This isn’t just a “techbro” attitude. Although they disagree on the specific problem laws in question, basically every political group (at least in the US) takes issue with the law as written. And most agree (72% as polled in 2023) that the law is written to favor the interests of the wealthy. The pushback against data centers isn’t in contrast to this—data centers provide the bulk of their benefits to wealthy investors, and many localities are permitting them against the will of local citizens.

You might also want to consider that many believe the current AI regulation push is a trojan horse for regulatory capture and subsequent domination of the industry by large, well-connected players who are hostile to privacy and individual freedom.

So when you see US people on a US site complaining about a law that affects US industry, especially scrappy startups, consider if maybe there’s more to it.

The way I interpret your comment is that, in the future, it will be enough to prove that someone tried to remove an LLM watermark to put them in jail.

Of course, the implication by comparison to the building code example, that text absent some homeopathic suggestion of provenance causes harm, is absurd at best.

Sent from my iPhone (harm prevention watermark)

Isn't that what this watermarking allows for? To allow LLM companies to detect that certain text was authored by their tools?

Reading their technical report https://cdn.openai.com/pdf/e9508624-d767-41b6-a26d-e34ca798a... it's a bit more complicated than that, but yes, the watermark is added during sampling.

I keep saying: its worse than that. Companies that actually do not need to ask for consent do - because their compliance departments prefer to play it safe. My current employer genuinely does not share any data with anyone, the only stuff we process is for our own technical purposes, very well within the remit of GDPR. But year after year, a chief data privacy officer after chief data privacy officer, I lose the battle for "lets get rid of the obnoxious cookie consent banner, we dont need it". All big companies are like that.

And of course, cookies are no longer needed for invasive tracking, fingerprinting, and data disaggregation. Been this for years. But hey, bureaucracies never backtrack, so we will have the cookie consent until the thermal death of the universe.

This is also malicious compliance.

The whole effort started as a way to pin point which work openAI stole from! Now they are redirecting the dicussion to "our sources are magic. let's talk about who is copying from that magic".

All the controversy about this being pointless, is on purpose. They are pushing the pointless thing as a distraction and we keep discussing how pointless it is. no wonder.