With this matter, I hope I actually shan’t have more to write about. But this thought needed to be written out (only if to unload it from my head).
For some reason the current state of affairs around “AI” reminds me a lot of alcohol. Mind you, it’s a useful substance (as a solvent or a disinfectant), some people may even use it in recreational purposes or to deal with stress—but there are always some people abusing it, often for no good reason, and giving bad name to it all. Also there were countries whose budget was largely dependent on alcohol over-consumption but that’s less important here.
The situation with “AI” assistants looks entirely familiar: some people use it responsibly and even achieve useful results with it, but it’s usually other people (a loud but hopefully still minority) who abuse such tools to the point they get high with imaginary power and behave themselves as typical drunks: some boast how much they can consume (tokens or pints of beer), some vomit uncontrollably (you can see the results on GitHub—when it is still up of course), some suffer from neuro-toxic effects (and can’t move or code straight any longer without an external support), some lose all internal restraints (there’s little difference between alcoholics raising ruckus because their favourite liquor store is closed when they want to get a drink and AIcoholics trying to push slop to some project without caring what the change does and why the project in question doesn’t want to accept it). And occasionally you can see the entertaining stunts that would cause normal person a serious damage (like falling from a third floor or deleting a production database) but with a person in question not realising that at all.
Hopefully the situation with “AI” will mature and normalise so that the technology abusers will be shamed for their actions and become an exception instead of current “sport fans right after the match” vibe.
In my country the likely solution to these problems will be a) taxing the users more, and b) endless government funded “Use AI Responsibly” advertising campaigns. That’s how we deal with alcohol and gambling down here.
That’s how most governments deal with vices, by taxing or banning them. The question is what the morals will be, not the laws. E.g. in russia being drunk is not considered to be a good excuse by law (it may add to your sentence/punishment, not diminish it) while russians themselves will excuse almost everything because it was done in a drunk state. If you need an example with humans, I read it’s similar in South Korea.
I also remember reading an interesting opinion in one book that Prohibition in the USA was targeting the specific culture of getting plastered with whisky in the saloons. And while people haven’t stopped consuming alcohol (because of course) and there were some obvious bad consequences (like the rise of organised crime), people at least changed their consumption habits and they’re less severe now. Of course there can’t be a direct analogy for “AI” but maybe some radical move will cause a change in how it’s used and abused and how people treat it as well.