there's no objective morality and therefore as long as it doesn't personally affect you

Being affected personally is not a real requirement for anything in decision making.

Some conversations should be primarily about an object level thing, for its own elucidation (they serve the idea itself, bringing it into the world). A person can have motivations that are not about (emotions of) people (including that person themselves).

A good explanation constructs an understanding in its audience, which is slightly different from describing something, or from making it accessible.

I was ineptly objecting to this snippet in particular:

If that were the only provision of the bill, then yes, that would be a problem

The problem I intended to describe in the first two comments of the thread is that this provision creates a particular harmful incentive. By itself, this incentive is created regardless of whether it's also opposed in some contexts by other things. The net effect of the bill in the mitigated contexts could then be beneficial, but the incentive would still be there (in some balance with other incentives), and it wouldn't be mitigated in the other contexts. The incentive is not mitigated for podcasts and blog posts, examples I've mentioned above, so it would still be a problem there (if my argument for it being a problem makes sense), and the way it's still a problem there is not moved at all by the other provisions of the bill.

So I was thinking of my argument as about existence of this incentive specifically, and read tlevin's snippet as missing the point, claiming the incentive's presence depends on things that have nothing to do with the mechanism that brings it into existence. But there's also a plausible reading of what I was saying (even though unintended) as an argument for the broader claim that the bill as a whole incentivises AI companies to communicate less than what they are communicating currently, because of this provision. I don't have a good enough handle on this more complicated question, so it wasn't my intent to touch on it at all (other than by providing a self-contained ingredient for considering this broader question).

But in this unintended reading, tlevin's comment is a relevant counterargument, and my inept objection to it is stubborn insistence on not seeing its relevance or validity, expressed without argument. Judging by the votes, it was a plausible enough reading, and the readers are almost always right (about what the words you write down actually say, regardless of your intent).

"Locally invalid" was a specific react for highlighting the part of a comment that makes a self-contained mistake, different from "Disagree". A faulty step is not centrally a "weak argument", as it's sometimes not any kind of argument. And discussion often gestures at a claim without providing any sort of evidence or giving any argument, the evidence or the argument is for the recipients to reconstruct for themselves.

Whether this thing in particular is a problem or not doesn't depend on the presence of other things in there, even those that would compensate for it.

I wouldn't know about what works in court, but not saying anything (in interviews or posts on their site and such) is probably even safer, unless the sky is already on fire or something. It seems to be a step in an obviously wrong direction, a friction that gets worse if the things AI company representative would've liked to say happen to be sufficiently contrary to prevailing discourse. Like with COVID-19.

Not make “any materially false or misleading statement” about catastrophic risk from its frontier models, its management of catastrophic risk, or its compliance with its frontier AI framework.

The risk of any statement being considered "materially false or misleading" is an incentive for AI companies to avoid talking about catastrophic risk.

In this framing the crux is whether there is an After at all (at any level of capability). The distinction between "failure doesn't kill the observer" (a perpetual Before) and "failure is successfully avoided" (managing to navigate the After).