Tennessee is about to make building chatbots a Class A felony | Hacker News Reader

Tennessee is about to make building chatbots a Class A felony

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33 pointsmindcrime12 comments

Wow.

> The bill makes it a Class A felony (15-25 years imprisonment) to “knowingly train artificial intelligence” to do ANY of the following:

• Provide emotional support, including through open-ended conversations with a user

• Develop an emotional relationship with, or otherwise act as a companion to, an individual

• Simulate a human being, including in appearance, voice, or other mannerisms

• Act as a sentient human or mirror interactions that a human user might have with another human user, such that an individual would feel that the individual could develop a friendship or other relationship with the artificial intelligence

So, with how poorly that's defined, and with that "ANY" there, most video games/characters.

As I posted at top level, they've already backed off, but even the linked version had a carve out for video games:

  (B) Does not include:
  ...
  (ii) A bot that is a feature of a video game and is limited to
  replies related to the video game that cannot discuss topics
  related to mental health, self-harm, or sexually explicit content, or
  maintain a dialogue on other topics unrelated to the video game

It's really hard to prevent a general-purpose LLM from doing those. Especially the last one; any topic unrelated to the game is forbidden, not just the ones you slapped a second LLM on top to monitor for.

> Simulate a human being, including in appearance, voice, or other mannerisms

This covers all text-to-speech ever? Like, Alexa or Siri.

As some of the reddit comments point out, they've already backed off: https://www.wjhl.com/news/tennessee-backs-off-sweeping-artif...

We need to stop getting worked up about crazy legislation being proposed. That's a circus even at the Federal level as legislators propose all kinds of loony stuff to appeal to their base knowing full well it never has a chance to become law. It is extremely cheap to propose legislation, a very different matter to actually pass legislation that is signed into law.

But when you write an article about legislation that is merely proposed at the state level, then that's really rage-baiting.

And when you title this as "about to make" instead of "loony rep proposed something he knows will never stand a chance of passing his own chamber", then it's being downright dishonest.

But datacenters are fine?

https://www.datacenters.com/locations/united-states/tennesse...

It's against xAI Colossus datacenter in Memphis

Finally someone taking AGI x-risk seriously.

cf. https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/5CfBDiQNg9upfipWk/only-law-c...

Is this a joke? This bill does not particularly sound like it's written by a person who even knows x-risks are a thing; it seems to be trying to fight parasocial attachments to LLMs.

And even if it was otherwise, it'd be nearly useless since it's a law of one particular state. From the very post you linked: "If an ASI ban is to accomplish anything at all, it has to be effective everywhere. [...] Driving an AI company out of just your own city will not protect your family from death. It won't even protect your city from job losses, earlier in the timeline."

Since Oracle is moving to Nashville, I support this decision.

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