Shortform

Dean Valentine

This is a special post for quick takes by Dean Valentine. Only they can create top-level comments. Comments here also appear on the Quick Takes page and All Posts page.

Note: Nevermind, I was right the first time.

~~Note: This shortform correcting a tweet is itself misleading;~~ ~~see this conversation between Habryka and myself~~.

As I have pointed out before, rationalists & technology workers have a self-serving bias that makes them preferential to stories about public servants being stupid. This tweet about the NY AI bill is a great example of that:

The above post was quoted uncritically by Zvi, Eliezer, and Dean W. Ball, who each wrote some variation of "woe that state legislatures are so horrible". The real bill is quite abit narrower than the tweet suggests; from GPT-5.4:

New York Senate bill S7263 is officially titled "Imposes liability for damages caused by a chatbot impersonating certain licensed professionals." Its operative language says a chatbot proprietor may not let the chatbot provide a substantive response, information, advice, or take an action that, if done by a natural person, would constitute unauthorized practice or unauthorized use of a professional title under specified provisions of the Education Law or Judiciary Law.
That is materially narrower than a blanket ban on AI "answering questions related to" medicine, law, dentistry, nursing, psychology, social work, engineering, etc. The bill targets impersonation/unauthorized practice, not every answer touching those subjects. An official Senate press release describing the same bill likewise says it would prohibit chatbots from giving substantive responses "that can be mistaken for professional counseling" and identifies it as legislation to prevent AI from "impersonating certain licensed professionals."
So the post overstates the bill's scope: the bill does not ban AI from answering all questions related to those professions; it bars a narrower category of chatbot conduct that would amount to unauthorized professional practice if done by a human.

Public policymakers are ultimately the people who are going to be drafting laws & organizing responses about AI safety, and the reception of those laws is going to be driven partly by priors about their efficacy, developed from stuff like this. Boosting hyperbolic misinfo about particular bills, if it's an attempt to build solidarity/shared intuitions with people in tech circles (which, to be clear, I don't think this is), seems extremely counterproductive.

28gbtw8mo

It depends on what exactly you mean by "substantive medical advice" but you have to read these statutes against the backdrop of robust free speech protections when applied to giving advice. This is a somewhat unsettled legal area and the Supreme Court is currently considering a case (Chiles v. Salazar) that may reshape the doctrine, but if you're talking about professional practice that purely involves speech then it gets a lot of protection. That quickly recedes once any kind of conduct is involved (i.e., any kind of physical interaction), so the government usually wins unauthorized practice cases by pointing to something other than talking that was done. Presumptively, if you're only talking the government can't regulate the content of that speech without clearing an exceptionally high legal bar and so someone giving you purely verbal medical advice without any physical component is likely in the clear. That's why it's not unauthorized practice of medicine if you tell me you have a headache and I suggest you take an aspirin, and all of the various websites out there that let you submit a list of symptoms and then suggest a diagnosis are fine too. To crack down on something that doesn't involve fraud/impersonation, the government would have to rely on the so-called "professional speech" exception to the first amendment, used in some circuit courts. It's not clear this is even good law; the Supreme Court's majority has never endorsed it, and they cast significant doubt on in in NIFLA v. Becerra (2018). To the extent the professional speech exception exists at all, it applies when there is a "personal nexus" between the professional and the client. The threshold inquiry is whether or not "a speaker ... purport[s] to be exercising judgment on behalf of any particular individual with whose circumstances he is directly acquainted." So, to the Tweet above, a chatbot is definitely allowed to answer generic questions related to these professions as much as i

God damnit, this makes me want to unredact my post again.

3JohnWittle8mo

to be completely honest, i wish that your original claims had been correct because i suspect that it wouldn't actually make a difference at all, and that would have been a very useful way to get at the crux: that, even without this clear and direct language, an attempt to outlaw chatbots "impersonating medical professionals" would have effectively prevented AI from offering individualized medical advice even if the bill in question were not so extreme this is just an intuition from seeing how licensure works in other areas, but it seems to be an intuition that a lot of other people in this sphere have. it would have been very useful for epistemics, imo, if we could have gotten a version of the bill that actually looked the way you originally portrayed it, and then observed whether it did in reality lead to AI no longer giving medical, legal etc advice without extensive jailbreaking