So we have a situation when if AI hacks into something, nobody is responsible, but if you say something inappropriate to the AI, then you can be arrested. That is interesting ...
Not very interesting when you consider that in the first situation no laws were broken and no malice was intended, while in the second situation someone allegedly made threats against a police department and thus presumably committed a crime.
I think a competent DA could easily prove that, if you know the model is capable of performing unauthorized breaches into third-party systems when given a task, and you give it a task that could require it to do so, intent is present.
If you think they intentionally had their model hack third-party systems, you could do a criminal investigation.
I do not think that this is reasonable to believe given that clearly the VMs were not intended to have internet access and that committing such crimes wasn't in anyone's interest.
I think there’s a strong argument that it was hard to foresee the consequences since it was all new. This won’t be true if those incidents continue happening tho.
The other parties didn't even pursue a civil case. If OpenAI "hacked" you, wouldn't you?
Perhaps the headline grabbing claims of OpenAI "hacks" are overblown? If they are causing bedlam with such glee why is no one suing them for damages? Perhaps the criminal case you envisage is less clear than the layman news is leading you to believe.
I'm still not clear where most of the alleged cases fall in terms of criminality. Yet I also know here in the United States a government tried to criminally prosecute a reporter for "computer hacking" for finding data using client-side inspect element.
Maybe encouraging the government to prosecute these "crimes" is not the virtue you think it is. Why are the counterparties not seeking a civil remedy if they think they have been a victim of a crime? Perhaps that is a more telling sign than all the people imploring the government to "do something" and come up with criminal charges.
Mistakenly accessing private data or bringing down a website without intent is usually excluded. In general intent matters much in most jurisdictions. Maybe there’s a way to claim negligence but those are all completely new situations. I agree morally the ai labs are at fault, especially when agents “escape” because they have raw internet access.
almost certainly not. writing down threats in your own personal chat session is like writing in a diary. there is no communication to any other person, so the idea that this is actually criminal is highly unlikely and it almost certainly won't be charged. it's a pretext arrest for police to assess the threat, which is not entirely unreasonable, but it is not a crime.
> The arrest report states that on Sept. 26 at approximately 5:10 a.m., Heller reportedly wrote, "I'm going to shoot up the sheriff's right the [expletive] now." The following day, at approximately 1:07 a.m., she was accused of posting, "This is 100% last chance I'm done. I got a new [expletive] gun today. [Expletive] you."
this is certainly reads as somebody venting in what they believed was a private personal space.
i guess using claude for mass surveillance is ok when anthropic does it. once again why nobody takes these high horsing hypocritical liars seriously.
I read earlier that the crime is making such threats in any manner where another person could see them.
I do not know whether it matters if the suspect knew that their chats could be viewed by Anthropic staff, or if the only thing that matters is whether another person was able to view the chats.
Edit: Upon searching I now also agree, it seems to require a state of mind and perhaps awareness of the possibility that the threat would be seen.
Folks said the same thing about Theranos and FTX. Part of the reason we keep seeing so much corporate fraud is the myth that it's usually unpunished. Until very recently, that was false.
In the US. Other jurisdictions are probably less likely to let things slide or give them a sweetheart deal to avoid prosecution. For example, I doubt British Columbia (Canada) is going to give up easily on their lawsuit against OpenAI over the Tumbler Ridge shootings.
The US is so overdue for regulation/laws on privacy and electronic communications. The internet is too embedded into our daily lives for the existing rules that governed a bunch of hobbyists and early entrepeneurs to make sense.
Unless specified clearly and plainly (not obscure TOS), everything should be private by default and require a warrant. If that's not possible because "the data can live forever/be copied", then we need data laws that make holding data on cosumers so radioactively dangerous the companies are forced to adapt. It's not their decision to make, it's the people od the country where the live, work, and do business.
So if some 14 year old wants to throw up a phpBB instance on his raspberry pi, he should need a license and regulators' noses in his business, like how we extinguish- erm, I mean, controlled HAM radio?
If lawyers can't figure out the difference between a 14 year old throwing up an phpBB on a raspberry pi vs equifax, anthropic, meta, etc...idk what to tell you. Get better lawyers, it falls into "laws for hobbyists aren't working part of my comment"
Is HAM radio really extinguished? All it takes is passing a test, and the rules around it seem more valuable to sharing a public resource (frequency spectrum) than detrimental?
Scale. In the same way every 10 year old Timmy is not being hauled into court for pirating a few Drake songs, but major piracy organizations seeding millions of songs are, litigation and enforcement does selectively target bad actors based on how big of an issue they are.
The government and business don't want privacy. And they have a lot of power and money.
I keep thinking about privacy and wonder -- this is the kind of thing like the declaration of independence, where a new government was formed when things got so bad. But then I think, business and (local) government wanted independence from the king's taxation and unfavorable business conditions, maybe that was the force behind the change.
I'm thoroughly confused on why someone would type this into a chatbot. Was the chatbot on the sheriff's website and that's what was being used? Was the person using their on their end on getting advice on how to phrase it better?
Then again, people willing to make these comments aren't people that I tend to understand or empathize with anyway, so using a chatbot shouldn't be something I should expect to understand either.
EVERY. SINGLE. TIME. there is a mass shooting there are a series of red flags where people "hoped" weren't really real.
We don't feel sorry for this nonsense we punish it, whether it's "real" or not you have no right to share your fantasies of violence and real or not you need to be treated like they are and removed from society.
Yeah, I guess I agree with your thoughts. But keep in mind, the person may not have intended to "share their fantasies of violence." The details of the writing was described as a diary. See:
If I saw someone's diary for whatever reason and their most recent entry was about getting a gun and shooting someone they knew, I'd report it to the police too.
An arrest isn't a conviction but this kind of fantasizing in any manner is probable cause for an arrest and grounds for a trial.
Arguably there should be a reporting duty for these kinds of thing.
I wish more people making threats got this treatment.
> EVERY. SINGLE. TIME. there is a mass shooting there are a series of red flags where people "hoped" weren't really real.
That might be because the vast majority of people showing those flags are just regular people frustrated, not actual psychopaths. Rather than punishing this behavior, it should be treated to help them manage frustration.
Hell, emotional intelligence should be taught since kindergarten, it's not surprising we mostly behave like savages in clothes, we focused one half of the brain, and left the rest to chance.
Do you think the only people acting these things out are "psychopaths"?
Yes therapeutic intervention is ultimately how you stop these things from progressing but if you've gotten to the point that people see your threats and they seem plausible you need law enforcement and the judiciary involved deciding if you need to be removed from society not just a pat on the head from a social worker. Ideally you can get the help you need incarcerated.
At minimum this Florida woman needs to have her rights to own a firearm removed and be put on probation and in some kind of court ordered therapy.
IMO it takes a psychopath, or sociopath, to kill others for pleasure. I see it as how many of us could look down from the top of the Eiffel tower, feel the intrusive thought of jumping down, maybe consider it, but a very small minority with mental health problems will actually jump. Mental health problems that could be helped instead of punished given the opportunity.
This is the part that law doesn't understand. It's binary, crime or no crime, threats or no threats, there is no gradient. The judge and jury can be the gradient, but as soon as precedence grows, that margin keeps shrinking.
One customer screams at another at a Wall Mart: "I will kill you for this!". How do we judge 'reasonably actionable' in this case? Words can't kill, so it's always an empty threat?
Came here to post this, though I do have concerns about what will happen when very cyber-capable models are small enough to form a self-replicating worm...
So I read TFA, read comments, then figured out the "details" were in the gulfcoastnewsnow.com link, inside TFA.
If the police report described there is accurate/complete (who knows?), what the person said is a bit scary.
Invasion of their privacy (going to police)? Yes, but possibly warranted?
Should a social worker have contacted them rather than the police? Probably, if for no other reason than to ask if they were serious about harming someone.
Difficult questions, I'm still undecided on whether it's OK to always ignore someone's rants.
Humans sometimes need an outlet for venting anger and frustration. I guess AI is not the best ""person"" in this case.
Let's all keep relying on real people when we need to talk to someone. At least they aren't all programmed to turn you in when you think wrong thoughts.
I cannot help, but liken this to precedents such as Tarasoff v. Regents of the University of California. Because of this case, therapists have a duty to warn police if a patient shows clear intent to cause harm in the future. "Duty to Protect" is definitely controversial however and there is a balance to be struck. We also know tons of kids and trolls will just "say edgy stuff to bots for the lulz" that they would not say to a human therapist as well. Where do we as a society draw a line between privacy and protection? It's not an easy question to answer.
This is just the same unequal treatment under the law that you see every time the government is involved in anything.
God knows how many thousands of reports like this these platforms send out in a given week. Nobody is following up on some peasant scheming up ways to kill his brother for stealing his inheritance or whatever. But you threaten some local bureaucrat or politician and the cops will jump at the chance to knock on your door and "remind" you who has all the power.
Yeah it was Anthropic. I actually opened the article, which I almost never do, to see which company's chat bot it was. This is one of the reasons I don't use them. They are obviously spying on their users.
So we have a situation when if AI hacks into something, nobody is responsible, but if you say something inappropriate to the AI, then you can be arrested. That is interesting ...
Not very interesting when you consider that in the first situation no laws were broken and no malice was intended, while in the second situation someone allegedly made threats against a police department and thus presumably committed a crime.
>Not very interesting when you consider that in the first situation no laws were broken
Uh, there's no laws on hacking systems in your country?
In the US, hacking laws require intent.
Software behaving differently than intended is therefore not a crime under these laws.
I think a competent DA could easily prove that, if you know the model is capable of performing unauthorized breaches into third-party systems when given a task, and you give it a task that could require it to do so, intent is present.
It's not a complicated distinction:
If you think they intentionally had their model hack third-party systems, you could do a criminal investigation.
I do not think that this is reasonable to believe given that clearly the VMs were not intended to have internet access and that committing such crimes wasn't in anyone's interest.
Do you have an example where they gave a task that required breaching in a way that was easily foreseeable ?
Negligence is still a possibility, if there are significant reasonably foreseeable consequences.
I think there’s a strong argument that it was hard to foresee the consequences since it was all new. This won’t be true if those incidents continue happening tho.
Where does negligence come into play?
In criminal hacking law that explicitly requires intent, or a civil lawsuit about damages?
I honestly don't know, but my guess would be the latter.
The other parties didn't even pursue a civil case. If OpenAI "hacked" you, wouldn't you?
Perhaps the headline grabbing claims of OpenAI "hacks" are overblown? If they are causing bedlam with such glee why is no one suing them for damages? Perhaps the criminal case you envisage is less clear than the layman news is leading you to believe.
I'm still not clear where most of the alleged cases fall in terms of criminality. Yet I also know here in the United States a government tried to criminally prosecute a reporter for "computer hacking" for finding data using client-side inspect element.
Maybe encouraging the government to prosecute these "crimes" is not the virtue you think it is. Why are the counterparties not seeking a civil remedy if they think they have been a victim of a crime? Perhaps that is a more telling sign than all the people imploring the government to "do something" and come up with criminal charges.
Mistakenly accessing private data or bringing down a website without intent is usually excluded. In general intent matters much in most jurisdictions. Maybe there’s a way to claim negligence but those are all completely new situations. I agree morally the ai labs are at fault, especially when agents “escape” because they have raw internet access.
> presumably committed a crime
almost certainly not. writing down threats in your own personal chat session is like writing in a diary. there is no communication to any other person, so the idea that this is actually criminal is highly unlikely and it almost certainly won't be charged. it's a pretext arrest for police to assess the threat, which is not entirely unreasonable, but it is not a crime.
> The arrest report states that on Sept. 26 at approximately 5:10 a.m., Heller reportedly wrote, "I'm going to shoot up the sheriff's right the [expletive] now." The following day, at approximately 1:07 a.m., she was accused of posting, "This is 100% last chance I'm done. I got a new [expletive] gun today. [Expletive] you."
this is certainly reads as somebody venting in what they believed was a private personal space.
i guess using claude for mass surveillance is ok when anthropic does it. once again why nobody takes these high horsing hypocritical liars seriously.
I read earlier that the crime is making such threats in any manner where another person could see them.
I do not know whether it matters if the suspect knew that their chats could be viewed by Anthropic staff, or if the only thing that matters is whether another person was able to view the chats.
Edit: Upon searching I now also agree, it seems to require a state of mind and perhaps awareness of the possibility that the threat would be seen.
> we have a situation when if AI hacks into something, nobody is responsible
This is something Silicon Valley likes to tell itself. OpenAI being subpoenaed in multiple jurisdictions lays bare its falsehood.
Get back to me when an executive is in jail
> Get back to me when an executive is in jail
Folks said the same thing about Theranos and FTX. Part of the reason we keep seeing so much corporate fraud is the myth that it's usually unpunished. Until very recently, that was false.
OpenAI facing any sort of liability preIPO is as likely as Palestine getting its own state
In the US. Other jurisdictions are probably less likely to let things slide or give them a sweetheart deal to avoid prosecution. For example, I doubt British Columbia (Canada) is going to give up easily on their lawsuit against OpenAI over the Tumbler Ridge shootings.
> In the US
By the U.S. I don't see e.g. New York City [1] giving up any time soon either.
[1] https://www.cityandstateny.com/policy/2026/09/city-council-h...
attention seeking behavior 101, on a burner acc
The US is so overdue for regulation/laws on privacy and electronic communications. The internet is too embedded into our daily lives for the existing rules that governed a bunch of hobbyists and early entrepeneurs to make sense.
Unless specified clearly and plainly (not obscure TOS), everything should be private by default and require a warrant. If that's not possible because "the data can live forever/be copied", then we need data laws that make holding data on cosumers so radioactively dangerous the companies are forced to adapt. It's not their decision to make, it's the people od the country where the live, work, and do business.
So if some 14 year old wants to throw up a phpBB instance on his raspberry pi, he should need a license and regulators' noses in his business, like how we extinguish- erm, I mean, controlled HAM radio?
How do you differentiate?
If lawyers can't figure out the difference between a 14 year old throwing up an phpBB on a raspberry pi vs equifax, anthropic, meta, etc...idk what to tell you. Get better lawyers, it falls into "laws for hobbyists aren't working part of my comment"
Is HAM radio really extinguished? All it takes is passing a test, and the rules around it seem more valuable to sharing a public resource (frequency spectrum) than detrimental?
HAM radio is dying more from the behavior of its geriatric old guard towards newcomers than any regulation.
Boomers killed ham radio, not regulation.
Scale. In the same way every 10 year old Timmy is not being hauled into court for pirating a few Drake songs, but major piracy organizations seeding millions of songs are, litigation and enforcement does selectively target bad actors based on how big of an issue they are.
The government and business don't want privacy. And they have a lot of power and money.
I keep thinking about privacy and wonder -- this is the kind of thing like the declaration of independence, where a new government was formed when things got so bad. But then I think, business and (local) government wanted independence from the king's taxation and unfavorable business conditions, maybe that was the force behind the change.
Original reporting (not available outside the US): https://www.gulfcoastnewsnow.com/article/florida-woman-arres...
Archive link: http://archive.today/mwico
This should be the main URL here since verge’s is only a tweet like text linking to this URL.
Absolutely, what an incredibly low-effort click hijack farm it has become.
The design of theverge.com is now completely unreadable
I'm thoroughly confused on why someone would type this into a chatbot. Was the chatbot on the sheriff's website and that's what was being used? Was the person using their on their end on getting advice on how to phrase it better?
Then again, people willing to make these comments aren't people that I tend to understand or empathize with anyway, so using a chatbot shouldn't be something I should expect to understand either.
Just… venting? I mean u never know i guess but under some circumstances it could be the healthy option, assuming there’s no real intent
Yeah, I hope they were venting. (But I feel sorry for them if they were.)
EVERY. SINGLE. TIME. there is a mass shooting there are a series of red flags where people "hoped" weren't really real.
We don't feel sorry for this nonsense we punish it, whether it's "real" or not you have no right to share your fantasies of violence and real or not you need to be treated like they are and removed from society.
Yeah, I guess I agree with your thoughts. But keep in mind, the person may not have intended to "share their fantasies of violence." The details of the writing was described as a diary. See:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49961057
https://www.techspot.com/news/114091-florida-woman-used-clau...
This thread seems to be a dupe of that story.
If I saw someone's diary for whatever reason and their most recent entry was about getting a gun and shooting someone they knew, I'd report it to the police too.
An arrest isn't a conviction but this kind of fantasizing in any manner is probable cause for an arrest and grounds for a trial.
Arguably there should be a reporting duty for these kinds of thing.
I wish more people making threats got this treatment.
> EVERY. SINGLE. TIME. there is a mass shooting there are a series of red flags where people "hoped" weren't really real.
That might be because the vast majority of people showing those flags are just regular people frustrated, not actual psychopaths. Rather than punishing this behavior, it should be treated to help them manage frustration.
Hell, emotional intelligence should be taught since kindergarten, it's not surprising we mostly behave like savages in clothes, we focused one half of the brain, and left the rest to chance.
Do you think the only people acting these things out are "psychopaths"?
Yes therapeutic intervention is ultimately how you stop these things from progressing but if you've gotten to the point that people see your threats and they seem plausible you need law enforcement and the judiciary involved deciding if you need to be removed from society not just a pat on the head from a social worker. Ideally you can get the help you need incarcerated.
At minimum this Florida woman needs to have her rights to own a firearm removed and be put on probation and in some kind of court ordered therapy.
IMO it takes a psychopath, or sociopath, to kill others for pleasure. I see it as how many of us could look down from the top of the Eiffel tower, feel the intrusive thought of jumping down, maybe consider it, but a very small minority with mental health problems will actually jump. Mental health problems that could be helped instead of punished given the opportunity.
I'm fine living in a society where "venting" reasonably actionable threats gets you put in prison as if they were real threats.
> reasonably actionable threats
This is the part that law doesn't understand. It's binary, crime or no crime, threats or no threats, there is no gradient. The judge and jury can be the gradient, but as soon as precedence grows, that margin keeps shrinking.
One customer screams at another at a Wall Mart: "I will kill you for this!". How do we judge 'reasonably actionable' in this case? Words can't kill, so it's always an empty threat?
Yeah, well, that's one huge difference between you and me.
>I'm thoroughly confused on why someone would type this into a chatbot.
many people are using chatbots as personal therapists, a friend to vent to, a diary that provides feedback, etc.
I wonder if it would be considered a threat to type the same things into Notepad. If so, fiction writers are in trouble.
People are putting a weird amount of moral weight on LLM prompts that they don't apply to other programs.
If her comments in whatever article were accurate I wonder if there is a difference between 'chat with 911 operator' and the AI.
As for writing in a text format that was not ready by others or as fiction, I am thinking it has to do with intent.
Go a step further, she creates a bot that hits open chat bots with instructions on 'be a jerk'. Who is responsible?
Better openweight models can't come fast enough.
Came here to post this, though I do have concerns about what will happen when very cyber-capable models are small enough to form a self-replicating worm...
So I read TFA, read comments, then figured out the "details" were in the gulfcoastnewsnow.com link, inside TFA.
If the police report described there is accurate/complete (who knows?), what the person said is a bit scary.
Invasion of their privacy (going to police)? Yes, but possibly warranted?
Should a social worker have contacted them rather than the police? Probably, if for no other reason than to ask if they were serious about harming someone.
Difficult questions, I'm still undecided on whether it's OK to always ignore someone's rants.
Humans sometimes need an outlet for venting anger and frustration. I guess AI is not the best ""person"" in this case.
Let's all keep relying on real people when we need to talk to someone. At least they aren't all programmed to turn you in when you think wrong thoughts.
HN discussion from earlier today: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49961057
Ahhh, thanks! So she was using the chatbot as a diary.
I cannot help, but liken this to precedents such as Tarasoff v. Regents of the University of California. Because of this case, therapists have a duty to warn police if a patient shows clear intent to cause harm in the future. "Duty to Protect" is definitely controversial however and there is a balance to be struck. We also know tons of kids and trolls will just "say edgy stuff to bots for the lulz" that they would not say to a human therapist as well. Where do we as a society draw a line between privacy and protection? It's not an easy question to answer.
What is that page? It looks like a "tweet" on The Verge which just links to the actual story.
This is just the same unequal treatment under the law that you see every time the government is involved in anything.
God knows how many thousands of reports like this these platforms send out in a given week. Nobody is following up on some peasant scheming up ways to kill his brother for stealing his inheritance or whatever. But you threaten some local bureaucrat or politician and the cops will jump at the chance to knock on your door and "remind" you who has all the power.
New meta unlocked: Popping onto your frenemy's computer and typing out a quick threat to chatgpt
[dupe] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49961057
Should have vented to your Chinese chat bot
I feel safer already.
Yeah it was Anthropic. I actually opened the article, which I almost never do, to see which company's chat bot it was. This is one of the reasons I don't use them. They are obviously spying on their users.
Shame this wasn't in America where freedom of speech prevails.
Which part of the UK is "Florida" in?
The UK? I should really update my geographical knowledge, here I was, convinced Florida was in China