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Culture War Roundup for the week of September 5, 2022

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First volley in the AI culture war? The EU’s attempt to regulate open-source AI is counterproductive

The regulation of general-purpose AI (GPAI) is currently being debated by the European Union’s legislative bodies as they work on the Artificial Intelligence Act (AIA). One proposed change from the Council of the EU (the Council) would take the unusual, and harmful, step of regulating open-source GPAI. While intended to enable the safer use of these tools, the proposal would create legal liability for open-source GPAI models, undermining their development. This could further concentrate power over the future of AI in large technology companies and prevent research that is critical to the public’s understanding of AI.

The definition of "GPAI" is vague and unclear, but it may possibly differ from the commonly-understood usage of "AGI" and may include systems like GPT-3 and SD.

I will be very curious to see how much mainstream political traction these issues get in the coming years and what the left/right divide on the issue will look like.

commonly-understood usage of "AGI"

Honestly, I follow this field largely peripherally, but I don't think anyone understands what "AGI" means. There's a lot of scaremongering about what "generalized intelligence" will entail (it's a classic science fiction trope!), but from what I'm seeing of the development it's not clear that "generalized" will be the sort of thing easily weaponized against us. It seems quite plausible to me that existing neural models won't inherently have any sort of long-term objectives or goals. Are emotions separable from intelligence like science fiction authors would have us believe?

As a rough comparison, I feel like an observer in 1900 watching lots of attempts at powered heavier-than-air flight, but wondering if initiatives to stop investing in roads ("we'll fly!") or railroads (we do fly sometimes) are well-timed. It seems likely someone will be successful, but exactly what it will look like is unclear, and I'm not sure we should start planning for our ornithopter overlords.

I don't think anyone understands what "AGI" means

Most "confusion" over what AGI means seems to come from people who want to shift the goalposts to make ridiculous claims (e.g. that GPT-3 is "already an AGI").

One thing that would obviously qualify an AI as an AGI is if it could do everything a human could do. Obviously this would entail that it has agency, that it has some sort of body that it can use to interact with the physical world, etc.

Maybe some less powerful systems could qualify as AGI as well, e.g. a non-embodied agent that we could only interact with through text. But the fact that there are edge cases doesn't mean that the concept of AGI is particularly difficult to grasp, or that most people don't intuitively understand what is meant by the concept.