California Legislature Passes Controversial 'Kill Switch' AI Safety Bill

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: A controversial bill aimed at enforcing safety standards for large artificial intelligence models has now passed the California State Assembly by a 45-11 vote. Following a 32-1 state Senate vote in May, SB-1047 now faces just one more procedural state senate vote before heading to Governor Gavin Newsom's desk. As we've previously explored in depth, SB-1047 asks AI model creators to implement a 'kill switch' that can be activated if that model starts introducing 'novel threats to public safety and security,' especially if it's acting 'with limited human oversight, intervention, or supervision.' Some have criticized the bill for focusing on outlandish risks from an imagined future AI rather than real, present-day harms of AI use cases like deep fakes or misinformation.

If the Senate confirms the Assembly version as expected, Newsom will have until September 30 to decide whether to sign the bill into law. If he vetoes it, the legislature could override with a two-thirds vote in each chamber (a strong possibility given the overwhelming votes in favor of the bill). At a UC Berkeley Symposium in May, Newsom said he worried that 'if we over-regulate, if we overindulge, if we chase a shiny object, we could put ourselves in a perilous position.' At the same time, Newsom said those over-regulation worries were balanced against concerns he was hearing from leaders in the AI industry. 'When you have the inventors of this technology, the godmothers and fathers, saying, 'Help, you need to regulate us,' that's a very different environment,' he said at the symposium. 'When they're rushing to educate people, and they're basically saying, 'We don't know, really, what we've done, but you've got to do something about it,' that's an interesting environment.' Supporters of the AI safety bill include state senator Scott Weiner and AI experts including Geoffrey Hinton and Yoshua Bengio. Bengio supports the bill as a necessary step for consumer protection and insists that AI should not be self-regulated by corporations, akin to other industries like pharmaceuticals and aerospace.

Stanford professor Fei-Fei Li opposes the bill, arguing that it could have harmful effects on the AI ecosystem by discouraging open-source collaboration and limiting academic research due to the liability placed on developers of modified models. A group of business leaders also sent an open letter Wednesday urging Newsom to veto the bill, calling it 'fundamentally flawed.'

Read more of this story at Slashdot.