the pro-ai astroturf movement thing that sort of metastasized out of sb 1047 still feels indelibly sb 1047 shaped today. take the obsession they have with "doomers" and their "speculative science-fiction scenarios about AI causing catastrophic risks."
we still hear these lines today from the astroturfers and the small number of authentic unwitting fools who got astroturfed.
yet the actual, powerful 'pro-ai' line is something more like "right now, only the rich get great legal and medical and other expert advice, and the entrenched classes who provide those services want their work to remain expensive." and indeed, many of the state laws we see are doing just this: barring AI from providing licensed expert advice in various ways, or restricting use in a structurally similar fashion.
you'd expect the 'pro-ai astroturf' crowd to be all over this stuff, but few of them are. instead they are pouring monotonically more money into this quixotic quest against the catastrophic risk bills--some of the cleanest AI legislation there is from a political-economy perspective. I wish someone would astroturf the "AI means mass abundance of services previously reserved for the elites" argument--it's true after all! the entrenched classes (the medical establishment, the state bars, etc.) really are lobbying for regulatory capture. where is the outrage?
but instead the pro-ai people obsess over this deeply unpersuasive idea that AI policy is a manichean struggle against "the doomers."
so bad laws--laws that hinder good uses of ai by normal people and keep expensive things expensive--are passing like crazy, and the White House is bullying states into voting down light-touch catastrophic-risk transparency laws while the career staff of the national security agency point at mythos like the black monolith.
it is an incredibly stupid outcome. it is also remarkably sb 1047-shaped. that debate really programmed the brains of many, especially on the accelerationist side (and btw, for those lacking context, I was among the very earliest sb 1047 skeptics, writing screeds about that early attempt at ai regulation back in February 2024 when the VCs were telling me "oh, it's just a state law, that'll never matter." true story.)
it is time for a great reset of ai policy.