Legendary founder of the Silk Road darknet marketplace Ross Ulbricht has published a tweet from prison. This time, he talked about artificial intelligence technology.

Ulbricht has spent more than 11 years in prison after being arrested in 2013, when Silk Road was shut down by law-enforcement agents.

Ulbricht praises AI tech

The Silk Road founder tweeted that he had read an article about experiments on AI software producing images on the basis of people’s thoughts. Ulbricht seemed to be quite enthusiastic about that development, stating that technology has become much more advanced since he was free.

Just read an article about how AI can produce images based on people’s thoughts. Incredible! Technology has come so far since I was free.

— Ross Ulbricht (@RealRossU) August 26, 2024

It is likely that Ulbricht referred to last year’s article published by Vice, whose title says: “Researchers Use AI to Generate Images Based on People's Brain Activity.” The article tells about experiments making AI “reconstruct high-resolution and highly accurate images from brain activity by using the popular Stable Diffusion image generation model.”

The scientists claimed that they did not need to train or fine-tune the AI models to make them create those images.

card

Elon Musk calls for AI safety bill in California

Today, Elon Musk took to the X social media platform to make an important AI call.

Musk said he believes it is necessary that the California state should pass the SB 1047 AI safety bill. The xAI founder added that he has been an advocate for regulating AI in the past 20 years. Artificial intelligence development, Musk stressed, should be regulated by authorities just like they regulate “any product/technology that is a potential risk to the public.”

This is a tough call and will make some people upset, but, all things considered, I think California should probably pass the SB 1047 AI safety bill.For over 20 years, I have been an advocate for AI regulation, just as we regulate any product/technology that is a potential risk…

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) August 26, 2024

This bill authored by Senator Scott Wiener would be the first bill that, if passed, would require AI-creating companies to test their large-scale AI models for safety before releasing them. In response, large AI companies threatened to leave the state of California should the bill be passed.

The document would force companies that are involved in creating large AI models worth more than $100 million to train in order to “limit any significant risks in the system that they find through safety testing.”

AI developers will also be required to come up with a “technical plan” that would handle safety risks and “to maintain a copy of that plan as long as the model is available, plus five years.”