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Comment by tshaddox | Hacker News Reader

I don't know. Any of these criticisms can be applied on a case be case basis, but I think I would be justifiably upset if any of these happened:

1. my qBittorrent client pirated content without me intending it or taking any irresponsible actions that could reasonably be expected to cause it

2. my chatbot illegally infiltrated servers without me intending it or taking any irresponsible actions that could reasonably be expected to cause it

3. my firearm killed a person without me intending it or taking any irresponsible actions that could reasonably be expected to cause it

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> my chatbot illegally infiltrated servers without me intending it or taking any irresponsible actions that could reasonably be expected to cause it

> taking any irresponsible actions that could reasonably be expected to cause it

That latter part of the sentence is doing a lot of heavy lifting here

For certain specific cases, sure, but there is a general concern about an AI agent doing something illegal or harmful against the intentions of the human operator. And this analogy of a BitTorrent client being used intentionally by a human to download copyrighted content is just not applicable.

I disagree. Fifteen years ago, you absolutely could have written a web crawler that aggregated torrent links, and occasionally picked one and downloaded it. You could even build in an attempt to screen filenames to only download legal content. Your program very well could have downloaded illegal content regardless.

The bittorrent client being used intentionally illegally by a human is something you've invented, it's not something in the original post nor in the comment I replied to.

There's a solid argument to be made that using a powerful LLM in an internet-connected environment constitutes "taking irresponsible actions that could reasonably be expected to cause it". The fact that doing otherwise makes powerful LLMs much less useful is beside the point here.

> Fifteen years ago, you absolutely could have written a web crawler that aggregated torrent links...

Sure, and you'd probably be culpable if you wrote the software. But if you purchased Quicken99 to do your taxes, and that software downloaded some copyrighted content with bittorrent, you would not be culpable.

> There's a solid argument to be made that using a powerful LLM in an internet-connected environment constitutes "taking irresponsible actions that could reasonably be expected to cause it".

That is a wild claim and could not possibly be true without some major legal precedent (and almost certainly significant legal/regulatory changes). These are among the most widely used and general purpose internet products in the United States.

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