New bill to protect American citizens access to AI – Please read and share
righttorun.us
righttorun.us
The author is forthcoming about his lack of knowledge or experience in legislation or the finer details of public policymaking, and he seems like a smart guy. He asks that any interested and more knowledgeable parties carry the effort forward and make it good law.
Since the "effort" here is apparently full-text draft bills for consideration by Congress and the Minnesota legislature, we are meant to gather that the author has used LLMs to assist him in producing something close to the intended final product of his initiative. But given the goals of the bill, I do not think LLM assistance was the right choice.
You, me, and everyone else are all non-experts in countless, countless vocations. The non-electricians among us are smart enough not to try to do that work ourselves, but that's only out of self-preservation.
The bill's text and analysis all but pound the table in asserting that the added "capability" afforded by LLMs shouldn't be denied to the public. I find little to disagree with there, but here, that great capability has been used to write something which an experienced lawmaker would recognize as generated. Perhaps even vulnerable to legal challenges from wealthy interested parties.
What I'm saying, ultimately, is that while noble and well intentioned, this is not a home run of an example of how the public might wield this "capability".
Nothing's going to zap us for trying our hand at legislation, and thus our sense of self-preservation won't stop us.
But what good things might we preserve by respecting and recognizing our ignorance? I'm not talking about staying ignorant, just confronting it, in service of knowing oneself.
Eg I haven’t finished reading it, but it cites Heller on the first page and enshrines that AI is/can be used for self defense. That feels like a huge can of worms for the court, because now every 2A case in our history is relevant to any AI bill.
I also don’t know that it will accomplish what the author intends. Even if we hypothetically establish that AI use is covered by the first and second amendments, the government can still regulate it if they can pass strict scrutiny, ie if they have a worrisome enough complaint.
What the author wants, at the level of certainty they want it, would require a constitutional amendment and dismantling the strict scrutiny system. No idea what the impact of that would be, but my wild guess is “probably bad”.