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Comment by pancsta | Hacker News Reader

But he doesnt “ship malware” as in executable code, he just ships human text which the user decides to execute in the addition to executing the source code. If you put a gun in your mouth and pull the trigger, does it matter who put the bullet in the chamber?

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He wouldn't be adding prompt injections if he didn't have reasonable expectation that users would process the output with an LLM. I don't see a lot of plausible deniability there

He was giving away a soap that was pretty good in cleaning a broad range of skin types.

Now he decided that freckled skin of redheads should be immediately dissolved on contact and didn't disclose it anywhere on the label.

Or, following on with your analogy - this is the blank ammo supplier for the film sets, but in the specific type of the weapons used on set the bullet explodes ripping off the fingers - but only from the latest release. Without any warning.

If he said/wrote "you can't use this with LLM" and it only deletes itself from the project, basically, I think that and only that is a valid point. But if the instruction was to download malware, or anything else that causes real damage, on purpose, this would be very different.

You are misinterpreting what deleting itself as if the authoritial authority over the IP implies ownership but it's not so. It's executing unwanted code to delete files on the end users computer.

It matters not a whit who owns the copyright.

Legally speaking, he already said, fuck this shit, sue me then.

> "executing unwanted code to delete files on the end users computer"

As the author put it: "It's as much "active destruction" as telling someone to eff themselves."

Morally speaking, people who sling slop created from things taken without consent at humans who don't want slop can complain about a social contract they already cancelled unilaterally all they want.

Embedding instructions meant to run unintended operations isn't like telling a person an instruction because the intended effect is to run unauthorized operation on the computer not a person who can disregard them. The intent is further clarified by the effort to hide the instructions at the terminal.

It could easily be a felony in addition to a lawsuit. Have fun spending 50k proving it's not.

Notably it's not clear that actual open source can even be open source whilst trying to control what local tools devs use to work with it. You certainly can't do that if your software depends on actual GPL or the like.

You cannot nullify the social contract by quantifying what you imagine it ought to be and justifying any sort of misbehavior that you wish to engage in.

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