LW - RTFB: California's AB 3211 by Zvi

The Nonlinear Library

Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: RTFB: California's AB 3211, published by Zvi on July 30, 2024 on LessWrong. Some in the tech industry decided now was the time to raise alarm about AB 3211. As Dean Ball points out, there's a lot of bills out there. One must do triage. Dean Ball: But SB 1047 is far from the only AI bill worth discussing. It's not even the only one of the dozens of AI bills in California worth discussing. Let's talk about AB 3211, the California Provenance, Authenticity, and Watermarking Standards Act, written by Assemblymember Buffy Wicks, who represents the East Bay. SB 1047 is a carefully written bill that tries to maximize benefits and minimize costs. You can still quite reasonably disagree with the aims, philosophy or premise of the bill, or its execution details, and thus think its costs exceed its benefits. When people claim SB 1047 is made of crazy pills, they are attacking provisions not in the bill. That is not how it usually goes. Most bills involving tech regulation that come before state legislatures are made of crazy pills, written by people in over their heads. There are people whose full time job is essentially pointing out the latest bill that might break the internet in various ways, over and over, forever. They do a great and necessary service, and I do my best to forgive them the occasional false alarm. They deal with idiots, with bulls in China shops, on the daily. I rarely get the sense these noble warriors are having any fun. AB 3211 unanimously passed the California assembly, and I started seeing bold claims about how bad it would be. Here was one of the more measured and detailed ones. Dean Ball: The bill also requires every generative AI system to maintain a database with digital fingerprints for "any piece of potentially deceptive content" it produces. This would be a significant burden for the creator of any AI system. And it seems flatly impossible for the creators of open weight models to comply. Under AB 3211, a chatbot would have to notify the user that it is a chatbot at the start of every conversation. The user would have to acknowledge this before the conversation could begin. In other words, AB 3211 could create the AI version of those annoying cookie notifications you get every time you visit a European website. … AB 3211 mandates "maximally indelible watermarks," which it defines as "a watermark that is designed to be as difficult to remove as possible using state-of-the-art techniques and relevant industry standards." So I decided to Read the Bill (RTFB). It's a bad bill, sir. A stunningly terrible bill. How did it unanimously pass the California assembly? My current model is: 1. There are some committee chairs and others that can veto procedural progress. 2. Most of the members will vote for pretty much anything. 3. They are counting on Newsom to evaluate and if needed veto. 4. So California only sort of has a functioning legislative branch, at best. 5. Thus when bills pass like this, it means a lot less than you might think. Yet everyone stays there, despite everything. There really is a lot of ruin in that state. Time to read the bill. Read The Bill (RTFB) It's short - the bottom half of the page is all deleted text. Section 1 is rhetorical declarations. GenAI can produce inauthentic images, they need to be clearly disclosed and labeled, or various bad things could happen. That sounds like a job for California, which should require creators to provide tools and platforms to provide labels. So we all can remain 'safe and informed.' Oh no. Section 2 22949.90 provides some definitions. Most are standard. These aren't: (c) "Authentic content" means images, videos, audio, or text created by human beings without any modifications or with only minor modifications that do not lead to significant changes to the perceived contents or meaning of the cont...