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Comment by quadhome | Hacker News Reader

It is unlawful for any person to send, post, or transmit, or procure the sending, posting, or transmission of, a writing or other record, including an electronic record, in any manner in which it may be viewed by another person, when in such writing or record the person makes a threat to: (a) Kill or to do bodily harm to another person; or (b) Conduct a mass shooting or an act of terrorism.

— via https://www.leg.state.fl.us/Statutes/index.cfm?App_mode=Disp...

The DA is serious about "in any matter."

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> in which it may be viewed by another person

To me, that is the more interesting legal question. Does a LLM-based safety net that sends content to a human, when the original use case would not have sent it to a human, count as "may be viewed by another person". It certainly wasn't intended to be, and that isn't the norm. At the same time, because no security is perfect, we could say that any digital record, stored in any way "may be viewed by another person."

Something for the courts to sort out, of course.

The usual thing that makes laws against criminal conspiracy pass First Amendment muster is that the words have to be combined with some concrete acts furthering the criminal conspiracy. That might just be something as otherwise innocuous as looking up the blueprints of the bank you talked about robbing but it has to be something other than just talk.

Lotsa words in that law... except they don't define what a "threat" may be.

If you enter my house I will k!ll you. <- is this a threat? noone knows. The interpretation of the word "threat" is unknown. Besides, is a conditional a statement? who knows. But sure, blah blah... "in any manner in which it may..." these words are putting me to sleep.

Is the LLM now "another person"?

I suppose since Anthropic's T&Cs allow them to have a person read your chats, that makes it violate the law. Of course, if Anthropic didn't have that in their T&Cs, it wouldn't have been illegal to write.

And it would never have been read by a person (wink wink)

The company that runs it is

Depends on how good her lawyer is now

The other person is not the LLM, rather the service provider’s employees.

> may be viewed by another person

Was it viewed by another person? Yes.

So a written threat only becomes a crime when someone reads it, even if you never intended for anyone to read it? Is it a crime if I make a threatening statement in a diary and someone breaks into my house and reads the diary?

"may be viewed" not "is viewed"

Except if you're one of the "warfighters" that Anthropic supports

I mean, obviously? Soldiers operate under different rules than civilians. This has always been true.

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