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Comment by thelastgallon | Hacker News Reader

You're right. Nothing will come out of this. It is very important for these companies that they are sued now by the super-friendly administration and be gently punished (Punishment: Don't do it again, Ok? Defendents: We promise we won't do it again) or settled for a measly sum of a few million (no admission of guilt).

Then you can be never tried again for the same crimes. There is some law against being tried for the same crimes multiple times.

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That's not how that works. If you kill someone and are tried for it, guilty or not, that does not give you license to go kill more people. You can be tried for the same crime if you do the crime again.

You cannot be tried multiple times for the same instance of a crime.

Since OAI et al don't appear interested in stopping crime, they can (and likely will) be tried again the next time they do it.

Technically from a legal perspective sure, but there is also the common cultural understanding of these things, and an overton window of how we talk about them. The whole doomer narrative, and pseudo-anthromorphization (xenomorphization?) where we ascribe agency and volition to the algorithm, plays right to the interests of the AI leaders by simultaneously making their products so incredibly powerful and civilization altering that of course the valuations are justified, while also providing a convenient narrative that if anything goes wrong the AI did it and there was no way for them to control this new life form. Privatize the benefit, socialize the risk; this is not a new playbook.

> You can be tried for the same crime if you do the crime again.

> Since OAI et al don't appear interested in stopping crime, they can (and likely will) be tried again the next time they do it.

There is no second entire internet for them to steal though

Their bot crawling numbers seem to disagree.

It's also only true for criminal courts. Double jeopardy does not automatically apply to civil torts the same way that it does to criminal courts.

Everything that the FTC investigates is strictly civil. Any criminal prosecution arising from their investigations is passed off to the DOJ.

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