechnica.com/2019/04/16/fukushimas-final-costs-...

This is what government should be doing. Figure out how to do something safely, make that a regulation, then shield companies from liability as long as they follow that regulation. In practice you won't extract trillions of dollars from most companies anyways, because they'll go bankrupt long before they manage to pay all that back.

It's the "guns don't kill people" equivalent for AIs.

---

Before the pitchforks and downvotes:

- yes, it's a deliberate simplification

- yes, the issue is complex because you can also argue that you can't blame authors of encyclopedias and chemistry books for bombs and poisons, so why would we blame providers of LLMs

- and no, this bill is only introduced to cover everyone's assess when, not if, LLMs use results in large scale issues.

In fairness, a well designed and tested weapon at least can be expected to reliably and consistently perform the same thing each time. We also understand deeply how they work and can easily investigate if something happens whether it was user error, a defect or design issue. LLMs, not so much.

This dodges the moral argument behind "guns don't kill people", which is worth confronting directly. I think people can reasonably disagree about whether second/third/fourth/etc. order effects carry moral/legal responsibility.

In light of such disagreement, and given the lack of any higher authority among free, equal, people to arbitrate it, the only reasonable way to coexist peacefully is to avoid imposing your ideas on others. This is the foundation of a liberal society.

“Guns don’t kill people” is actually a pretty strong argument for regulating who can access firearms. Things like red flag laws and background checks.

Quite an appropriate analogy: gun manufacturers were sued for their responsibility in US mass shootings. They won, so the mass shootings continue.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protection_of_Lawful_Commerce_...

Wait, you think that if we shut down the gun companies the mass shootings would stop?

Stop no, reduce yes. Same with how seatbelts didn’t end car crash fatalities. Eliminating drunk driving also wouldn’t end road fatalities, but outside of Wisconsin no one believes drunk drivers shouldn’t be in jail.

Those comparisons don’t make sense. There are millions of guns in the country, and cutting US manufacturing wouldn’t change that any time soon.

> any time soon

Mandating seatbelts on new cars also did not immediately stop people from flying through their windshields.

My first thought was that this must be related to the automated weapons issue that got Anthropic on Trump's shitlist. It makes sense that a company that will eventually be asked to build weapons that choose their own targets will want to limit liability when it will inevitably kill the "wrong" person.

Also, I am disturbed by the fact that in all the discussions on this topic during the last month, no one has mentioned the magic word "Skynet". This is clearly a terrible idea. And if a company needs immunity from liability, they know it is a terrible idea.

Skynet's flaw wasn't that it killed humans. It was a military machine specifically designed to kill humans. If it only killed "the enemy", it would have been hailed a marvelous success. It was only considered a failure because it killed the wrong humans.

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