edit: ah, future crime cannot be protected.

You end up just weighing up the difference in trust between a vendor and a friend against the level of disinterest that they might have in your affairs.

I'm not saying fake child porn should be allowed or not-allowed, just showing there exist possible exceptions and rationalizations for them even without two parties.

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.

In a "three felonies a day" universe?

The AI companies have clauses in their user agreements saying they can review content flagged as harmful. It’s not legally spying.

If you recall previous outrage about ChatGPT being used in cases of suicides or shootings, this is the result. Every time a crime was committed and the police found ChatGPT history about the crime, the media turned it into a frenzy. So the AI labs added safety filters to their consumer plans that detect threats of violence, escalate them to human review, and report to the police.

Spying is not the right analogy because the information was given to the police by a third party which had a EULA saying they would do this. A more analogous situation would be someone reading another person’s diary and then turning it into the police department. There might be some limitation in the law that makes the evidence inadmissible because it was not intended to be shared with anyone, but that’s a separate decision.

With the obvious IANAL, it doesn't seem to rely on the message be sent to the person being threatened. The specific segment is "in any manner in which it may be viewed by another person".

This may be one of those cases where we get to find out how courts view SaaS platforms.

The prosecutors likely know this and expect it. But there's enough gray area here for them to make the argument, and it's hard to prove malicious prosecution, so they know they'll get away with it. It's just about sending a message to the public - they don't care whether a conviction sticks. Just politics.

sandbox your ai.

Note that the law doesn't forbid the writing of a threat. You have to send it to someone. Had she kept it in a book under her bed, she would not be in trouble. But she sent it to a website/service/LLM portal.

>> 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

    OpenAI’s stated rationale was a concern for the shooter’s privacy, but its own interests
    better explain its silence. Upon information and belief, OpenAI was seeking to avoid implementation of a
    hard line rule to refer planning of real-world violence to authorities, perhaps due to how frequently its
    product is implicated in threats to human life. Requiring such disclosures would be incompatible with the
    company’s public position that ChatGPT is safe. It could also threaten the valuation underlying OpenAI’s
    anticipated initial public offering. Rather than expose those risks, OpenAI accepted the consequences of
    its silence. A mass murder in the only secondary school in Tumbler Ridge followed.

    Accordingly, the Crown, led by Attorney General Sharma, and SD59 jointly bring this
    action to hold OpenAI and Sam Altman accountable for designing a dangerous product, distributing it to
    every home with internet access, ignoring the warnings of their own safety team,
    refusing to notify authorities when they knew the shooter was planning gun violence, inviting the shooter back onto the
    platform after deactivating the shooter’s account, and choosing corporate self-interest over the lives of
    children. They seek compensation for the not just foreseeable but known harm OpenAI inflicted, the
    damages that they incurred and are incurring, and injunctive relief to ensure that this tragedy does not
    happen again.

Then the AI companies have more confidence that they can move forward in a certain way, and issue investor guidance that is maybe closer to reality.

I see constant ads on video platform (particularly youtube/tiktok) about llm chat apps, from friends, dating, romance and everythkng inbetween; that's personal.

People need to be reminded constantly if they use such apps that they are participating in easier mass surveillance, profiling and AI training.

Yup. And with zero privacy protections in statute for AI chat, there is nothing to prevent an AI CEO looking to curry political favour from e.g. handing over the private correspondence of an opponent or an entire district’s residents.

A bot talking to you directly as if its some one real caters to your thoughts and can take you in a certain direction without you realizing it. I have heard first hand experience from people that they feel more comfortable talking to chatgpt or claude cause it gives a feeling of being on their side and listening to them.

As another commenter said, you're not chatting with a friend; you're chatting with Big Tech.

How much do you love Big Brother?

It's the other way around, big techs need to properly disclose in their platform, during interaction that they aren't in a private and safe environment

"Anthropic failed to report murderer's threats to authorities"

(or "Chatbot knew man was planning murder, yet company did nothing")

"Anthropic reported private chats to authorities"

(or "Arrested for chatbot fantasy")

To be fair to the journalists in these cases, there's also no society-wide agreed Schelling point about the correct outcome or correct rules. I have strong beliefs and intuitions about what should happen, but other people also have strong beliefs and intuitions, and many of those are probably opposite of mine. Even if my intuitions are the best and most justified, a journalist is unlikely to think "I'm just not going to mention that some people are mad at this company over this outcome, because a hypothetically better norm or principle would support the company's actions here". Hopefully the journalism can at least contextualize the lack of legal or social consensus and the difficult incentive problems, rather than jumping to "obviously companies are sociopaths staffed by supervillains".

Including any chats anywhere where someone might have a phone in their pocket, or if there's a "camera" attached to a utility pole or a nearby tree. The only real private chats might be whispered lying down in the bathtub together, with a mattress covering it like you're both hiding from a hurricane.

> they're chatting with Big Tech

They're chatting with any powerful person who wants to hear it. She thought she was chatting with Anthropic, who doesn't give a shit about her. But after being threatened (and immediately backing down because, of course, they don't give a shit about her) Anthropic has become an arm of the government. So she was chatting with the Bonita Springs, FL Sheriff's office, or anybody else. If I paid enough, Anthropic would tell me about what she was doing so I could sell her laundry detergent.

Somehow humanity survived the past 40 years without Microsoft Word and Excel phoning home and shopping users to the feds at random, I don't see why the standard should be any different for this new class of tooling.

I feel like if people understood what these things actually are there'd be way less of this AI psychosis and similar stuff.

There'd also be fewer people falling for apocalyptic Rationalist delusions.

Also: people need to understand "not your computer, not your data." (Unless it's stored in the cloud but encrypted locally with keys only you possess.) Same goes for storing things unencrypted in OneDrive, Google Drive, etc. There is nothing to stop these companies from bulk scanning, data mining, or reporting people based on whatever request a government gives them. Don't count on them to resist, because they often can't, especially if the request is from a sovereign state where they do business.

On the other hand, they did put themselves into this position deliberately.

Adding: - I typically ask questions in the I form, regardless for whom or why I ask for. - Gemini chats quite often end when it starts recommending psychological council or a suicide line, to talk about my problems. It apparently detects a persistent tendency to not agree with the party line. So it makes sense I must be suicidal ;-

But sure, as llm's start to babysit us, and know our inner dialog better than anyone else, we'll soon be debugging their opinion/behavior/co-existence/authority, when it comes to reporting people to the authorities, or taking on tasks in society in general. We'll hire doctors to cure our psychological profile from our record (Total Recall).

A Minority Report like this shouldn't cause a referral to the police.

I can certainly threaten you harm and send it to not-you and you're still clearly in danger even if it wasnt transmitted to you. So the question becomes did she transmit it to someone? Clearly yes she transmitted it to Anthropic. But she clearly intended to send it to Claude, an inanimate object.

Do we, though? What if someone started an AI company that uses end-to-end encryption to make it impossible for anyone but you to access your data? Personally, I would switch to it in a heartbeat assuming it's competitive with the other products. I don't think it's the tech companies' job to surveil the population and prevent crimes. That said, I'm not necessarily against Anthropic or other companies reporting suspicious activity if their existing systems are detecting it. I'm just not sure we want every product to be forced into that data model.

Your follow-up about purely private tech seems to contradict your first statement. We can either have privacy or surveillance, not both.

Back to LLM chats: A system that can declare her "unstable" is also one that can permaban you from all air-travel because you "privately" said unflattering things about Dear Leader.

So... minority report?

There are trade offs. ISP effectively is like driving on a highway, everyone can see where you are going but not what is inside the car. Id like these AI chats to be the same but they are not.

Maybe you do; I want my tech to always include secure, encrypted communications. Don't include me in your destruction of privacy with your silly bandwagon!

----

jfc, why is this website full on psychopaths

"The actual fundamental underlying problem being that not all people are equal, but we kinda have to pretend they are, because not doing so leads to fascism and other terrible stuff.

But we kinda also do not want to fully pretend that, because doing so leads to yet other terrible stuff."

other people are not pretending everyone is equal. your power levels are showing, it isn't subtle.

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.

> If they were to offer total privacy, is it ok for the public to use chat to get advice on _how_ to commit a crime?

Yes it should be, but it should be illegal for a company providing chat service to respond with anything other than a refusal when doing so.

That detection and refusal should be a private closed loop though, anonymizing any data that will be passed into a training pipeline, or ads targeting. This requirement for closed loop private chats should be mandated by law sooner than later. Otherwise we're getting into very tricky territory where the temptation of alerting on things like pre-crime grows too close.

You get privacy if you're a big corporation that needs to make sure OpenAI/Google/Anthropic can't read your trade secrets etc.

But those contractual privacy protections have been in place for a long time. It doesn't have anything to do with AI, it's been the same with Office365, Google Docs, etc.

LocalLLM enthusiasts exist for a good reason.

Two teens riding in a Waymo were arrested because the AI detected them talking about having a gun.

Basically, under this interpretation, any personal note you store in the servers of a company could qualify, even if you didn't ever imagine someone would read and as such you couldn't have thought about it as a threat

I’ve had them email me before because I was testing it as a filter for abusive messages and they detected some no-no and wrongthink in those test messages.

https://www.nbcmiami.com/news/local/everyone-deserves-to-die...

https://www.wdsu.com/article/maryland-high-school-student-ch...

https://www.pinellassheriff.gov/21-023-deputies-arrest-pinel...