philip lelyveld The world of entertainment technology

How the Loudest Voices in AI Went From ‘Regulate Us’ to ‘Unleash Us’ 

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 In DC, the word “oversight” has fallen out of favor, and the AI discourse is no exception. Instead of advocating for outside bodies to examine AI models to assess risks, or for platforms to alert people when they are interacting with AI, committee chair Ted Cruz argued for a path where the government would not only fuel innovation but remove barriers like “overregulation.” Altman was on board with that. His message was no longer “regulate me” but “invest in me.” He said that overregulation—like the rules adopted by the European Union or one bill recently vetoed in California would be “disastrous.” “We need the space to innovate and to move quickly,” he said. Safety guardrails might be necessary, he affirmed, but they needed to involve “sensible regulation that does not slow us down.” ...

The Trump doctrine of AI regulation seems suspiciously close to that of Trump supporter Marc Andreessen, who declared in his Techno Optimist Manifesto that AI regulation was literally a form of murder because “any deceleration of AI will cost lives.” ...

Public pressure, or some spectacular example of misuse, may lead Congress to address those AI issues at some point. But what lingers for me is the about-face from two years ago when serious worries about catastrophic risk dominated conversations in the AI world. The glaring exception to this is Anthropic, which still hasn’t budged from a late October blog post—just days before the presidential election—that not only urged effective regulation to “reduce catastrophic risks” but pretty much proposed the end of times if we didn’t do it soon. “Governments should urgently take action on AI policy in the next eighteen months,” it read, in boldface. “The window for proactive risk prevention is closing fast.” ...

See the full story here: https://www.wired.com/story/plaintext-sam-altman-ai-regulation-trump/