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Comment by nwoli | Hacker News Reader

Im fine with the stable diffusion license. It’s just there to cover their ass from lawsuits. Releasing the weights is enough to be good guys in my book.

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Hmm... but somehow hardware stores don't feel the need to make you sign an agreement to not cut off anyone's head before selling you a machete, and gas stations don't make you sign an agreement to not burn down buildings before selling you gasoline.

Isn't that because laws relating to physical harm already exist and are well-established? There's not really much legal regulation yet in terms of specific AI-driven harms. We're probably yet still to find out all the ways in which it can be abused.

What AI harms would not already be addressed by existing laws? Do you think there are gaps in criminal codes, for example?

> What AI harms would not already be addressed by existing laws?

I think that's the whole point -- we don't know.

Not an expert but I'd imagine there are a lot of gaps in relation to deepfakes

What you have in mind? Something against ownership and creation?

People have been making fake photographs for going on two centuries now.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hippolyte_Bayard

Perhaps the issue is "psychological harms" which are not yet criminal, but we have an up-and-coming generation of law grads who believe they should be.

> and gas stations don't make you sign an agreement to not burn down buildings before selling you gasoline.

That's historic. Gas stations wouldn't be allowed nowadays, and the legal ways to buy something that dangerous would certainly not be anonymous

To charge my electric car recently on holiday I couldn't just swipe my card at the charger like I can with a self-serve gas station. I had to download some shonky app, sign up, provide address details, and agree to pages of restrictions.

There probably are all sorts of weird “you may not use this computer to commit terrorist acts” agreements you implicitly or explicitly agree on when buying a computer

Yep, iTunes famously may not be used to produce nuclear weapons. Well, the non-clickbait story is that Apple's generic user license has some boilerplate CYA regarding US federal laws. But seeing it written down in your music player is still funny [1]

Even more amusing was Douglas Crockford putting a clause in his software license saying it may not be used "for evil". A bit of tongue-in-cheek humor referencing George Bush, but actually ended up causing a bit of a headache for some orgs, and the GNU Project declaring it a non-free license [2]

[1] https://www.apple.com/legal/internet-services/itunes/dev/std...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Douglas_Crockford#Software_lic...

Hardware stores don’t have sites like this froth at the mouth to talk about how dangerous their machetes are and how it’s irresponsible to let people use them and so on and so forth.

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