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Comment by buovjaga | Hacker News Reader

It's a pity that there is no clear way to send takedown requests. We didn't ask for deceptive garbage to be generated as documentation for LibreOffice, but here it is and newbies are discovering it: https://deepwiki.com/LibreOffice/core/2-build-system (spoiler: LibreOffice has never used Buck as a build system)

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Out of curiosity, how come LibreOffice has .buckversion, BUCK, .buckconfig, etc? This commit[1] does seem to indicate using Buck to build at one point, though it is 10 years old.

[1]: https://github.com/LibreOffice/core/commit/1fd41f43eb73c373c...

It seems like it uses Make to build the main thing and then Buck is used to publish Java API to Maven Central, rather than building. Which is kind of a side thing, I guess code organization wise it would be better if Buck was not included on the root level? But Buck requires it? Although not a huge deal, but explains at least how LLM thought it was equivalent in importance.

Indeed and the BUCK file was updated 2 months ago. It definitely does use BUCK. Maybe it's not the main build system, but it's not hard to see why someone or something unfamiliar with the project would think that.

Really there should be a comment in the BUCK file explaining what it is.

Ok, I submitted a patch with a comment.

From my experience using deepwiki what it generates is not deceptive garbage

I sent them a politely worded threat and they responded right away opting me out:

> Hello, I am writing you as an author of Open Source software seeking to protect my security and that of my users.

> What I would like to know is: how may I prevent deepwiki from indexing my projects, specifically those in the ----- GitHub organization? If you consider yourselves to have implicit legal permission to train on my projects and write about them, know that I hereby explicitly and permanently revoke that permission.

> Since you likely believe that I lack the authority to get you to stop, I will add this:

> To the extent allowed by law I will consider any incorrect information you publish about my projects to be libelous and, given this notice, made with your intention. LLMs have no will to act, so publishing misinformation about my project, at such time as that happens, could only be the result of human will.

> Kind regards, > Conrad Buck

Just because you "consider" incorrect information to be libelous does not mean that it is. While it's true that LLMs have no will to act, the use of an LLM to publish information that ends up being incorrect does not imply that the user of the LLM intended to post incorrect information.

In that universe, there is no accountability at all. There is no way the system of law would allow that.

I admit that in my message I was careful not to make an accusation. I only stated my disposition towards their actions.

IANAL, but I don't believe that lack of intent to cause harm means that relief can't be granted. You could still take legal action if they refused to remove the information. To my knowledge, a question that still hasn't been thoroughly tested from a legal perspective is to what degree users of LLMs should be reasonably expected to be aware of the potentially for false information and to what degree continued use despite that knowledge constitutes willful negligence.

Humans can make mistakes too when compiling information and when mistakes are done unintentionally without the intent of causing harm, I believe liability is typically limited. I would expect the same would be true of LLM use. As long as the user of the LLM has taken reasonable precautions to ensure accuracy, I think liability probably should be limited in most cases. In the case of DeepWiki getting something wrong, I think the case for significant reputational damage is pretty weak.

It's reasonable precautions where it seems to me they are likely to be what I would consider partially to wholly negligent. The lack of an ability to opt out, for example.

Agreed that there should be an ability to opt out.

Yuck, based on tone alone I would ignore an email worded this way.

Sometimes you have to get angry to set boundaries.

Anyone human who puts their name to their words is free to write about my work.

If their wiki was just a wiki with human and AI contributorship that would have been a much better product and I probably would have been fine with it.

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