Generally for a court case, a generalized grievance is not enough—you need to have a concrete and particularized harm. What you are talking about sounds most analogous to “Public Nuisance”—I don’t find the Wikipedia summary to be very good, and don’t have time at this moment to find a better one. But the short version is, to bring a claim for Public Nuisance, you have to either be the government, or else be an individual who has an additional special harm above and beyond the general harm to the public.
Thankfully, it seems like the US Federal Government is more on the same page with me about these risks than I had previously thought.
“(k) The term “dual-use foundation model” means an AI model that is trained on broad data; generally uses self-supervision; contains at least tens of billions of parameters; is applicable across a wide range of contexts; and that exhibits, or could be easily modified to exhibit, high levels of performance at tasks that pose a serious risk to security, national economic security, national public health or safety, or any combination of those matters, such as by:
(i) substantially lowering the barrier of entry for non-experts to design, synthesize, acquire, or use chemical, biological, radiological, or nuclear (CBRN) weapons;
(ii) enabling powerful offensive cyber operations through automated vulnerability discovery and exploitation against a wide range of potential targets of cyber attacks; or
(iii) permitting the evasion of human control or oversight through means of deception or obfuscation.
Models meet this definition even if they are provided to end users with technical safeguards that attempt to prevent users from taking advantage of the relevant unsafe capabilities. ”
Thanks RamblinDash, that’s helpful. I agree that this does seem like something the government should consider taking on, rather than making sense as a claim from a particular person at this point. I suppose that if there is a catastrophe that results which can be traced back to Llama2, then the survivors would have an easier case to make.
Generally for a court case, a generalized grievance is not enough—you need to have a concrete and particularized harm. What you are talking about sounds most analogous to “Public Nuisance”—I don’t find the Wikipedia summary to be very good, and don’t have time at this moment to find a better one. But the short version is, to bring a claim for Public Nuisance, you have to either be the government, or else be an individual who has an additional special harm above and beyond the general harm to the public.
Thankfully, it seems like the US Federal Government is more on the same page with me about these risks than I had previously thought.
“(k) The term “dual-use foundation model” means an AI model that is trained on broad data; generally uses self-supervision; contains at least tens of billions of parameters; is applicable across a wide range of contexts; and that exhibits, or could be easily modified to exhibit, high levels of performance at tasks that pose a serious risk to security, national economic security, national public health or safety, or any combination of those matters, such as by:
(i) substantially lowering the barrier of entry for non-experts to design, synthesize, acquire, or use chemical, biological, radiological, or nuclear (CBRN) weapons;
(ii) enabling powerful offensive cyber operations through automated vulnerability discovery and exploitation against a wide range of potential targets of cyber attacks; or
(iii) permitting the evasion of human control or oversight through means of deception or obfuscation.
Models meet this definition even if they are provided to end users with technical safeguards that attempt to prevent users from taking advantage of the relevant unsafe capabilities. ”
I especially like “or could be easily modified to exhibit” here.
Thanks RamblinDash, that’s helpful. I agree that this does seem like something the government should consider taking on, rather than making sense as a claim from a particular person at this point. I suppose that if there is a catastrophe that results which can be traced back to Llama2, then the survivors would have an easier case to make.