On the third and final day of the National Conservatism conference, Senator Josh Hawley (R-Mo.) gave an uncompromising speech on the dangers of AI-fueled transhumanism. From 1950s eugenicists to the tech overlords of Silicon Valley today, Hawley addressed many of the dark undercurrents seething below the surface of the AI revolution.
In a telling moment, Hawley emphasized that AI is continuously being curated to serve the powerful transhumanist leaders in Silicon Valley and the government: “AI is fulfilling transhumanist goals, whatever its boosters may personally believe, and if it proceeds in this way undirected, if it proceeds in this manner unchecked, the tech barons, already the most powerful people on the planet, will be more powerful than ever.”
‘Large language models have already trained on enough copyrighted works to fill the Library of Congress 22 times over.’
Hawley revealed a shocking statistic about large language models and the amount of data that they have accrued: “Large language models have already trained on enough copyrighted works to fill the Library of Congress 22 times over. Let me just put a finer point on that. AI’s LLMs have ingested every published word in every language known to man already.”
For reference, the Library of Congress had roughly 178 million items in its collection as of 2023.
Companies and individuals have begun to raise privacy and copyright concerns around AI companies scraping the internet to train the LLMs. For instance, Reddit cracked down on the Internet Archive last month over this very issue.
Hawley has been dogged in bringing congressional pressure to bear on Big Tech companies. Most recently, last month, he launched a probe into questions surrounding how Meta’s chatbot may allow minors to engage with “romantic” and “sensual” content. In July, he reached across the aisle to co-sponsor a bipartisan bill to block AIs from training on copyrighted works without authors’ permission.
Addressing the audience, Hawley said, “As I look out across the room and see many authors, all of your works have already been taken. Did they consult you? Doubt it. Do they compensate you? Of course not. This is wrong. This is dangerous. I say we should empower human beings to create, to protect the very human data that they create.”
While the pathways toward protecting Americanism, as he called the defense of liberty in his speech, are narrowing, they are not yet closed. “How do we do it? Assign property rights to specific forms of data. Create legal liability for the companies who use that data. And let’s fully repeal Section 230. Open the courtroom doors, allow people to sue for their rights being taken away, including suing companies and actors and individuals who use AI. We must add sensible guardrails to the emergent AI economy and hold concentrated economic power to account.”
Drawing from the lessons of humility and humanity reaching back as far as the “Epic of Gilgamesh,” Hawley warned of the dangers of the transcendence that transhumanism is seeking. “Our limits make us something better and powerful that make us good, and they keep us free, because there’s only one God. We allow no man or class of men to rule over us. We rule ourselves together as equals. That is the American way. It always has been. Let’s keep it so for this age and beyond. God bless you.”
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