It is a tool. If I use a tool for illegal purposes I have broken the law. I can be held accountable for having broken the law. If the laws are deficient, make the laws stronger and punish people for wrong deed, regardless of the tool at hand.
This is a naked attempt to build a regulatory moat while capitalizing on fear of the unknown and ignorance. It’s attempting to regulate research into something that has no external ability to cause harm without the use of a principal directing it.
I can see a day (perhaps) when AIs have some form of independent autonomy, or even display agency and sentience, when we can revisit. Other issues come into play as well, such as the morality of owning a sentience and what that entails. But that is way down the road. And even further if Microsoft’s proxy closes the doors on anyone but Microsoft, Google, Amazon, and Facebook.
It is a tool which allows any individual to have nearly instant access not only to all the world's public data, but the ability to correlate and research that data to synthesize new information quickly.
Without guardrails, someone can have a completely amoral LLM that has the ability to write persuasive manifestos on any kind of extremist movement that prior would have taken someone with intelligence.
A person will be able to ask the model how best to commit various crimes with the lowest chances of being caught.
It will enable a level of pattern matching and surveillance yet unseen.
I know the genie is out of the bottle, but there are absolutely monumental shifts in technology happening that can and will be used for evil and mere dishonesty.
And those are just the ways LLM and "AI" will fuck with us without guardrails. Even in a walled garden, we honestly won't be able to trust any online interaction with people in the near future. Your comment and mine could both be LLM generated in the near future. Webs of trust will be more necessary.
Anyone who can't think of about five ways AI is going to radically shake society isn't thinking hard enough.
What if we required licenses to create a website? After all, some unscrupulous individuals create websites that sell drugs and other illicit things!