16 comments

  • sega_sai 55 minutes ago
    So we have a situation when if AI hacks into something, nobody is responsible, but if you say something inappropriate to the AI, then you can be arrested. That is interesting ...
    • Avicebron 37 minutes ago
      The US is so overdue for regulation/laws on privacy and electronic communications. The internet is too embedded into our daily lives for the existing rules that governed a bunch of hobbyists and early entrepeneurs to make sense.

      Unless specified clearly and plainly (not obscure TOS), everything should be private by default and require a warrant. If that's not possible because "the data can live forever/be copied", then we need data laws that make holding data on cosumers so radioactively dangerous the companies are forced to adapt. It's not their decision to make, it's the people od the country where the live, work, and do business.

      • functionmouse 33 minutes ago
        So if some 14 year old wants to throw up a phpBB instance on his raspberry pi, he should need a license and regulators' noses in his business, like how we extinguish- erm, I mean, controlled HAM radio?

        How do you differentiate?

        • Avicebron 26 minutes ago
          If lawyers can't figure out the difference between a 14 year old throwing up an phpBB on a raspberry pi vs equifax, anthropic, meta, etc...idk what to tell you. Get better lawyers, it falls into "laws for hobbyists aren't working part of my comment"
        • repeekad 22 minutes ago
          Is HAM radio really extinguished? All it takes is passing a test, and the rules around it seem more valuable to sharing a public resource (frequency spectrum) than detrimental?
          • SoftTalker 3 minutes ago
            HAM radio is dying more from the behavior of its geriatric old guard towards newcomers than any regulation.
    • JumpCrisscross 41 minutes ago
      > we have a situation when if AI hacks into something, nobody is responsible

      This is something Silicon Valley likes to tell itself. OpenAI being subpoenaed in multiple jurisdictions lays bare its falsehood.

      • 8448488585 34 minutes ago
        OpenAI facing any sort of liability preIPO is as likely as Palestine getting its own state
        • bryanlarsen 31 minutes ago
          In the US. Other jurisdictions are probably less likely to let things slide or give them a sweetheart deal to avoid prosecution. For example, I doubt British Columbia (Canada) is going to give up easily on their lawsuit against OpenAI over the Tumbler Ridge shootings.
        • redanddead 31 minutes ago
          attention seeking behavior 101, on a burner acc
      • iso1631 35 minutes ago
        Get back to me when an executive is in jail
    • user43928 47 minutes ago
      Not very interesting when you consider that in the first situation no laws were broken and no malice was intended, while in the second situation someone allegedly made threats against a police department and thus presumably committed a crime.
      • metalspot 27 minutes ago
        > presumably committed a crime

        almost certainly not. writing down threats in your own personal chat session is like writing in a diary. there is no communication to any other person, so the idea that this is actually criminal is highly unlikely and it almost certainly won't be charged. it's a pretext arrest for police to assess the threat, which is not entirely unreasonable, but it is not a crime.

        > The arrest report states that on Sept. 26 at approximately 5:10 a.m., Heller reportedly wrote, "I'm going to shoot up the sheriff's right the [expletive] now." The following day, at approximately 1:07 a.m., she was accused of posting, "This is 100% last chance I'm done. I got a new [expletive] gun today. [Expletive] you."

        this is certainly reads as somebody venting in what they believed was a private personal space.

        i guess using claude for mass surveillance is ok when anthropic does it. once again why nobody takes these high horsing hypocritical liars seriously.

        • user43928 15 minutes ago
          I read earlier that the crime is making such threats in any manner where another person could see them.

          I do not know whether it matters if the suspect knew that their chats could be viewed by Anthropic staff, or if the only thing that matters is whether another person was able to view the chats.

      • aeve890 44 minutes ago
        >Not very interesting when you consider that in the first situation no laws were broken

        Uh, there's no laws on hacking systems in your country?

        • godwinson__4-8 35 minutes ago
          The other parties didn't even pursue a civil case. If OpenAI "hacked" you, wouldn't you?

          Perhaps the headline grabbing claims of OpenAI "hacks" are overblown? If they are causing bedlam with such glee why is no one suing them for damages? Perhaps the criminal case you envisage is less clear than the layman news is leading you to believe.

          I'm still not clear where most of the alleged cases fall in terms of criminality. Yet I also know here in the United States a government tried to criminally prosecute a reporter for "computer hacking" for finding data using client-side inspect element.

          Maybe encouraging the government to prosecute these "crimes" is not the virtue you think it is. Why are the counterparties not seeking a civil remedy if they think they have been a victim of a crime? Perhaps that is a more telling sign than all the people imploring the government to "do something" and come up with criminal charges.

        • arbll 23 minutes ago
          Mistakenly accessing private data or bringing down a website without intent is usually excluded. In general intent matters much in most jurisdictions. Maybe there’s a way to claim negligence but those are all completely new situations. I agree morally the ai labs are at fault, especially when agents “escape” because they have raw internet access.
        • user43928 40 minutes ago
          In the US, hacking laws require intent.

          Software behaving differently than intended is therefore not a crime under these laws.

          • TheOtherHobbes 34 minutes ago
            Negligence is still a possibility, if there are significant reasonably foreseeable consequences.
            • user43928 9 minutes ago
              Where does negligence come into play?

              In criminal hacking law that explicitly requires intent, or a civil lawsuit about damages?

              I honestly don't know, but my guess would be the latter.

            • arbll 21 minutes ago
              I think there’s a strong argument that it was hard to foresee the consequences since it was all new. This won’t be true if those incidents continue happening tho.
          • etchalon 35 minutes ago
            I think a competent DA could easily prove that, if you know the model is capable of performing unauthorized breaches into third-party systems when given a task, and you give it a task that could require it to do so, intent is present.
            • user43928 29 minutes ago
              It's not a complicated distinction:

              If you think they intentionally had their model hack third-party systems, you could do a criminal investigation.

              I do not think that this is reasonable to believe given that clearly the VMs were not intended to have internet access and that committing such crimes wasn't in anyone's interest.

            • arbll 15 minutes ago
              Do you have an example where they gave a task that required breaching in a way that was easily foreseeable ?
          • aeve890 29 minutes ago
            [flagged]
  • timpera 2 hours ago
    Original reporting (not available outside the US): https://www.gulfcoastnewsnow.com/article/florida-woman-arres...

    Archive link: http://archive.today/mwico

    • ilt 1 hour ago
      This should be the main URL here since verge’s is only a tweet like text linking to this URL.
      • sgc 42 minutes ago
        Absolutely, what an incredibly low-effort click hijack farm it has become.
    • righthand 1 hour ago
      Why did you submit the wrong link? Do you work for The Verge?
      • timpera 49 minutes ago
        Because the original reporting is unavailable to international readers, and submitting an archive link does not seem like a good practice. My apologies if this was not the right move. (And I have no connection to The Verge.)
        • righthand 34 minutes ago
          I am confused, you submit The Verge link but if an international reader were to click the link in The Verge article itself they would still be blocked. How does submitting The Verge link help international readers?
      • anewhnaccount2 53 minutes ago
        The main link is available internationally.
        • thesdev 44 minutes ago
          It is not. Just tried from Sweden and got "Sorry, this content is not available in your region."
          • azernik 37 minutes ago
            I tried from Israel and it did work. Might be EU only that's blocked?
        • cubefox 37 minutes ago
          No it's not.
  • jakzurr 10 minutes ago
    So I read TFA, read comments, then figured out the "details" were in the gulfcoastnewsnow.com link, inside TFA.

    If the police report described there is accurate/complete (who knows?), what the person said is a bit scary.

    Invasion of their privacy (going to police)? Yes, but possibly warranted?

    Should a social worker have contacted them rather than the police? Probably, if for no other reason than to ask if they were serious about harming someone.

    Difficult questions, I'm still undecided on whether it's OK to always ignore someone's rants.

  • fagnerbrack 2 hours ago
    The design of theverge.com is now completely unreadable
  • dylan604 1 hour ago
    I'm thoroughly confused on why someone would type this into a chatbot. Was the chatbot on the sheriff's website and that's what was being used? Was the person using their on their end on getting advice on how to phrase it better?

    Then again, people willing to make these comments aren't people that I tend to understand or empathize with anyway, so using a chatbot shouldn't be something I should expect to understand either.

    • john_strinlai 59 minutes ago
      >I'm thoroughly confused on why someone would type this into a chatbot.

      many people are using chatbots as personal therapists, a friend to vent to, a diary that provides feedback, etc.

    • strideashort 1 hour ago
      Just… venting? I mean u never know i guess but under some circumstances it could be the healthy option, assuming there’s no real intent
      • jakzurr 6 minutes ago
        Yeah, I hope they were venting. (But I feel sorry for them if they were.)
        • colechristensen 3 minutes ago
          EVERY. SINGLE. TIME. there is a mass shooting there are a series of red flags where people "hoped" weren't really real.

          We don't feel sorry for this nonsense we punish it, whether it's "real" or not you have no right to share your fantasies of violence and real or not you need to be treated like they are and removed from society.

      • colechristensen 6 minutes ago
        I'm fine living in a society where "venting" reasonably actionable threats gets you put in prison as if they were real threats.
    • Cytobit 48 minutes ago
      I wonder if it would be considered a threat to type the same things into Notepad. If so, fiction writers are in trouble.

      People are putting a weird amount of moral weight on LLM prompts that they don't apply to other programs.

      • pizzafeelsright 16 minutes ago
        If her comments in whatever article were accurate I wonder if there is a difference between 'chat with 911 operator' and the AI.

        As for writing in a text format that was not ready by others or as fiction, I am thinking it has to do with intent.

        Go a step further, she creates a bot that hits open chat bots with instructions on 'be a jerk'. Who is responsible?

  • 1-6 33 minutes ago
    Better openweight models can't come fast enough.
    • rlt 26 minutes ago
      Came here to post this, though I do have concerns about what will happen when very cyber-capable models are small enough to form a self-replicating worm...
  • EvanAnderson 1 hour ago
    HN discussion from earlier today: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49961057
    • jakzurr 3 minutes ago
      Ahhh, thanks! So she was using the chatbot as a diary.
  • skarz 1 hour ago
    What is that page? It looks like a "tweet" on The Verge which just links to the actual story.
  • ChrisArchitect 20 minutes ago
  • cucumber3732842 28 minutes ago
    This is just the same unequal treatment under the law that you see every time the government is involved in anything.

    God knows how many thousands of reports like this these platforms send out in a given week. Nobody is following up on some peasant scheming up ways to kill his brother for stealing his inheritance or whatever. But you threaten some local bureaucrat or politician and the cops will jump at the chance to knock on your door and "remind" you who has all the power.

  • IncreasePosts 34 minutes ago
    New meta unlocked: Popping onto your frenemy's computer and typing out a quick threat to chatgpt
  • iso1631 29 minutes ago
    Shame this wasn't in America where freedom of speech prevails.

    Which part of the UK is "Florida" in?

  • zeroCalories 1 hour ago
    Should have vented to your Chinese chat bot
    • joshheitzman 49 minutes ago
      Yeah it was Anthropic. I actually opened the article, which I almost never do, to see which company's chat bot it was. This is one of the reasons I don't use them. They are obviously spying on their users.
    • LogicFailsMe 56 minutes ago
      I feel safer already.
  • redsocksfan45 1 hour ago
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  • onetokeoverthe 1 hour ago
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