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Comment by burningChrome | Hacker News Reader

>> 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.

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> 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].

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.

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).

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