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Comment by Paracompact | Hacker News Reader

It's not all-or-nothing. Banning Chinese models in the public sector and strong-arming the private sector against using them would already do great damage. Similarly, open-source training could be stymied by any of hardware embargoes, taxation, or regulation of larger players.

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Sure, it's possible for regulations to make things worse, i will agree. But without regulations it's pretty clear things are going to end up VERY bad, and the only knob we have to make it not bad is regulations. So it's important we try something, and work towards doing a good kind of regulation, or any one of the bad futures you imagine is pretty likely to come to pass.

Good regulations would be very nice! Mandatory transparency into training and dataset usage would be a benefit for all, for example. Some sort of regulation or incentives against the most corrosive enshittification (AI call centers, AI therapists, undisclosed AI entertainment mills, etc.) would also be an overwhelmingly popular proposition. And enforcement of the CFAA on operators who let malicious agents loose onto the open internet, or otherwise consume too many resources or violate robots.txt, might at least help the internet stay alive a little longer.

It’s quite possible for imperfect regulations to make a problem worse. See, for instance, sanctions intended to weaken China that ended up creating powerful Chinese competitors and reducing Western influence in their internal markets, bringing them closer to technological autonomy.

The sibling comment offers some good regulations that may actually reduce harms, but the kind of regulations offered there are not the ones that the “safety” people want, because they hurt profits.

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