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Comment by rubyfan | Hacker News Reader

Being a poorly equipped victim still isn’t a crime thankfully.

It may or may not be a crime and typically the damaged party is pressing the charges. One would argue there is no actual damage here.

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Despite the common misconceptions from TV, the victim "pressing charges" isn't actually a thing in criminal cases: prosecutors can choose to put someone on trial even if the victim doesn't want that. In practice this is somewhat rare, but it certainly can happen. In my reply to tokioyoyo below I laid out why this is one instance where the government should prosecute even if HuggingFace doesn't want it to.

Criminal Cases of 'hacking' require specific intent. What you're asking is that the prosecution attempt to prove Open AI intended to infiltrate Huggingface maliciously, all while the victim is saying 'no harm no foul'.

No offense but prosecutors have better things to do with their time.

Gross negligence can stand in for intent. I believe a rather compelling case could be developed on the basis that a system believed to be capable of this was developed and improperly secured.

But what’s the crime? The thing got out of its poorly secured cage and caused what damage? Imagine instead of an agent it was a dog or a chimpanzee that got into the neighbor’s yard and the particular neighbor isn’t even pissed about it.

Aaron Schwartz was being prosecuted and threatened with 35 years in jail for the crime of saving research papers to a thumb drive. What damage did he cause?

If intent matters when LLMs get involved, then we can't do anything even if they kill millions of people. Anything LLM-related should involve strict liability.

Get back to me when they kill millions of people then. Like I said, prosecutors have better things to do.

I don't care about intent. That it happened is unacceptable. Ignorance is not an excuse

Intent often matters in the law (aside from certain laws with strict liability). You intentionally drive your car into someone you hate and kill them => murder, go straight to jail. You're driving along normally and someone who's chasing their pet cat suddenly runs into traffic and you hit them => no charges. Sometimes you can be charged with negligence for not taking enough care to prevent something, but then you have to deal with the tricky question of how much care is enough.

If you're driving along normally and then tie a blindfold around your face and hit someone you've taken actions that still expose you to liability. And, in the case that you hit someone who is chasing their pet cat into traffic then you'd better hope you were following every facet of safe driving - being distracted, drunk or on your phone could easily result in you being charged.

I mean, in theory the FBI could press charges on this as it was an attack involving interstate commerce.

The chances of this are nearly zero if HF doesn't want it, and even if they did OAI has their bread buttered with the administration.

But what do you honestly expect would happen? It’s “an accident” with no actual damages.

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