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Comment by pjc50 | Hacker News Reader

The only underlying question here is "who is liable for the output of the LLM?"

I just don't think the "nobody is" current solution is going to last in the current litigious environment.

The person who prompts would be responsible. Everything else doesn't really make sense. This is usually the trivial solution for any form of tool we use.

If there’s going to be a lawsuit, go after Colt before Anthropic.

Good point. Since LLM isn't a person, this leaves only the vendor and the user as liable parties. That's one less legal person than in regular search, where you have the user, the search engine vendor, and the author/publisher of the content involved in a harm scenario.

What is the consensus on liability in case of regular web search? Your comment made me realize that I never thought much about it in 20+ years of using the Internet; I kind of always assumed it's all on the user.

> What is the consensus on liability in case of regular web search? Your comment made me realize that I never thought much about it in 20+ years of using the Internet

Have you never noticed those "google has removed some results to comply with the DMCA" notices?

But the reason we "needed" the DMCA is because they wouldn't have been liable under existing law, and the DMCA only covers copyright violations.

The DMCA is the copyright industry's response to "nobody is liable for results" which was the statu quo before.

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