They mention the Nuclear Forces Treaty which manages to accomplish this for a similarly difficult problem, so i believe this is technicality a solvable problem, it's just a matter of political will.
I don't disagree that theoretically there could be some kind of test ban treaty type thing. But the mere fact that the primary rhetoric we see from leaders is around "winning the AI competition with China", I personally can't help but interpret this as a sign that nobody in the US is even close to ready to come to the table ready to slow things down.
The restrictions this author mentions about amazon are incorrect. You can use the card to get an amazon credit and then buy any amount on amazon and use your normal credit card PLUS this credit amount.
Am i missing something, or isn't there already a law saying it's illegal to 3d print firearms there? So this is making it illegal to break the law???? Is there going to be a 3rd law criminalizing the bypass of 3D printer gun blocking bypass blockers?
And yet sometimes the consequences ARE too severe to ignore. Nuclear war is a serious concept and it's carefully investigated and attempted to be controlled by a lot of powerful people. Why is this situation different? Because it's unlikely? So is nuclear war.
I'm kinda confused as to _what_, exactly this post is saying? Is it saying that alignment needs to be better? That seems strictly pro-safetyism. But he talks about Eliezer's ethics negatively, so does he not believe that AI is a world-ending risk? If he just believes that AI is not that dangerous and just needs some minor "correctly done" alignment i don't think his stance is meaningful as a anti-both-sides perspective because that's basically equivalent to status quo.
There are none that are reliably usable by actual porn companies at this moment. Check pornhub, you can only subscribe to them via bitcoin and direct bank payments.
This sounds bad enough that it makes me wonder what the punishment for breaking the rules in jail is. If you can't sleep in a certain direction, what are they going to do if you refuse to obey? Or even can't obey because you don't speak Japanese?
According to amnesty international [0] you'd be put in solitary confinement and restrained with your hands handcuffed to a belt. From the report "Handcuffs
are not removed at any time, even during mealtimes, or when the prisoner needs to sleep or use the toilet."
Breaking rules in US prisons leads to solitary confinement. I'm assuming there's something similar in Japanese prisons, although the conditions sound like they can't get much worse...
I can't logically think of any other lawfully worse punishment than what was described in the article. I don't know what they'd do for breaking rules in these situations, to be honest.
I've attempted desperately to understand this paper after thoroughly reading it and have made 0 progress. Can anyone who does understand it attempt to explain?
Currently my understanding is that this paper is claiming that "concepts" are a fundamental building block of experience (which relates to consciousness), and can only be built by a mapmaker which is something that directly converts continuous physical phenomena into discrete tokens. But I couldn't get further into how that related to consciousness.
EDIT: the paper seems to be assuming that something simulating a mapmaker, or the process of doing it, can by nature not be a mapmaker since performing alphabetization is inherently something that must be "instantiated". How do they confirm if something is doing simulation vs if it's actually instantiating it? How can you tell the difference? They say how, much like simulating photosynthesis will not produce glucose, simulating mapmaking won't produce concepts. But you can't measure concepts, they're intangible, so you can't differentiate simulating mapmaking vs a real mapmaker.
It starts by saying that a simulation of something is not the real thing. A simulation of a hurricane is not a hurricane. That's certainly true and even obvious.
Then they say that current AI is just a simulation of consciousness and therefore is not real consciousness. Moreover, it can never be real consciousness because it is just a simulation.
But that's a circular argument: they are defining AI as a simulation. But what if AI is not a simulation of consciousness but actual consciousness? They don't offer any argument for why that's impossible.
If we simulated a hurricane by somehow inducing a rotating, organized system of clouds and thunderstorms over warm tropical waters with wind speeds over 75+ mph, the difference could end up being fairly unimportant to those in the simulation's path.
Computer simulations of hurricanes obviously lack those important properties of what makes something a hurricane. I'm not so sure that the same would apply to something as abstract and difficult to define as consciousness.
Agreed! The paper is not explicit about how to distinguish between a simulation and the real thing, and that's how it gets into trouble.
With consciousness, the extra difficulty is that we can't distinguish via observable evidence. With a hurricane, we can measure wind-speed and track insurance claims to distinguish between simulation and the real thing. How do we do that with consciousness? What is the observable effect of consciousness?
On the other hand, an accurate digital simulation of a mechanical calculator really does calculate. The "a simulation is not the real thing" objection breaks down when the function is information processing, on account of information's substrate independence.
We invented a word for a very specific thing (consciousness) and are now debating whether that relatively unimportant word represents a large open set or a narrow closed set.
We do one thing in our bodies with relatively binary nervous system and a fundamentally continuous endocrine system. That's clearly and unanimously consciousness. We also, however, see other animals with similar set-ups but less capabilities, so we understand it exists on a spectrum.
We separately invented a thing that gets to similar outcomes with fundamentally binary logic gates.
Our minds are drawn to comparison and classification, so we fight over how similar or different those two things are in a way that often feels unsatisfactory because in order to meaningfully compare the two, we have to reduce them in a way that feels like its underselling either/both.
Yep that's about what i managed to get out of it as well. If you define AI as a simulation of a mapmaker, it can't be a real mapmaker. But they are never able to prove that it IS only a simulation, instead of an actual mapmaker.
Also, since there's no way to prove that we're not entities in a simulation of something else, the argument runs out of steam in the opposite direction as well.
> A simulation of a hurricane is not a hurricane. That's certainly true and even obvious.
I mean, if I simulated a small section of a hurricane by generating 120 mph winds and water pointed at your house, your house could still be flooded and destroyed.
Yes, and it immediately called to mind for me the phrase “the map is not the territory.”
Put another way: no matter how detailed or “perfect” you make a map, it will never be the territory, ie the thing that is mapped.
Computers and AI are like a map in this regard —- just ones and zeros that we have assigned meaning to arbitrarily. No matter how “good” AI gets, it’s still just a map of the thing not the thing itself.
So AI saying “I feel sad” is never more than a representation of sadness that should not be confused with the subjective experience of sadness itself.
I've tried to explain this paper to people in similar circumstances and have also struggled!
In my mind the key point of departure between this paper and the more standard computational functionalist approaches is the importance of metabolism. Metabolism _precedes_ organism. The body is first deeply entangled with the environment through exchanges of resources (content causality) before it is capable of building computers (vehicle causality). Having built and alphabetized the world we can understand them in terms of discrete state transitions.
I expect my explanations have been unsatisfying as we can immediately move to seeing metabolism as some alphabetized input/output system that can be immediately placed back into the computational framework. Moving outside of this framework requires engaging with the enactivist/organicist traditions, which is a rich but minority view.
I'm only partway through, but I believe one of the foundational blocks is that computation is fundamentally an interpretation of physical events, not something that can just exist by itself.
Currently out understanding of living systems is that they have to inhabit the body. What if tomorrow we find Alien race which is like drone operator operating a drone somewhat like Navi controlling other other animals but wireless. Would we change our definition of consciousness if brain (command and control centre) and body (physical execution) are distinct systems? This argument was stated by Daniel Dennett
"if Claude was trained on the LGPL-licensed codebase and its output reflects patterns learned from that code, can the output be treated as license-free? The emerging legal consensus is probably not, and assuming it can creates significant liability for anyone shipping that code commercially."
Is there any citation for this "legal consensus"? I was not aware there was any evidence backed stances on this topic as of yet
This sounds like a problem that's pretty easy to get around.
CC does not need LGPL code. There's more than enough BSD and Apache code to go around.
And they can generate synthetic data that is better than LGPL for their training.
It's also a problem that does not seem feasible to meaningfully enforce.
It's easy to generate CC code and lie and say you didn't. It would be hard to prove that you did, especially if you took any precautions to make it even slightly difficult that you did.
Unlike GPL, BSD and Apache licenses do not claim to also cover your non-AI-generated code that only invokes the AI-generated code.
However, even if the BSD/Apache/MIT licensed code can be incorporated freely in your application, you still have no right to remove the copyright notices from it and/or to claim that you own the copyright for it.
Therefore, unless the AI model has been trained only on non-copyrighted public-domain code, incorporating the generated code in your application means that you have removed the copyright notices from it, which is not allowed by the original licenses.
There is absolutely no doubt that using an AI coding assistant works around the copyright laws, but it is still equivalent with doing copy and paste with fragments from copyrighted works into your source code.
I consider that copyright should not be applicable to program sources, at least not in its current form, so reusing parts from other programs should be fair use, but only if human programmers would be allowed to do the same.
> However, even if the BSD/Apache/MIT licensed code can be incorporated freely in your application, you still have no right to remove the copyright notices from it and/or to claim that you own the copyright for it.
I can't speak for all licenses, but I'm familiar with at least one BSD license. That's almost the entire point of it...
You cannot take their literal code and call it your own. You can derive code from it and call it your own. That's what LLMs primarily do.
With sufficient obfuscation (which models seem to provide intrinsically), how would anyone know to sue? On top of that, only the most major sorts of litigation have the legal force to pierce even the flimsiest of obfuscation... this is likely all moot.
If some GPL-licensed group were to sue some commercial software project that they do not have the source code for, what would even give it away? But they throw $1 million at a lawyer who can at least get it to the discovery phase somehow, and the source code is provided. It looks to be shit, but maybe an expert witness would come along and say "that looks inspired by the open source project". Where does it go from there? The model is a black box, but maybe you've got a superhero lawyer who manages to rope in Anthropic or OpenAI, and you can see how it produced the code given those prompts. What now? Are there any expert witnesses who both could say and would say that it was "bulk copying-pasting code". And if it were, what jury is going to go for that theory of the crime? Copying-and-pasting, but the code doesn't match, except in short little strings that any code might match. This isn't a slamdunk, and it's not going to proceed very far unless it's another Google-vs-Oracle shitfest.
The chardet dispute is the closest thing to an active test case on this specific question, and you are right that it has not resolved into settled law. "Emerging legal consensus" was imprecise. The more accurate framing is: the legal community's working assumption, based on how copyright doctrine treats derivative works, is that training-data provenance travels with the output. That assumption has not been tested definitively in court yet.
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