You can make AI/LLMs illegal, but other countries won't. There's a real risk as a country you fall behind economically if you ban what turns out to be the next big tech revolution.

Okay. Let China become more technologically advanced than us. I don’t care. Chinese tech companies being able to write software 20% faster than us is a less bitter pill to swallow than having to live in our current LLM world.

> I don’t understand why people act like we just have to submit to the AI revolution.

Some people are genuinely interested and excited about this new technology. Other people have an interest that the AI will succeed. At least on the surface it seems that these two groups are louder (or more successful) than the ones that oppose AI.

> We can make this technology illegal, and shut it down completely. Why don’t we?

Because there are not many (if any) lobby groups that pour money into making it illegal and also because of fear of not being left behind. There are also plenty of lobby groups that invest a lot of money into putting AI into everything.

the genie is out of the bottle.

no government on earth will make ai outright illegal. they are the perfect thing to shrug accountability onto, let alone all of the actual semi-useful reasons of keeping ai legal.

how would you even make it illegal? people have local models everywhere. if your country makes it illegal but mine doesnt, people from your country will just vpn and access them in my country. it would have to be a worldwide effort (lol).

If the government made it illegal it would just be for you and me. You can bet they'd still use it for mass surveillance processing, sorting people into buckets, AI generated propaganda, etc. And in the United States they'd be likely to leave carve outs for large corporations to continue to abuse it for advertising (including political), copyright laundering, automated price setting, etc. Like when Mattel got caught selling lead painted toys and congress passed legislation forcing all toys to be inspected but left Mattel exempt.

And then you'd still have to defend against AI powered scams (cloned voices, cloned video, bespoke scam campaigns directly targeted at individuals generated by AI with OSINT), social media bot campaigns, AI generated black mail or harassment including deepfakes, etc because that stuff is already largely illegal and either ignored or not feasible to police as it happens across international borders.

We make child porn illegal which is even easier to copy than local LLMs. It doesn’t work perfectly, of course there are people who still have it, but we could dramatically reduce the number of people with local LLMs if we punished possession with long prison sentences.

i am sorry, i was trying to take you seriously, but you completely lose me at comparing an llm to child sexual abuse material (CSAM) and suggesting possession of an llm should be met with similarly long prison sentences. that is absurd.

a central tenet of justice is that the punishment fits the crime. for CSAM, it is obvious why extremely long prison sentences are fitting. the damage CSAM causes is immense and hard to even capture with words.

the damage llms cause is... not even close.

Punishment is not only tied to the harm done by the crime, it’s also tied to difficulty of enforcement. For laws that are relatively easy to break without getting caught, you need severe penalties or everyone will just ignore them.

No, only lawmakers can make things illegal and only if their personal incentives align so they are better off from making those things illegal.

Because lots of people, businesses and governments don't want to.

My impression is that The majority of people do want to.

When has that ever mattered?

My impression is that, seeing the rising AI use rates everywhere, that you are in a bubble.

Could be me too, but seeing China's general societal infatuation with AI outpace the US by orders of magnitude, I think that's a bit less likely.

then you're just thinking in a very naive way.

you'd need everybody to be onboard, be it your neighbor, the guy 8000 miles away from you on the other side of the planet, all the nations

if even one goes "well ill just keep going" it won't work.

it's like with nuclear weapons, nobody wants to be the one without them unless nobody else has them, so in the end they're still prevalent.