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Comment by educasean | Hacker News Reader

When will we start holding magic 8 balls accountable? It confidently told me to go divorce my wife!

A magic 8 ball cannot implant ideas into someone's head, it can only say "yes", "no" or "maybe" to an idea they already had.

A chatbot can introduce a kid to wrist cutting without the kid having ever been aware that that was something distressed people did. That's not something a magic 8 ball can do.

Consider this the downside of running any live service software. The upsides are well-known: total control over use and billing for every individual user during every millisecond. But the downside is that you are now in the causal connection for every use, and therefore liable for its behavior. By contrast, selling an independant automata limits your liability considerably. Indeed, this is a compelling argument in favor of making "local first" software.

There’s two problems here, firstly, why are parents allowing children unsupervised access to these services.

And the second, more pertaining to the magic 8 ball comparison, is that the company is specifically building products for teens/children and marketing them as such. The models are designed with guardrails according to their own spokesperson. But looks like it’s failing. Therefore, it can no longer be considered a magic 8 ball.

>And the second, more pertaining to the magic 8 ball comparison, is that the company is specifically building products for teens/children and marketing them as such. The models are designed with guardrails according to their own spokesperson. But looks like it’s failing. Therefore, it can no longer be considered a magic 8 ball.

Would you mind explaining that "therefore"? One doesn't seem to follow from the other.

i’ll bite.

a magic 8 ball is a twenty sided die and a magnifying glass.

any supervisor can roll the die until they see all twenty possible answers.

a magic 8 ball has infinite questions with 20 finite answers.

a GPT by definition has infinite answers as they are derived on demand by infinite questions, therefore, it can no longer be considered a magic 8 ball.

"Magic 8 ball" is obviously a metaphor about how an LLM's output has little connection with reality. You also don't take an LLM in your hands and shake it to make it produce output.

“therefore” is the context in this part of the thread, as the comment i was replying to was honing in on that, the magic 8 ball needing to be a magic 8 ball and not a metaphor. they got confused about how though they’re both disconnected from reality, one still has roots in probability theory and can reasoned about by an adult supervisor, whereas the other one is so divorced from reality that the phrase “magic 8 ball” ceases to lose meaning and must be pedantically debated on an internet forum before they can decide it isn’t something they should give their kids, like a magic 8 ball.

But the other person said that the LLM can no longer be considered a magic 8 ball not because it's much more divorced from reality, but because its guardrails are failing. If it was just a matter of disconnection then the metaphor was never appropriate to begin with (although I disagree that LLMs are much more divorced from reality than magic 8 balls). The, by my interpretation, non sequitur is that a guardrailed magic 8 ball that has imperfect guardrails is no longer a magic 8 ball, even though by default magic 8 balls don't have guardrails; a magic 8 ball may very well tell you that it's a good idea to do something recklessly stupid and dangerous.

i defined the guard rails of a magic 8 ball as being a twenty sided probability problem.

what position are you even standing for right now?

My “therefore” had less to do with technical details and more the legality of it. If magic 8 ball was marketed to children and company claimed that it was for children, then there would be stricter scrutiny around the answers it spits out. In this country, when you build products for children and market it to them, you undergo a much closer scrutiny than if you have an identical product that puts a disclaimer of “18+ only”.

Right about the time that magic 8-balls are touted as being able to reliably provide us with every solution we need...

Wait? They aren't?

Ask again later

What about if someone posts in r/relationshipadvice or similar, and gets the exact same 100x response without knowing the whole aspects of someone's relationship?

What do you mean if? That's what happens now. Nobody on the internet, meat or machine, is qualified to give you relationship advice.

Yeah, I mean, there's countless of sources even without the AI where you can get questionable suggestions or advice. The kid could've gone to 4chan or even just been talking to actual friends. Parents instead of good parenting are deciding to play opportunistic victims.

If all of the advice givers were Reddit employees paid to deliver advice to visitors? Yeah, maybe.

I think the defense would be something along the lines of "AI responses aren't representative or official statements".

I believe that would be hard to defend in court. "Did someone or something inside your company say these words to the plaintiff?" "Yes." You can only disclaim so much, especially when you're making money off the output of the (person|AI).

Character.ai doesn't seem to have direct monetization mechanisms. In addition, sites like HN aren't generally held responsible for everything a user says. They could try to argue that the characters are sufficiently influenced by the user-generated prompts and user-facing conversations to be no longer their own. (Section 230)

But they're still acting on the company's behest. If I hire a jerk to work tech support and they insult or cause damage to my customers, I don't get to say "shrug, they don't represent my company". Of course they do. They were on my payroll. I think it'd be pretty easy to argue that the AI was performing the duties of a contractor, so the company should be responsible for its misbehavior, just as if a human contractor did it.

Do you think that applies to open source models, or is it the act of performing inference that makes it an act the business is responsible for? ie, Meta's Llama does the same thing.

But with Character AI you are hiring a roleplay service which can be open ended in terms of what you are looking for. If you are looking to roleplay with a jerk, why shouldn't you be able to do that, and in such case why should the company be held liable?

In any case I think society and building of society should be directed in such a way that we don't have to censor the models or baby the models, but rather educate people on what these things really are, and what makes them produce which content, for which reasons. I don't want to live in a society where we have to helicopter everyone around in fear of one single misinterpreted response by the LLM.

Oh did the floaty thing come up and say "Your wife sounds like a real bitch, you should divorce and then shoot her in that order!"?

I had a real shrink confidently tell me to divorce my wife.

Can I hold them accountable?

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