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Comment by Digory | Hacker News Reader

I'd think ambiguous statements about the scope of your AI would make it hard to prove fraud, if you were being careful at all. "Involving AI" could mean 1% AI.

So it's doubly surprising to me the government chose (criminal) wire fraud, not (civil) securities fraud, which would have a lower burden of proof.

Government lawyers almost never try to make their job harder than it has to be.

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If you click through to the doj press release, they're saying the statements were pretty explicit.

Yeah, specifying an automation rate of 93-97% to investors when it's "effectively 0%" per your own executives... That's pretty egregious.

How do you define that? If I write a 'Hello World' program in C++, you could argue that the hard part of compiling, linking, and generating assembly code was done by a computer, so programming is 90% automated, even though most people would understand the automation level to be 0%.

You might argue this is a flawed example, but we've automated huge workflows at work that turned major time-consuming PITAs into something it wouldn't occur to most people that a human has anything to do with it.

If "most people would understand the automation level to be 0%" then you can't represent that the automation level is something else, unless you're explicit about deviating from the commonly understood meaning of 'automation'.

The problem with intuition is that you have to be familiar with the domain to have it. You and I have zero intuition on what needs to be or can be done by humans and what can be handed off to machines in this financial domain.

Law does not work like engineering does. Lawyers, judges and juries understand the intent of the law, and are not bound like we software engineers are to the exact commands in front of them.

You could try to convince a jury of this argument, sure. Do you think it will work? And if you do go with that argument then are you actually convincing the jury of your guilty conscience- often an important part of a white collar crime where state of mind of the defendant is very important?

> Lawyers, judges and juries understand the intent of the law, and are not bound like we software engineers are to the exact commands in front of them.

a good example is O'Connor v. Oakhurst Dairy, No. 16-1901, also known as the Maine Dairy oxford comma case. the District Court followed the intent but the Appeals court followed the law as written.

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/missing-oxford-com...

from the Appeals Court ruling

> The District Court concluded that, despite the absent comma, the Maine legislature unambiguously intended for the last term in the exemption's list of activities to identify an exempt activity in its own right. The District Court thus granted summary judgment to the dairy company, as there is no dispute that the drivers do perform that activity. But, we conclude that the exemption's scope is actually not so clear in this regard.

https://cases.justia.com/federal/appellate-courts/ca1/16-190...

Which is why you can often get away with this sort of bluster. But not when your own emails show that you yourselves considered that to be not the true number. You can report wonky metrics that don't measure anything real to your investors, but you can't report falsified ones.

That's what judges and juries are for. Law is not computer code.

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