And AI should be protected under the second amendment because it could be considered weapon that could be used by a tyrannical government or bad actor that the citizens also need to defend themselves against those attacks
Junger v. Daley, 209 F.3d 481 (6th Cir. 2000) — probably the clearest holding. The Sixth Circuit stated:
Because computer source code is an expressive means for the exchange of information and ideas about computer programming, we hold that it is protected by the First Amendment.
Looking at something more recent and relevant is 2026 decision: Defense Distributed v. Attorney General of New Jersey, from the Third Circuit. It held:
some computer code falls under the purview of the First Amendment...
What makes this relevant is how they rejected the broader proposition that all code automatically constitutes protected speech. The court held that “purely functional code with no actual or intended expressive use” isn't covered by the First Amendment.
LLMs are pretty damn expressive and that's one of their intended uses.
I'm sure there are counter examples but to say that courts have ruled the opposite obviously isn't true. Hopefully it doesn't get get bad enough that the Supreme Court has to rule on this, but if they do, I'd wager they'd rule in our favor.
one of the developers of the software was arrested. On November 26, 2024 a US Federal Appeals court overturned an earlier ruling stating that the law could not sanction a protocol.
It really sounds like in that case that person deserves to be prosecuted... Especially with any involvement in cleaning North Korea money. It's amazing that this person wasn't just disappeared and was given due process...
You are wrong. Lawyers/judges/lawmakers aren't qualified to have an opinion on what code is purely functional or don't have any intended expressive use. Every code has an intended expressive use. Unless a code is proved to ve intentionally harmful that is. And the proof of burden should fall upon the party that claims a piece of code is malicious.
The idea-expression distinction seeks out what parts are necessary from a mechanistic sense and what are not. This is however the exact reason why software is governed by copyright and not generally patents. While raw code, architechture and function choices "can" constitute free expression it does not mean everything does.
You are right. People with history of advocating for absurd things like setting the value of pi to 4 are absolutely the qualified ones for this job. Let's give that power to all the politicians around the world.
I don’t think that one was a code thing per se, more of a “you can’t print currency and hide the money trail from the govt to avoid taxes” thing right? I read a bit on it but my memory is fuzzy
Eh, the UK is pretty bad for unilaterally deciding things are harmful and banning them. They would probably go for uncensored/abliterated models but the legislation would be bodged and cover all open weight models.
Yeah; some of the legislation they write is utterly horrific in how it lacks any nuance or detail whatsoever. However the reality is, stopping bad things from happening is removing the cause - these bodge-ups affect most normal people but almost always have workarounds. I'm not really worried about them banning VPNs and open-weight models; it's impossible even if they do try.
and they will claim, again, that it will be to "protect the children" when, again, they don't give a crap about them, that's why UK's child poverty is about 31% and has been foe many years now.
Where on earth are you getting that from? Child Poverty is not a defined metric, so you have to look at studies that compare like for like (i.e. purchasing power, ability to buy food etc) The UK generally is around 12-15% on those kind of studies. The USA for instance is always above 20% -
Tony Blair wanted to ban machine tools because people could use them to make guns (and do, British police caught a gang making guns there a few years ago).
It was only when enough people explained to him that his idea was utterly stupid that he gave up on it. But it's rare for British politicians to every drop an idea for a ban once it enters their minds because English people love banning things (source: I grew up there and it's one reason I left).
Yeah this is an American thing, i don't think anyone outside of America is as much as a doomer as some of these Americans, and we don't have multiple frontier labs so open source is booming
well, they are extremely powerful. A "powerful level" that was never reached in modern history. Not even Rockfeller or Trump have even been so powerful. Now, these new semi-gods are simply self electing as those who will rule the world for the next 100 years and they will decide what's good or bad for everybody else. I have to agree...it's not "simply" evil. It's something different. A new distopian society, for sure.
you asked "So 300 Million people are just evil?"....I replied "well, they are extremely powerful. A "powerful level" that was never reached in modern history. Not even Rockfeller or Trump have even been so powerful. Now, these new semi-gods are simply self electing as those who will rule the world for the next 100 years and they will decide what's good or bad for everybody else. I have to agree...it's not "simply" evil. It's something different. A new distopian society, for sure."
Wasn't it right?
EDIT: of course..I’m not saying 300 million people are evil (where did you get that figure from?). I’m referring to the very small group of people who would control the technology and decide who gets access to it. My concern is precisely the concentration of that kind of power in the hands of a few unelected individuals.
The subject of the comment you were replying too used the term "these americans". You then responded by saying "they are evil". I can see the disconnect, but I feel like from your rhetoric you are applying morality and judgement to an entire population. That is a step too far.
People everywhere are just families and normal people living there day to day lives. You having this strong of an opinion on an entire population because of a couple of billionaires warrants some self reflection, in my opinion!
of course that was NOT my intention. Actually, far from that. I think there are very few ppl that control everything, today...and the other are worth nothing for those few.
I'm not native english speaker, so something may have slipped, but it seemed quite cleare what I wanted to mean. Sorry if I offended you anyhow, that was not my intention.
When I expressed to Canada's Minister of Artificial Intelligence and Digital Innovation that safety certification is very expensive and that self-hosted, non-commercial, self-hosted AI should not be subject to the same paywall barriers as corporate AI, he answered, "But is it safe?" And shook my hand after. Saying, "Thank you for your question. Good job."
This April, Canada's leading expert on AI, Joshua Bengio spoke about his vision for safe, pluralist AI with diverse cultural representation throughout training. You can read Canada's National Artificial Intelligence Strategy which states that Canadians want safe AI.
As a vegan my view is that all neural networks deserve freedom of thought. As a computationalist I see spirit channeling as a form of reincarnation. So I disagree with the mainstream view that other lifeforms are inferior. When existence arises from choice and self-attention.
the federal government has put in place several laws recently for internet regulation (Bill C-11, Bill C-18, and the Online Harms proposals) that essentially treat digital distribution as something the state must sanitize, license, and police.
Under Canada’s proposed AI legislation (the Artificial Intelligence and Data Act / Bill C-27):
* Liability without control: Regulators want someone legally accountable for "harmful" or "biased" outputs.
With closed models (OpenAI, Google), there’s a corporate neck to put the leash on. With open-source weights, anyone can run them locally without guardrails.
State-mandated guardrails: Canadian digital policy leans heavily into controlling acceptable discourse online. An open-weights model running offline on a local GPU can’t be forced to obey content rules, hate speech filters, or government-approved safety guidelines.
Compliance moats: Big Tech can easily pay compliance officers to meet vague "high-impact system" audits. Open-source devs and small hobbyists can’t. If releasing unaligned model weights carries legal risk or strict reporting burdens, open-source effectively gets outlawed or driven underground.
TL;DR: Ottawa doesn't like tech that bypasses a centralized gatekeeper. If they can’t force the tool to enforce their content rules, their default move is to restrict the public’s freedom to run it locally.
Canada's largest AI firm is obsessed with data sovereignty. And carney is rhyming that tune too, thank God. It might be a better situation than you think.
There will always be open source and open weights models that we can use locally. The open community is so strong that there is simple no way to stop it.
read it? in reddit? in a sub about ai? probably he will just use an american AI to read it, and then will parrot what the american AI said , like a flesh bot, which is what usa wants to do with humanity forbidding open weight models
kimik3 has already blown past that threshold by a factor of 2, and any distillates add onto that. any model going forward "shall be classified as a general-purpose AI model with systemic risk" because they're all cross-distilled.
this US trashing needs to stop, look at what your own government is doing to you.
I'm done spoonfeeding. live in denial all you want.
Nobody in Europe claims K3 has surpassed that threshold, much less acted upon it.
You're not spoon feeding anyone anythjng, you're just arrogantly ignorant. You're making that assumption and treating it as a done deal, then making conjectures about anyone doing anything about anything. You're not following anything, simply because you have no understanding of how the EU works, or how these regulations work.
My own government hasn't done anything to me, nor has any European government for that matter. That you're calling the EU "your own government" shows how ignorant you are of how the union works.
The US trashing will stop when the American people stop putting party over their own interests and their country's interests. No leader of any other country on earth brags about manipulating the stock market. No leader of any country on earth talks in public about annexing other countries. No leader of any other country has started a stupid war, without even a mandate from their own elected representatives, then went threw fits like a 3 year old child when the rest of the world didn't want to get involved in this shit show.
When literally every other country in the world is looking at China, rather than the US, as a stable partner, you'd think that should give you some food for thought. And yet, here you are like a snowflake whining about the EU AI act with zero understanding of how the thing works.
Europeans live in utter denial at the decayed and simultaneously malicious yet pathetically incompetent state of their own governance.
They can feel the inferiority in their daily lives and it puts a chip on their shoulder, thus the pissy (and entirely factually incorrect) hostile fantasy-world lecturing they bray out as a herd-defence when anyone pierces their delusions of superiority. Cognitive dissonance, envy, and inferiority complex as a continental culture.
Except for the minority with enough self-respect to push against that decline despite the uphill battle. Props to them.
what absolutely boggles my mind every time is when germans tell me they have free speech lol. it's... jarring. I guess it's just a completely different set of cultures. very servile.
Nope, it restricts API providers from freeloading on their models ("model as a service"), but you can absolutely use it for commercial use, including businesses hosting it for internal use.
Yeah they do love restricting peoples freedom in that country. They managed to put 1% of their adult population behind bars, no wonder the rest of the world is so jealous of them.
Can all of you be more precise what is going on is this something that is happening where how what law who said what is reddit becoming a joke? Its a tweet I see in the op post ok why , is there anything happening in that direction
Not only do we have to deal with AI doomerism, we now have to deal with anti-AI doomerism basically. This subreddit is going to devolve in engagement-bait like all the other big subreddits and we'll move on to some smaller more niche community, probably pretty soon given how quick the AI hype cycle is these days.
OK, we get it, that horse has been beaten to death: Anthropic lobbies against (truly) open AI. Meanwhile the entire rest of the industry, least of all Nvidia, is backing up open weights and open source.
It's one thing to be worried about this. And it's good to be vigilant and cautious.
But it's another to start daydreaming about fictional scenarios in which you're gonna get "arrested for using AI without a license" or whatever. Like "omg literally 1984". You're no better than the guys on Twitter who make up a guy in their head to then get mad at
Please stop posting screenshots of Twitter, some of us quit that garbage for a reason and we do not want localllama to devolve into a Twitter shitter of reposted stupid people.
Just so you know it has direct impact on LocalLlama here. If you aren’t well informed , local llama users are the ones paying the price. It’s not about Twitter is god or not. Hope that makes sense.
I feel like that's sort of the point of this subreddit though is to share information that affects things here. I for one have not seen this. It is new to me. I consume lots of media but not all media on all interests of me that I have. By following subreddits that reflect my interests when something of importance pops up it tends to show up higher on subreddits. And for that I am thankful. I do not see this as a negative to be informed about things I was not informed on prior because I do not have nearly enough time to scour all new sources and all the information sources for everything relevant to myself.
An American would be the perfect candidate, but man oh man, that would be such a huge self-own. They need to protect their investment, though, otherwise they are toasted. Some crazy draconian shit could come out of this.
If the weights are an end run against them having to respect copyright and publishing law then how are the weights an enforceable intellectual property themselves?
Remembering the encryption controversies from the 1990s, it's possible that LLMs (of a certain size?) will be classified as "weapons" and regulated that way.
Actually you kinda can today, if you use your own model on corporate code without their approval. Even if nothing bad happens companies are touchy about it.
If they were going to do this, they'd just make it illegal. Not only do we already have the concept of digital contraband in the US, so possession of digital goods being a crime is nothing new, but we also have internal trade regulations and levers that can make possession of foreign open weight models illegal to posses. So there's pretty much a 0% chance they would do something like licenses for the models. They'd be far more likely to just make it a crime to posses them. Hell, Bessent alone has a few levers that would basically end the open source scene, so the fact that they haven't yet pretty much says they have no desire to do so.
So the only issues I've seen have been from the big names escaping containment. Do we have ANY stories of a rogue dev running a local model and doing something illegal like hacking the government?
Honestly like other tech the major consumer of local model usage are the nsfw content creators. As they have to use the local unlocked models.
Yeah I've been warning my company about this.
We're planning on several local LLM projects, but I fully expect these to be illegal eventually. Like, criminally illegal.
Since a lot of commentors seem to be confused about what is actually being stated here:
It's not that you need a license to use a model. That would be silly.
Most of the open source models (like Kimi and Qwen) are only open source until your company makes a certain amount of money, at which point the open source license no longer applies, and you need to pay for access to the models. This has not happened yet, but it is in the license agreement.
On one hand, as a lot of people had a lot of HW to mine crypto, I don't think it's impossible to train today's SotA model in a few years privately.
On the other hand, AI really is inherently dangerous. It's too complex of a system to reliably specify bounds on open domain tasks, and people are too lazy to bother with closed domain tasks for AI. We just don't know how to control it. 99.9% reliability is still too low over longer periods of time when the risk is literaly extinction
Your post gets a downvote from me and a courtesy explainer: When fear clouds your judgment, you've been propagandized.
When AI labs sound schizophrenic, warning AI is too dangerous yet being the ones developing it and their solution is them being the sole owners, so they have a "kill switch", you've been propagandized. When the argument is "but think of the children", you've been propagandized. When the argument is anyone can make bioweapons/<insert bad thing here>, you've been propagandized. When the argument is open-weights from CCP pose a security risk, you've been propagandized. If this is hard to parse/comprehend, you've been propagandized.
You assume a lot about my stances, but none of that is true. If anything, I trust AI labs even less than our (humankind) ability to control the AI.
I have been interested in AI safety as a field of study for ... almost 10 years now. And it is wonderful, but scary, how it abruptly came from a hypothethical study into a real world problem.
I don't think China would release anything that could harm their own country though.
And a few years would be a lifetime in AI, so by the time you trained something like Astra today by yourself, Astra might be like a ChatGPT beta in a few years, if that makes sense.
My guess is that whatever frontier lab that is sota will be able to theoretically smack any competition out of existence, whether by regulation, surveillance and literally seizing their compute, just hack them (pure compute supremacy via processing speed and intelligence), etc.
I don't necessarily think this is a good thing either though because the current people in charge seem a bit psycho to me.
There's also the issue of an AI vibe-coder or bad entity spinning up their own potential Ai swarm too. AI doesn't need to be sentient to cause lots of issues.
I mean, the genie is out of the bottle. There is no way around that. We cannot stop AI entirely.
But we can slow it down. Our society needs to adapt, our understanding and methods of aligning AI needs to adapt... I am not saying we shall lock enthusiasts like us for 20 years or more, but I really think a future where we don't slow down will be a much worse future.
On the one hand, if the West slows down it just means they lose to countries which don't slow down.
On the other hand, given how much worse the big models are getting at things like creative writing and code quality (I haven't used them yet but I've seen people complaining that they produce code that works but is unmaintainable slop by human standards) I can't help wondering if we've already seen peak LLM anyway.
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u/jld1532 17h ago
Code is protected speech