This quote from Amir Ghavi in an MIT Technology Review piece by Melissa Heikkilä made me laugh out loud:

While the EU is trying to prevent the worst AI harms proactively, the American approach is more reactive. The US waits for harms to emerge first before regulating, says Amir Ghavi, a partner at the law firm Fried Frank. Ghaviis representing Stability AI, the company behind the open-source image-generating AI Stable Diffusion, in three copyright lawsuits. 

“That’s a pro-capitalist stance,” Ghavi says. “It fosters innovation. It gives creators and inventors the freedom to be a bit more bold in imagining new solutions.” 

Because we all know having to worry about stupid things like “law” and “harms” is bad for “innovation.”

That’s why I put zero stock in the magical eight “commitments” the big AI providers made at the White House. Every one of those commitments is no doubt either something the companies were already doing, or were lately pushed into promising via increasingly bad PR. And they are all cut from this same cloth, where “innovation” is put first, and human beings dead last in any meaningful sense.

And this last item in the pledge basically gives AI providers carte blanche to do pretty much whatever so long as they can dress it up in a way of it ‘helping’ something something:

Commitment 8: The companies commit to develop and deploy advanced A.I. systems to help address society’s greatest challenges.

Not impressed. But moreover, not surprised. Same old same old. For a country so ostensibly hell-bent on innovation, we seem to have no problem endlessly trotting out the same old few tired hackney “solutions” and calling it good.

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