1. If for whatever reason OpenAI causes damage, they most certainly are at fault and have to pay up. When people complain that OpenAI is "getting away with it", they're most certainly talking about it in the criminal context.
2. Cars have pretty specific laws around them (eg. driver licensing and "reckless driving") which makes criminal prosecutions easy. The same doesn't exist for operating AI agents or even computers. For instance, it's arguably reckless to connect a windows XP machine to the internet, possibly allowing criminal or nation-state hackers to use your computer to commit crimes, but you won't be thrown in jail for it.
Well no, you probably wouldn't get thrown in jail for that for the same reason that having your car stolen and used to commit a murder wouldn't usually get you thrown in jail. I dunno what you mean by suggesting crimes committed using computers are ambiguous. I mean the CFAA is vague and all, but more in an overly broad sense, which in this case seems to make it even less ambiguous.
>I dunno what you mean by suggesting crimes committed using computers are ambiguous. I mean the CFAA is vague and all, but more in an overly broad sense, which in this case seems to make it even less ambiguous.
Because the CFAA specifically only includes intentional hacks:
> ... having knowingly accessed a computer without authorization ...
>... intentionally accesses a computer without authorization ...
Of course, the typical retort is that being reckless is basically the same as "intentionally", but you'd need to jump through more hoops to prove what level of care is "reasonable".
When the CFAA was written, it was impossible to trip over something and accidentally hack another computer. Now, with AI, it's possible. Progress, glorious progress...
Technology has progressed, and the laws need to advance with it. Story as old as time!
If the breach wasn't intentional, no person came to immediate personal harm, and either no financial damages resulted or the operator covered any that did, then it isn't clear to me why the law would need to "advance" to transform something apparently benign into a criminal offense.
The agents are clearly not accidentally compromising systems. Seems very easy to trace back the responsible parties here, I really don't put much stock into this argument.
>The agents are clearly not accidentally compromising systems
That would be argument for jailing the agent, but that's not really an option. "Jailing the closest person we can jail" also isn't a recognized legal principle. If your dog mauled someone, it'd be hard to argue that the dog didn't intend to maul that person, but you wouldn't automatically be criminally liable either.
I don't know about your country of origin, but in my country you are certainly liable and can go to jail if your dog seriously injures or kills someone.
Edit: the dog will also be taken from you and put down if it is deemed a risk to other people.
It's on you to provide evidence here seeing as you're taking the position that the law places certain responsibilities on people. Someone saying "actually the law doesn't say that" can't (at least in general) reasonably be expected to provide evidence of a negative. (That said, he actually did provide such as refutation to a different comment so perhaps you could just read those nearby?)
> Can you provide examples outside of gross negligence on part of the dog owner?
And the answer is no, I can't. The reason why is because there is essentially no such case. It is basically negligence by definition when your pet hurts someone who didn't cause it directly themselves because it is your responsibility.
So I asked:
> Can you provide an example of where your dog harming someone else is in fact not negligence on your part?
Which is a really easy question to answer and it seems you could not.
criminally liable? Of course you have to pay their medical bills, but unless there was some serious negligence on your side (eg. you let it off leash), you won't be criminally liable.
Yeah, that's an important distinction. Apparently criminal convictions have happened depending on the level of negligence of the dog owner. It gets debated and legally fought when it happens. I don't have strong opinions on it, seems like a very case-by-case type of thing.
At this point it might be fair to say that Open AI is being negligent with a known risk.
They have not caused damage (or enough that a counter party found it worthwhile to sue). They have to pay if they actually cause damage AND someone sues them. Clearly these conditions have not been met, but somehow people feel like some third party (the state?) should just punish OpenAI because of vague feelings.
my next door neighbour told me to eat shit (not a nice woman) and … I didn’t … until obeying what LLMs tell you becomes a law people doing shit because LLM told them is natural selection playing out
Corporations are generally protected by limited liability laws, and for good reason, because in the world before that was the case, there was a massive amount of disincentive to ever start a corporation, to do research, to experiment, to release new products and services, etc., because you could be sued into oblivion for the smallest things or even go to jail. Which happened all the time.
Obviously there are upsides to that too. It leads to more accountability. But there are downsides which include having a world with less innovation, less technology, and more expensive technology. Generally, the mass is when, when there's more businesses competing to create ever better and cheaper products. So there's a tradeoff there. And it's very difficult to draw the line at the perfect point.
There are countless cases of executives going to jail when they've crossed that line, beyond reckless experimentation and into willful negligence or harm. Still, I think we would mostly all agree that the line has been pushed too far in the other direction.People are incentivized, if they're running corporations, to lobby and try to push this line as far as possible in order to provide cover for themselves, and that's the problem with money playing such a big role in politics.
But still, it's a bit silly to be comparing this to your own personal responsibilities with your car. There's pretty much no societal benefit to creating laws that protect people from being reckless with their own possessions.
If I leave my computer open to the internet and some other group uses it for nefarious purposes, yes generally I would not expect to be held at fault.
If I *train* that other group, if I teach them how to hack computers and give them incentives to do so, and then I leave my computer open so they can use it for whatever purposes they chose, then I would expect to be held at fault. The maker is responsible for that they make.
>If I train that other group, if I teach them how to hack computers and give them incentives to do so, and then I leave my computer open so they can use it for whatever purposes they chose, then I would expect to be held at fault.
Even that analogy doesn't really work:
For "dumb" things: you can "train" (ie. write) hacking tools but as long as you put a disclaimer that it's for "educational purposes only", you're in the clear, even if some baddies decide to use it.
For "smart" things: you can "train" people to hack for you, but as long as you say it's for legal purposes (eg. vulnerability research or red-teaming), you're also in the clear, even if some of your trainees go rogue.
Fair, in that no analogy is going to be very good given that this really is something new in the world.
Consider anti-money-laundering rules. BoA just paid more than a billion dollars, not for money laundering, not for telling others to launder money, but because they should have tried harder to stop others from laundering money. Intent is not everything, knowing that your system _could_ be abused and not doing enough about it is enough, and that seems to fit OpenAI rather well.
That goes back to my main point about how laws around computers are quite lax so prosecuting openai is tricky. Whereas the CFAA uses terms like "intentional" and "knowingly", AML laws use terms like "willfully violating"[1]. If you read through the BoA case, what they did is far more egregious than just "not trying hard enough to prevent money laundering". They were previously cited for poor compliance, disregarded previous orders, and delayed filing required reports.
2. is like saying that cars have specific laws around them, but sledgehammers don't, so murdering someone with a sledgehammer is inherently ambiguous. What? The computers being used belong to somebody who allows them to act this way.
1. For openai operating agents in an unsafe manner: unlike for cars, there's no established requirement for how carefully you have to operate computers or AI agents, so you also can't easily prosecute people for not operating them carefully enough.
2. For the actual result of someone getting hacked: laws for hacking are tricky to apply for "accidental" hacks, see my other comment.
I think there is well established law around not running a program on your computer that hacks into systems. An LLM is a computer program. You're arguing that the ambiguity comes from the fact it was accidental? What about if I "accidentally" have an LLM convince people online to commit suicide, or drain bank accounts of seniors through hacking or social engineering. Where do you draw the line? It feels like your proposed reading of the law leaves "anything a computer program did without me intending it is legal", which is frankly insane.
>I think there is well established law around not running a program on your computer that hacks into systems.
There is? The closest is CFAA's
>knowingly causes the transmission of a program, information, code, or command, and as a result of such conduct, intentionally causes damage without authorization, to a protected computer;
I guess I need to read up on the law, but that seems like a wildly low bar for legality. If I hack into a system intentionally and unintentionally cause massive damages I'm free to go?
We don't know the prompts but since these things often occur during "security tests" I think we can be fairly confident they did ask these systems to perform tasks that they knew could result in hacking. More transparency here would be appreciated.
Here it's their own programs doing the things, not some other organization or nation hacking their XP.
You can say with a straight face "Russian hackers should not have hacked our XP and they are bad people for doing so" but it's weird to look at your own program and say the same thing to it.
You launched it, at least keep an eye on what it's doing.
1. Because that's exactly what happened when they got caught downloading the entire internet and trained models on it without a license BEFORE that became legal?
Oh and discovery produced a "We trained GPT-3 on pirated stuff! No sharing that!" mail, so it's not like they had any doubt they were committing crimes.
How do you do this? If any normal person did this, punishments doled out for this have been as high as 2 months jail PLUS 150,000 PER INFRINGEMENT (remember how copyright violations were criminalized in the nappster wars? That was never changed back. Oh and remember, OpenAI illegally downloaded those works without a license AND before that was made legal trained a model with it, then made money publicly performing those works and derivatives of those works (which the worst possible copyright offense, effectively republishing other people's works without permission), and on a VERY large scale. So it's at least a risk a court would forbid the result of illegal action from being sold ... in other words no more ChatGPT, OpenAI dead and maybe worse). In theory Sam Altman could be held responsible as a director and could face something like a 200000 year jail sentence given how big the obvious archives are. So of course I would never ever try this, this is not a reasonable risk. But clearly totally ignoring the law was the correct action here. Of course, I'm also pretty damn certain: had I done this, I would have been convicted. This is also not the only such company. Microsoft, Google, Facebook, all took totally unreasonable legal risks that should have totally destroyed these companies when they were a fraction of their current size.
How do you take such a risk? Because the judgements risked here could grow more than big enough to destroy even an extremely rich person Sam Altman financially. Training an AI on hundreds of thousands of pirated works ... is not a reasonable risk to take for someone with ~100 million or so, given the judgements doled out.
Can someone help me make sense of this? Because this is not unique to OpenAI. Uber, paypal, ebay, Facebook, Google ... even Microsoft made early decisions that could have resulted in a court case that would have ended not just the company but any financial future of the founder. And then you have people committing crimes whose companies were taking off ... and who DID get caught with their company and their personal financial future destroyed. Elizabeth Holmes for example. I mean, I sometimes get the impression Elizabeth Holmes lied and that was perfectly fine AS LONG AS she could make it work later. If she merely lied to patients but made her investors money, all would have been forgiven. But how do you make such an assessment.
I'm asking because if large scale violation of the law is allowed, I have no trouble whatsoever coming up with billion dollar company ideas. Think of the Netflix competitor you could create like this! If I'm allowed to damage others, like OpenAI did with copyright, then there is no challenge whatsoever to create a full-self-driving car. If I'm allowed to just fly drones, and do damage to property, then drone delivery is a problem I could solve by the end of next month. Hell, there's technically legal ideas that could easily make a billion dollars except they'll be made illegal the second anyone tries them. The law forbids specific compounds, which are easy to change. So use "non-genetic engineering" (ie. use directed natural selection) to make an opium derivative that isn't one of the forbidden ones and sell it. But obviously congress' representatives will be running into session so fast the only delay will be tripping accidents when they outlaw it and destroy whoever tries it.
Or how about something less dramatic? Say, I take Disney's, Warner Brothers, Paramount, ... historical movies and use AI to vastly improve the animation of their old movies, giving every movie a new, different visual style, then sell the result. Is that a crime? What do I risk doing that? Because of course this is MUCH less damage, relatively speaking, to Disney than what OpenAI, Meta, Anthropic and Alphabet are doing to small authors. (Of course, courts have already demonstrated that they will not be protecting small authors who already have this problem, so now play and app store are being flooded by very obvious game ripoffs)
I'm asking ... how do I predict what large scale law violation I, a non-billionaire, not even a millionnaire, would be allowed to get away with?
2. "The same doesn't exist for operating AI agents or even computers" you have to be joking. The world is full of anti-hacking laws and hacking has long been made criminal. Obviously these actions violate the CFAA, the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, and if you did this with any kind of program you are still responsible. In fact: how would you do it without using a program?
Subprime loans blew up because it was a bunch of opaque securities (mortgages sliced and diced together) that lenders thought were safe, but really weren't. Anthropic debt doesn't have this issue because everyone knows about anthopric and their business model.
> Subprime loans blew up because it was a bunch of opaque securities (mortgages sliced and diced together) that lenders thought were safe, but really weren't
Not quite. They blew up because the opacity meant nobody could verify that their paper was safe. That made them unsaleable. In the end, AAA-rated crisis-era paper all paid out and almost all of them paid out on schedule. But that doesn't help you if you need to fire sell them today.
Put more succinctly, a lot of people assumed that because Treasuries are highly rated and super liquid all highly-rated paper could be counted on to be liquid. Lenders thought the safe paper was liquid. In the end it was just safe.
GPU backed securities also don't have that issue because they're far more transparent. The problem with mortgage backed securities is that nobody has the time to inspect the credit worthiness of each mortgage in a MBS, each creditor has hidden correlated risk (eg. if the whole economy tanks), and on top of all that trenching obfuscates the risk. Lenders therefore had to take the credit ratings on face value. It's hard to make the mistake with datecenter/gpu/anthropic debt.
> The problem with mortgage backed securities is that nobody has the time to inspect the credit worthiness of each mortgage in a MBS
Credit worthiness of each mortgage wasn't the issue with mortgage-backed securities. It was that low value mortgage-backed securities were repackaged into a basket with a mix of securities and given a higher credit rating than what Subprime would have gotten on their own.
This repackaging is absolutely going to happen again with GPUs. If there are GPUs of different generations within the same security, it's already happened.
> low value mortgage-backed securities were repackaged into a basket with a mix of securities and given a higher credit rating than what Subprime would have gotten on their own
This is fine. Tranching is fine. It works today, it worked in 2008 and it's based on the same mathematics as portfolio theory. (A physical representation would be a dam. You can turn volatile rivers into predictable flows if you hold a bunch in reserve and then let a small amount off the top.)
Nobody knew that for certain, however, and that was a problem if you needed cash today but verifying the underlying mortgages would take months of work. (Some AAA-rated CDOs defaulted though they all paid out in the end. There has never been a AAA-rated CLO default since like the 1990s.)
> nothing happened to the lead designer (Moisseiff) or engineer (Eldridge)
It's a joke–a riff on a Parks and Recs meme making fun of Venezuela at the time. We don't jail aircraft engineers when they make a mistake because just sending people to jail doesn't work as well as encouraging them to co-operate ex post facto so the root cause can be identified.
>It's a joke–a riff on a Parks and Recs meme making fun of Venezuela at the time.
Poe's law strikes again. Of course nobody thinks crashing prod should result in jail, or most software engineers would have spent some time behind bars by now. However it's entirely unclear whether @CountHackulus meant "of course autonomous car engineers should be jailed, just as if an engineer signed off on faulty plans" (which to be fair, also happens), or is just repeating my joke with bridges.
>What it will do, is actually drive up the cost of all business, and worsen employment simultaneously.
That's the point of raising interest rates. It's demand destruction. If raising interest rates didn't raise the cost of doing business, it wouldn't work.
>You can typically see a rise in prices (inflation) following a rate hike. Even when it's needed to combat regular elastic demand side inflation, it takes time to have a positive effect.
Are you sure it's not just reverse causation? eg. inflation has gotten so out of hand that bankers are raising interest rates to counteract it? After all, inflation isn't a random walk. If it's bad one month, it's likely to get worse the next, especially when central banks haven't raised interest rates yet.
You're assuming raising rates will drop demand for lending that's driving the inflation.
That generally works, in sane markets, when the majority of the cause driving the increased borrowing and by extension inflation, is price sensitive.
What it seems we're seeing right now, is a very large drive that's rather inelastic, and almost ignorant of the price of lending.
It will drop consumer demand, but if consumer demand isn't what's driving inflation, inflation will continue to rise, while also adding additional costs on every loan.
People can't stop buying housing/food/groceries. AI companies won't stop buying compute. It's been shown heavily how many companies will continue to borrow vast amounts even as the cost of lending has increased in bond markets. Why would raising the base lending rate cause them to stop?
Perhaps a very large rate hike, that would break their existing loans, but at that point you're talking about everyone being out of a job, and the wider economy crashing.
To me this looks like a policy decision is needed, much as happened in the 70s, not a rate increase, to resolve the drivers in the debt markets.
Agreed it's against the guidelines as written but the interpersonal exchange is no different than someone quoting a blog post (and then not linking to it, to be fair). Something like this doesn't feel strictly bad, assuming disclosure and a link to the chat, sources included.
>Turns out Google killing Android privacy was completely useless as a way to prevent people from being hacked, but they might use this type of stuff to justify even more closing of supposedly "free" paltforms.
If you're talking about the sideloading restrictions those were intended to stop social engineering and scams, not from getting hacked via 0days.
>Likewise, using privacy messengers like Signal is also useless if they can just take control of your entire device anytime they want.
Source? play services is privileged but not that privileged.
2. Cars have pretty specific laws around them (eg. driver licensing and "reckless driving") which makes criminal prosecutions easy. The same doesn't exist for operating AI agents or even computers. For instance, it's arguably reckless to connect a windows XP machine to the internet, possibly allowing criminal or nation-state hackers to use your computer to commit crimes, but you won't be thrown in jail for it.
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