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Comment by Aurornis | Hacker News Reader

If a company advertised an LLM as perfectly safe and then it caused some damage, there would be a case against the company.

Have you used LLM tooling? It comes with warnings and explains that the user accepts the risk. Different levels of warning are supplied for the different levels of autonomy you can enable. The user has to understand the risk as they enable it.

This is not a new concept and it’s not an idea the LLM companies invented. It shouldn’t be surprising to anyone.

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> This is not a new concept and it’s not an idea the LLM companies invented.

I don't recall any prior computer software working so badly that it needed a disclaimer like "Claude is AI and can make mistakes" on its front page. Let alone one so costly.

You must not use any open source software, because much of it comes with a whole paragraph of ”IN NO EVENT SHALL THE AUTHORS OR COPYRIGHT HOLDERS BE LIABLE FOR ANY CLAIM, DAMAGES OR OTHER LIABILITY“

That would be fine if Claude was open source and/or unpaid

If you read the fine print of most commercial software you'll see some language to a similar effect. When's the last time Microsoft got sued due to an outage caused by a bug in Windows?

Yes, the fine print.

Only this so-called "AI" needs it full size on the front page.

I would consider that more honest than more of a problem.

That's actually meaningless in Europe under the Cyber Resiliency Act by the way. They are liable even if they say they aren't.

An outage is not the same thing. A similar thing would be if Outlook 365 started sending emails on your behalf or changing around words in them, or if SAP / Quickbooks said: "No guarantee that the numbers you type in match the results of the annual statement we produce", or if Tesla was like "You should absolutely not use our cars for driving anywhere".

If you bring language like this into more traditional fields, it feels absolutely bonkers.

edit: some lawsuits:

* Air Canada forced to honour chatbot offer - https://lsj.com.au/articles/air-canada-forced-to-honour-chat...

* Tesla pays $329M for defective autopilot - https://www.anzalonelaw.com/jury-finds-tesla-autopilot-defec...

* but then again: non-performance & damages disclaimer upheld in the "Diedrich" lawsuit https://www.lexology.com/library/detail.aspx?g=8f61a973-f05c...

This sentence only exists to offset law (or case law) have gave damage rights to anyone.

Every piece of software comes with giant disclaimers like this.

You’ve just been clicking past them.

This really isn’t new.

It's not new to LLM companies, but it does seem like they're leaning away from the standard "Hey, don't blame us if this doesn't work" and are moving into "It's now your fault any time our software fucks something up" which feels new.

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