Tim Hwang argues California's SB 1047 was a watershed coalition-building moment similar to SOPA

I continue to be surprised by the bizarre lessons so many people extracted from the SB 1047 debate and, while I stand by my substantive position on the bill, I do worry that I helped incubate a “dumbass pathogen,” or at least dressed it up as some kind of medicine.

But in the end I think there was no other choice given the state and clear intention of SB 1047 when it was first introduced but to kill it. It, and the mentality it represented, needed to suffer a loss, be stopped in its tracks. You must understand how different the vibes were in late 23/early 24. There were people who really did want to ban Llama 2 from being released open source! We desperately needed a course correction.

You must also remember that the safetyists had partnered with the fools and the fascists who wrote the Biden “blueprint for an AI bill of rights,” one of the most revolting AI policy documents ever written. The plan of this latter group really was to infect AI, and through this all future human minds, with their ideology of DEI. It feels so distant but this was real. One mustn’t forget this. One had to yell “stop!” That’s what I understood myself to be doing in opposing SB 1047, in some impressionistic sense, even though of course the bill itself didn’t come from the Biden admin. I was fighting “them.”

So I don’t really regret it, but I acknowledge that the opposition to SB 1047 did not really mature into a serious thing, but instead exists in a permanent state of fighting against SB 1047, an article of ancient history.

I continue to be surprised by the bizarre lessons so many people extracted from the SB 1047 debate and, while I stand by my substantive position on the bill, I do worry that I helped incubate a “dumbass pathogen,” or at least dressed it up as some kind of medicine.

But in the end I think there was no other choice given the state and clear intention of SB 1047 when it was first introduced but to kill it. It, and the mentality it represented, needed to suffer a loss, stopped in its tracks. You must understand how different the vibes were in late 23/early 24. There were people who really did want to ban Llama 2 from being released open source! We desperately needed a course correction.

You must also remember that the safetyists had partnered with the fools and the fascists who wrote the Biden “blueprint for an AI bill of rights,” one of the most revolting AI policy documents ever written. The plan of this latter group really was to infect AI, and this all future human minds, with their ideology of DEI. It feels so distant but this was real. One mustn’t forget this. One had to yell “stop!” That’s what I understood myself to be doing in opposing SB 1047, in some impressionistic sense, even though of course the bill itself didn’t come from the Biden admin. I was fighting “them.”

So I don’t really regret it, but I acknowledge that the opposition to SB 1047 did not really mature into a serious thing, but instead exists in a permanent state of fighting against SB 1047, an article of ancient history.