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Comment by chrismorgan | Hacker News Reader

Under the law of Moses, if your bull gored someone, you were not responsible; but if it was known to be a gorer, you were responsible if you didn’t ensure it couldn’t gore someone.

I don’t know exact parallels in current law, but I presume there will be things like that.

The OpenAI/Hugging Face case sounded rather like OpenAI building a fence around their bull that was known to be a gorer, and then thumbing their nose at it and saying “nyaa! bet you can’t break the fence!” and walking away while listening to loud music.

In Australia, if you have a fire and leave it unattended and it escapes, it’s your fault, you were supposed to keep watching as long as it was burning.

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I'm glad that we no longer live in a world where "bull goring" is such a common occurrence that it needs to be codified into law.

In Australian rodeo regulation:

  The roping of an unbroken horse or untrained bull is illegal.

In Australia at least three people have been injured by bulls in past two months (man suffered serious injuries after being gored by a bull at Mortlake livestock exchange / woman suffered significant leg and pelvic injuries following an incident with a bull on a private property at Crediton in Mackay / etc.)

Three years back 15 or so people were injured after bull escapes, charges through crowd at Kununurra rodeo - https://www.abc.net.au/news/2023-05-29/bull-escapes-kununurr...

There's not a lot of bull specific carve out, but still much regulation around dangerous animals.

Even at the time, the example was almost certainly more representative of the concept than meant to be a specific thing that happened all the time. Then as now, people have animals; animals sometimes do bad things; when is the owner responsible?

There are certain cats that are aggressive about expanding their territory; they'll break into other houses and attack the cats there. (Had this happen to us -- cat came in through a cat-flap a few times, until something happened that scared enough that it never came back.) The first time your cat does that sort of thing, you can say "I had no idea, it's not my fault." But if your cat has a habit of doing that, and you still let it out at night, you're no longer blameless.

Nobody got gored. HuggingFace may have the right to make demands; presumably they have already worked that out with OpenAI privately. Not really our business.

Nothing to see here. Just billion dollar companies producing hacking geniuses that are open for the public to jailbreak and use. This could never effect us, not really our business.

> billion dollar companies producing hacking geniuses that are open for the public

Hasn’t the biggest complaint about these (non open weight) models been that the versions open to the public are very careful and will issue denials if the request is even tangentially related to ‘hacking’, or building a bioweapon?

It damn right is our fucking business. They are unleashing these things on the world. They are becoming more capable.

They need to work properly and not do harmful actions. The labs have an obligation to society to not build powerful, dangerous AIs that go rogue.

> I don’t know exact parallels in current law, but I presume there will be things like that.

This is the difference between "knowingly" doing something (i.e. intent) and "negligently" allowing something to happen.

In American law, typically intent is more for criminal law and negligence is for liability of civil damages.

> I don’t know exact parallels in current law

You own a vicious dog, and it bites someone - you are responsible because you choose to own a dangerous dog.

A few claimed this might apply here: OpenAI knew their models are "dangerous", so they should be liable if they hack.

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