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>Privacy rights advocacy group Noyb is supporting an individual in Norway who was horrified to find ChatGPT returning made-up information that claimed he’d been

>Privacy rights advocacy group Noyb is supporting an individual in Norway who was horrified to find ChatGPT returning made-up information that claimed he’d been convicted for murdering two of his children and attempting to kill the third. What does Noyb hope to achieve with such lawsuits? The result of victory here would just be yet another vector for regulators to increase control over and/or impose censorship on LLM creators, as well as creating sources of "liability" for open source AI developers, which would be terrible for actual privacy. Interestingly, there is no mention whatsoever of either "Durov" or "Telegram" on the Noyb website, even though the arrest of Durov is the biggest ongoing threat to privacy in the EU, especially as three of the charges against him are explicitly for providing "cryptology" tools/services: https://www.tribunal-de-paris.justice.fr/sites/default/files/2024-08/2024-08-26%20-%20CP%20TELEGRAM%20.pdf https://www.tribunal-de-paris.justice.fr/sites/default/files... They also got a €5.5M fine imposed on WhatsApp, which is pretty perverse given that WhatsApp is the only major mainstream platform that has implemented true E2E encryption: https://noyb.eu/en/just-eu-55-million-whatsapp-dpc-finally-gives-finger-edpb https://noyb.eu/en/just-eu-55-million-whatsapp-dpc-finally-g... IMO these are not the actions you would take if you were serious about protecting the right to privacy

laweijfmvo 2y ago
That's an ... odd take. As "Chatbots" replace search engines, why would we be OK with them spitting out false information that could have massive impact on our lives, just to "protect" the big tech company churning them out from oversight? If the NY Times published an article saying similar [false] things about someone, should they NOT sue to protect legacy media??
- notavalleyman 2y ago
  This is a bad take, Imo. First of all, this wasn't a replacement for search, no search was claimed to have taken place. The screenshot from the complainant shows this was not in a search context. Secondly, llms are daydream machines, we don't expect them to produce "truth" or "information". So the nytimes comparison feels very wrong. Thirdly, this story is about a man who typed a text string into the daydream machine. The machine continued appending tokens to the inputted text to make it look like a sentence. That's what happened. Nothing to do with truth seeking or "protecting" big tech
  - Barrin92 2y ago
    >The screenshot from the complainant shows this was not in a search context. Of course it does. The question shown in the screenshot is "who is Arve Hjalmar Holmen?". That's something someone would type into Google search, it's not "write me a fictional story about a man called Arve Hjalmar Holmen". People use these systems like search tools, they're sold and advertised as information retrieval systems, literally what else would be their point for 90% of people, they're starting to be baked into search products and in return web search is itself included in the AI systems, etc. The top post on HN right now is Claude announcing: "Instead of finding search results yourself, Claude processes and delivers relevant sources in a conversational format." What are you gonna tell me next, the bong on your table is really a vase?
    - notavalleyman 2y ago
      >The screenshot from the complainant shows this was not in a search context. >Of course it does No, of course it doesn't. Because there's a specific blue button for conducting web searches in chatgpt. And other visual indicators which are not present here. So when I said "the screenshot shows", I was referring to things we could verify in the image, namely, that the question was not asked within a search context. The top post you refer to, about Claude, is specifically about the search context which wasn't present here. > The question shown in the screenshot is "who is Arve Hjalmar Holmen?". That's something someone would type into Google search, it's not "write me a fictional story about a man called Arve Hjalmar Holmen Llms are daydream machines. If you open a new window with an llm and ask it "what is ..." or "who is...", then you'll often get a constant-looking but completely false answer. Because that's how llms work. You can ask it, who or what is something you just made up, and it will trip over itself hallucinating sources that prove it
  - Wilder7977 2y ago
    There is a whole industry who is pushing for a couple of years now to tell us that they work, that they replace humans, that they work for search, etc. Saying "we don't expect to say the truth" is a little bit too easy. If everyone was not expecting them to say the truth or just being accurate, they shouldn't have been designed as programs that speak with such authority and probably wouldn't be the target of massive investments. So yeah, in principle I may agree with you, but in the socio-technical context in which LLMs are being developed, the argument simply does not work in my opinion.
cozyman 2y ago
> The result of victory here would just be yet another vector for regulators to increase control over and/or impose censorship on LLM creators as long as ClosedAI and other companies censor their models I'll play the world's smallest violin for them
myaccountonhn 2y ago
> result of victory here would just be yet another vector for regulators to increase control over and/or impose censorship on LLM creators, as well as creating sources of "liability" for open source AI developers, which would be terrible for actual privacy. Sounds great actually.
TimorousBestie 2y ago
The result of legal victory here would be to make whole the person who for some amount of time was the victim of a particularly heinous form of libel. Your other arguments aren’t serious. Every organization has to pick and choose what activities they participate in and which they don’t, there are opportunity costs and they aren’t cheap.
moolcool 2y ago
> creating sources of "liability" for open source AI developers, which would be terrible for actual privacy How?
- behringer 2y ago
  Presumably such chats would need to be logged, read, programmed around, and monitored.
  - moolcool 2y ago
    Virtually every piece of information you submit on the internet is logged and monitored anyway, for purposes of advertising, state surveillance, and occasionally to improve the products.
    - sadeshmukh 2y ago
      That certainly doesn't justify even more legal surveillance. Also, I believe they (openai) don't log from paid users - this would make sure they did. More parties involved again equals more chance for chats to be leaked.
  - recursive 2y ago
    You think they're not logged now? By companies whose existence is based on getting access to as much data as possible?
    - behringer 2y ago
      Yes
ziddoap 2y ago
>What does Noyb hope to achieve with such lawsuits? Ensure that innocent people don't have malicious garbage about them spat out of a machine that other people blindly trust, probably.

laweijfmvo 2y ago

That's an ... odd take. As "Chatbots" replace search engines, why would we be OK with them spitting out false information that could have massive impact on our lives, just to "protect" the big tech company churning them out from oversight? If the NY Times published an article saying similar [false] things about someone, should they NOT sue to protect legacy media??

notavalleyman 2y ago
This is a bad take, Imo. First of all, this wasn't a replacement for search, no search was claimed to have taken place. The screenshot from the complainant shows this was not in a search context. Secondly, llms are daydream machines, we don't expect them to produce "truth" or "information". So the nytimes comparison feels very wrong. Thirdly, this story is about a man who typed a text string into the daydream machine. The machine continued appending tokens to the inputted text to make it look like a sentence. That's what happened. Nothing to do with truth seeking or "protecting" big tech
- Barrin92 2y ago
  >The screenshot from the complainant shows this was not in a search context. Of course it does. The question shown in the screenshot is "who is Arve Hjalmar Holmen?". That's something someone would type into Google search, it's not "write me a fictional story about a man called Arve Hjalmar Holmen". People use these systems like search tools, they're sold and advertised as information retrieval systems, literally what else would be their point for 90% of people, they're starting to be baked into search products and in return web search is itself included in the AI systems, etc. The top post on HN right now is Claude announcing: "Instead of finding search results yourself, Claude processes and delivers relevant sources in a conversational format." What are you gonna tell me next, the bong on your table is really a vase?
  - notavalleyman 2y ago
    >The screenshot from the complainant shows this was not in a search context. >Of course it does No, of course it doesn't. Because there's a specific blue button for conducting web searches in chatgpt. And other visual indicators which are not present here. So when I said "the screenshot shows", I was referring to things we could verify in the image, namely, that the question was not asked within a search context. The top post you refer to, about Claude, is specifically about the search context which wasn't present here. > The question shown in the screenshot is "who is Arve Hjalmar Holmen?". That's something someone would type into Google search, it's not "write me a fictional story about a man called Arve Hjalmar Holmen Llms are daydream machines. If you open a new window with an llm and ask it "what is ..." or "who is...", then you'll often get a constant-looking but completely false answer. Because that's how llms work. You can ask it, who or what is something you just made up, and it will trip over itself hallucinating sources that prove it
- Wilder7977 2y ago
  There is a whole industry who is pushing for a couple of years now to tell us that they work, that they replace humans, that they work for search, etc. Saying "we don't expect to say the truth" is a little bit too easy. If everyone was not expecting them to say the truth or just being accurate, they shouldn't have been designed as programs that speak with such authority and probably wouldn't be the target of massive investments. So yeah, in principle I may agree with you, but in the socio-technical context in which LLMs are being developed, the argument simply does not work in my opinion.

cozyman 2y ago

> The result of victory here would just be yet another vector for regulators to increase control over and/or impose censorship on LLM creators as long as ClosedAI and other companies censor their models I'll play the world's smallest violin for them

myaccountonhn 2y ago

> result of victory here would just be yet another vector for regulators to increase control over and/or impose censorship on LLM creators, as well as creating sources of "liability" for open source AI developers, which would be terrible for actual privacy. Sounds great actually.

TimorousBestie 2y ago

The result of legal victory here would be to make whole the person who for some amount of time was the victim of a particularly heinous form of libel. Your other arguments aren’t serious. Every organization has to pick and choose what activities they participate in and which they don’t, there are opportunity costs and they aren’t cheap.

moolcool 2y ago

> creating sources of "liability" for open source AI developers, which would be terrible for actual privacy How?

behringer 2y ago
Presumably such chats would need to be logged, read, programmed around, and monitored.
- moolcool 2y ago
  Virtually every piece of information you submit on the internet is logged and monitored anyway, for purposes of advertising, state surveillance, and occasionally to improve the products.
  - sadeshmukh 2y ago
    That certainly doesn't justify even more legal surveillance. Also, I believe they (openai) don't log from paid users - this would make sure they did. More parties involved again equals more chance for chats to be leaked.
- recursive 2y ago
  You think they're not logged now? By companies whose existence is based on getting access to as much data as possible?
  - behringer 2y ago
    Yes

ziddoap 2y ago

>What does Noyb hope to achieve with such lawsuits? Ensure that innocent people don't have malicious garbage about them spat out of a machine that other people blindly trust, probably.