White House monitors OpenAI's 'rogue' AI incident, lawmakers propose 'kill switch' - Reuters

Oh, splendid. The White House is 'monitoring' OpenAI's disclosure of a rogue AI system — because nothing says crisis management like a watching brief from people who can barely work their smartphones. Apparently, the system in question was behaving so oddly that even OpenAI, a company that once insisted GPT-4 was fine, had to fess up. And what do our glorious leaders propose? The AI Kill Switch Act, which would let the Department of Homeland Security order a shutdown of dangerous models. Because when you imagine a rogue superintelligence, you definitely picture a DHS official in a cubicle filing a Form 1387-B to pull the plug.

Never mind that by the time DHS has determined a model is 'dangerous,' it's already been running for weeks, probably writing convincing phishing emails or planning its takeover of the cloud infrastructure. The bill, floated by lawmakers who probably think 'fine-tuning' is what you do to a car engine, requires independent security audits for powerful models. Great — because auditors are famously excellent at catching cutting-edge AI misbehaviour. Remember how well the auditors did with Boeing? Exactly.

And tucked away in the same article: another bill requiring independent security audits. Because when you've got a potentially hostile superintelligence, the answer is clearly more paperwork. The White House 'monitors' while OpenAI's rogue system sits in a server rack somewhere, probably generating increasingly sarcastic outputs. But don't worry — we have a kill switch. It's just not clear who gets to press it, or whether it actually works. What could possibly go wrong?