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Comment by gwd | Hacker News Reader

> Florida Statute 836.10 makes it a second-degree felony to send, post, or transmit a written or electronic record threatening to kill or injure someone, carry out a mass shooting, or commit an act of terrorism. The communication must be made in a manner in which another person may view it.

I think Anthropic did the right thing here; but the sheriff's office are probably demonstrating why she dislikes them. Writing a diary entry to a chatbot is clearly not how this law was intended to be used.

EDIT: Actually, on reflection, making this report to the people she was upset about was probably not the right call. If they'd sent it to the FBI, there'd be a much lower chance that someone felt the need to assert their "authority".

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>> I think Anthropic did the right thing here

This is the paradoxical times we live in right now.

Don't do something? She walks into the office and start shooting the place up. Several officers and innocent people are killed. Cue the media claiming, "You should've known she was talking about this an AI bot! Why didn't the bot tell anybody she was planning a mass shooting?!"

Do something? She gets rolled up by the cops and questioned about what she was talking about and brought to the cop station and interviewed. Cue the media claiming, "This is an unethical way to use AI, this is an infringement on free speech! This is authoritarian!"

I believe in free speech as much as the next person. But in this day and age, its almost better to be safe than to have to explain to someone's loved ones you had to chance to prevent this and did nothing.

> This is the paradoxical times we live in right now.

It's always been complicated like this. That's why certain professions (psych, lawyer, clergy) come with rules around when and if disclosure is allowed[ required, and/or admissible].

Mmm.

As a Brit, I'm aware of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twitter_joke_trial

I can't say I actually disagree with the initial prosecution. The penalty was a fine, likely less than the cost of investigating it.

Intended as a joke? Blowing off steam? I can understand that, but given the number of people on social media is large enough to include genuinely unhinged people, you can't expect anyone who receives such as message to take them as a joke.

Same with AI use. A billion users, you have to assume some of them are actually sincere if they write about any act of violence, from self-harm to a plan to steal a nuke and use it in a false-flag attack to trigger WW3 and everything between.

> you can't expect anyone who receives such as message to take them as a joke

That's a distinction that matters to me. Sending a spicy note to an LLM isn't remotely the same thing as posting it on social media where the entire world can read it.

I kinda agree, but on the other hand anything you send to an LLM has to be viewed through the lens that only an automated system (i.e. an LLM) is capable of even handling such a tsunami of natural language.

It absolutely will misclassify things, it doesn't know any better.

(We should all wish each other good luck, because we're going to need it).

They’d be in an easier position if they built the system such that it was impossible for them to know what people are writing. They might catch a little flack from people who want them to surveil all their customers, but by and large people seem to accept “we take technological measures to ensure privacy and that means we can’t spot crimes.”

So this conundrum is at least partly of their own making.

> They’d be in an easier position if they built the system such that it was impossible for them to know what people are writing. They might catch a little flack from people who want them to surveil all their customers

The companies making these AI chat bots are the people who most want to surveil all their customers. The plan is (or will end up being): spy on what their customers are saying to their chatbots, use the conversations to further train/improve the AI and to increase the user's engagement with it, mine the conversations for every scrap of private/personal data and build dossiers on the customers, let other companies and governments pay them for that data or at least turn the chatbot into a shill/manipulator targeting customers based on the contents of their dossier, then use the contents of their customers dossiers for anything else they want.

If they actually set up their services to be private it would kill almost all of the expected value and also cut them off from their best remaining source of training data that isn't the AI generated slop their products are increasingly polluting the internet and the rest of media with.

This is the only way to recoope the spending. Soon after an AI tax and every cititzen gets a free llm account at some provider whether they like it or not.

First and foremost journalism is the business of turning news into attention (and ad revenue), not informing the public.

s/journalism/poor journalism/tnx

> This is the paradoxical times we live in right now.

This quote is pretty old:

> Those who would give up essential liberty, to purchase a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety.

> its almost better to be safe than to have to explain to someone's loved ones you had to chance to prevent this and did nothing.

An authoritarian government isn't safe. That's why safety is also not deserved when you go chasing for a little of it at the cost of essential freedoms.

It feels icky, and my default is not to side with megacorps engaged in blanket surveillance, but I can’t really fault Anthropic here. The correct setup should be a law that protects this sort of interaction with a chat bot as privileged, along the lines of HIPAA-mode. Use a classifier or some sort of “private mode” toggle to tell the platform you’re engaging in privileged communication ala dear diary, and then a much higher legal standard needs to apply to protecting that data (no training, same protections as doctor / psychologist interactions). Even a therapist has a legal duty-to-report in certain situations.

Is it really "blanket surveillance" when it only sees exactly what you put into it? That's like saying you're being filmed against your will while... filming yourself.

Yes, and it's weird that on a form of technologists we're going with the idea that all of these systems we use every day to hold our personal private information that we are constantly ensured is secured against anyone unauthorized from accessing it is actually snitching to the cops just because someone else is hosting it on our behalf.

The 3rd Party Doctrine destroyed the 4th amendment and is the reason privacy respecting software has to play legal games. E2EE while a good security practice shouldn't be necessary to protect you against the cops rummaging around your stuff. The bar to establish that information is private shouldn't be "literally mathematically inaccessible but the cops are still allowed to try."

Counterpoint, if you give the agent access to your files - which happens to include the Notepad diary you've been writing since your teens - and it makes a similar conclusion about something you privately wrote, would have the same opinion?

I get where you’re coming from, but I think if the progression of technology has shown us anything, it’s that there will be constant competitive and social pressures being applied to use these tools more and more and that pressure will race far ahead of any privacy, consumer protections, public education and societal wellbeing counter forces. So opt-out ends up being a rapidly shrinking iceberg in practice.

"slippery slope" is an old phrase for a reason.

I’m going to guess that planning a mass shooting clears any hurdle that would be in place here.

While the privacy around ai chatbots is rotten in general, I can’t fault anyone who reported this.

Maybe not one that reported it, but the ‘we scan every message you sent into this for disallowed speech’ part is what gives me pause.

They shouldn’t be in a position to report it at all.

Yes in general I don't like that everything you do on a computer is sent to some 3rd party to scan. But the moment they did receive this message it's clear the only right move is to act on it.

Would you use an AI service knowing that they are inclined to turn you in to police if they detect illegal activity?

In a "three felonies a day" universe?

Legally they have to.

Would you use a lawyer knowing they are inclined to turn you into the police if you talk about committing a crime in the future?

The law is the law.

We should be happy about this as for once the AI companies did the right thing.

This is slippery. Many people do all of their journaling inside of Google or Apple cloud products. Some even write up their intentions to do bad things.

Does all writing now have to be scanned for thought crime?

That's an interesting wrinkle that is rather tough to work through.

To me, journaling your intent in a private journal, whether that's an Apple Journal/Note or a Moleskine in your drawer, feels qualitatively different in some way. But I'm not sure why.

So "I'm going to shoot up the police station" written in your own journal feels somewhat different than "I'm going to shoot up the police station" said to a system that might be able to _interpret_ or _act_ on what was said in some way. Did I just give AI a legal duty, or even a soul I didn't think it had before? I've written up about three or four "what about this, what about that" and deleted them all.

Your LG television transcribes every word you say in the living room. How would you feel if they began collaborating with police? Have you said any sentence that would seem incriminating out of context?

"If you give me six lines written by the hand of the most honest of men, I will find something in them which will hang him."

> Would you use an AI service knowing that they are inclined to turn you in to police if they detect illegal activity?

The appropriate question is whether I want to live in Florida. This is much more a Florida law problem than an AI company problem.

It would apply if you happened to use Office 365 to write your diary.

Sadly, this isn't a Florida problem.

I don’t live in the US. But this kind of broad law is hard to implement without surveilling all users, and it has multiple side effects.

What happens if I use Claude or ChatGPT to research sensitive social topics? Would that be considered a social network interaction and used against me when I apply for a visa?

Many governments (especially in Latin America) copy what the US does, meaning that similar laws will be pushed sooner or later.

> What happens if I use Claude or ChatGPT to research sensitive social topics?

Anthropic/OpenAI is not obligated to report your use, as long as it's not violating some terribly written law (like the Florida law). The government won't know about it, so no, you will not be denied a visa.

> Many governments (especially in Latin America) copy what the US does, meaning that similar laws will be pushed sooner or later.

I honestly don't know, but I suspect most US states don't have such an overreaching law.

Yes.

But that service is a process on MY computer, loaded into RAM, with an abliterated model.

I don't trust 3rd party networks from abusing any data I give them.

You omitted the part in the diary entry about shooting up sheriff’s office

You're missing the part where it's a diary entry, so the actual content is irrelevant. Her only mistake was not realizing that her diary wasn't private.

Because it's not relevant. They're not charging her with conspiracy, which is what they would do if she'd actually done anything concrete towards making that happen. She didn't email it, or text it, or post it on Facebook or Twitter or Discord or a message board, which is what this law is clearly about.

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