3 ms·

Not really sure what the group expects to achieve with its complaint. LLM's hallucinate. They just do. If companies are held liable, then they just... won't m

Not really sure what the group expects to achieve with its complaint. LLM's hallucinate. They just do. If companies are held liable, then they just... won't make LLM's available in countries where they are held liable. Is that really the desired outcome? And if it is, it ought to be decided by democratic legislatures, not courts.

ziddoap 2y ago
>LLM's hallucinate. They just do. Would you be okay if LLMs start responding that you murdered or diddled your kids when responding to "who is crazygringo" queries? Hallucinating about a cookie recipe or whatever is one thing. But people blindly trust what LLMs spit out. They shouldn't, but they do. This sort of hallucination can cause real damage to real people.
mattmanser 2y ago
What rubbish. This is the problem with the internet in a nutshell. A company that publishes libel and harmful content deserves to be fined. They used to be, but somehow the whole of social media got a get out of jail free card. And look what's happened. The collapse of western intellectualism, democracy and liberalism happening before our eyes. We should not make the mistake of giving that disastrous "I didn't make it, I'm just publishing it" get out of jail card to AI companies. If they somhow can't fix it, while a certain other AI company can magically fix whinnie the poo references, then they should be prosecuted.
- notavalleyman 2y ago
  > A company that publishes libel and harmful content Do you believe that a company who offers an llm to the public, could be said to have 'published' the generative output? Llms are day dream machines - is it libel if I tell you that I had a dream about you, where you killed a guy? (Has HN just published a harmful lie about you?)
  - mvdtnz 2y ago
    > Do you believe that a company who offers an llm to the public, could be said to have 'published' the generative output? Of course they did. What other term could you possibly use for it, when one goes to a website and that website itself hands you content? The content is certainly not user-generated, it's coming from the website.
    - notavalleyman 2y ago
      Maybe a different way of phrasing it would be, if a website embedded a rng generator, and you see the random number "eight", then did the publisher publish the number eight, or did they publish a rng? In my opinion, it's the latter. Similarly if the rng generated the number 666, we wouldn't assume the website is making some kind of biblical commentary. We'd recognise that the rng produced a random generative output, similar to the op situation. So, to impugn the publisher of a random text generator based on the random content .... If chatgpt generates a murder threat, or pro-terorrism content, or otherwise shouts fire in a theater, do you believe openai as the publishers should face arrest?
      - mvdtnz 2y ago
        > do you believe openai as the publishers should face arrest? Absolutely I do, yes. An LLM is not a random number generator. It is a tool built for the sole purpose of generating content.
        notavalleyman 2y ago
        It's very shocking to me that you would reply in the affirmative. I think you're saying that companies who host generative AI web services, ought to be legally liable if the ephemeral generative content is illegal. In your mind, should AI companies try and engineer protection from this huge legal risk? It seems criminally insane for a company to host an AI if they're going to be legally liable for the ephemeral daydream content. You should be shorting goog, meta and msft at the very least, because I make their models generate illegal content every night before bed
mvdtnz 2y ago
> LLM's hallucinate. They just do. Then we can establish that they legally can't operate. Sounds like a good outcome to me.
- lxgr 2y ago
  As many things, in practice there will be a balancing of legal interests. Different jurisdictions place vastly different value on privacy, absence of defamation against private individuals etc. vs. the right to process and publish information, but none that I know of absolutely prohibit the latter in favor of the former. (Yes, including the EU, despite all the truths and falsehoods programmers believe about the GDPR.)
lxgr 2y ago
I'd see it exactly the opposite way: If we don't hold LLM companies accountable for their products at all, we're leaving an important feedback loop open. There's definitely a sweet spot, but "no consequences whatsoever" is probably too far on the other side of "overwhelming flood of regulations/lawsuits".
quantified 2y ago
Sure is desired. Put yourself in the position of being defamed. Air Canada was forced to honor bogus-low prices described by its chatbot, for example. That doesn't stop Air Canada or anyone else from using LLM chatbots, but (in Canada) clarified that there can be liability.
acdha 2y ago
Flip that argument around: if your company can’t offer a product without rejecting any responsibility for its reliability, is it really a good product? That doesn’t mean that companies can’t use LLMs, it only means that they have to market them accurately and use them appropriately. The problem is that companies want to oversell their capabilities because most of the valuable applications need accuracy. Just as we don’t exempt restaurants from hygiene requirements because it’s burdensome, we shouldn’t let the get-rich-quick guys sell something they can’t actually deliver.
rsynnott 2y ago
> Is that really the desired outcome? And if it is, it ought to be decided by democratic legislatures, not courts. It would be up to governments to change the laws if they don't want courts doing this on the basis of existing law. Courts work with the laws they have, and in most countries if you (where you is a person or other legal entity, including a company) negligently lie about a normal person, you may be civilly liable (in many places the bar is higher for _public figures_, but that's not relevant in this case). There is no "magic robot did it" get-out clause.

ziddoap 2y ago

>LLM's hallucinate. They just do. Would you be okay if LLMs start responding that you murdered or diddled your kids when responding to "who is crazygringo" queries? Hallucinating about a cookie recipe or whatever is one thing. But people blindly trust what LLMs spit out. They shouldn't, but they do. This sort of hallucination can cause real damage to real people.

mattmanser 2y ago

What rubbish. This is the problem with the internet in a nutshell. A company that publishes libel and harmful content deserves to be fined. They used to be, but somehow the whole of social media got a get out of jail free card. And look what's happened. The collapse of western intellectualism, democracy and liberalism happening before our eyes. We should not make the mistake of giving that disastrous "I didn't make it, I'm just publishing it" get out of jail card to AI companies. If they somhow can't fix it, while a certain other AI company can magically fix whinnie the poo references, then they should be prosecuted.

notavalleyman 2y ago
> A company that publishes libel and harmful content Do you believe that a company who offers an llm to the public, could be said to have 'published' the generative output? Llms are day dream machines - is it libel if I tell you that I had a dream about you, where you killed a guy? (Has HN just published a harmful lie about you?)
- mvdtnz 2y ago
  > Do you believe that a company who offers an llm to the public, could be said to have 'published' the generative output? Of course they did. What other term could you possibly use for it, when one goes to a website and that website itself hands you content? The content is certainly not user-generated, it's coming from the website.
  - notavalleyman 2y ago
    Maybe a different way of phrasing it would be, if a website embedded a rng generator, and you see the random number "eight", then did the publisher publish the number eight, or did they publish a rng? In my opinion, it's the latter. Similarly if the rng generated the number 666, we wouldn't assume the website is making some kind of biblical commentary. We'd recognise that the rng produced a random generative output, similar to the op situation. So, to impugn the publisher of a random text generator based on the random content .... If chatgpt generates a murder threat, or pro-terorrism content, or otherwise shouts fire in a theater, do you believe openai as the publishers should face arrest?
    - mvdtnz 2y ago
      > do you believe openai as the publishers should face arrest? Absolutely I do, yes. An LLM is not a random number generator. It is a tool built for the sole purpose of generating content.
      - notavalleyman 2y ago
        It's very shocking to me that you would reply in the affirmative. I think you're saying that companies who host generative AI web services, ought to be legally liable if the ephemeral generative content is illegal. In your mind, should AI companies try and engineer protection from this huge legal risk? It seems criminally insane for a company to host an AI if they're going to be legally liable for the ephemeral daydream content. You should be shorting goog, meta and msft at the very least, because I make their models generate illegal content every night before bed

mvdtnz 2y ago

> LLM's hallucinate. They just do. Then we can establish that they legally can't operate. Sounds like a good outcome to me.

lxgr 2y ago
As many things, in practice there will be a balancing of legal interests. Different jurisdictions place vastly different value on privacy, absence of defamation against private individuals etc. vs. the right to process and publish information, but none that I know of absolutely prohibit the latter in favor of the former. (Yes, including the EU, despite all the truths and falsehoods programmers believe about the GDPR.)

lxgr 2y ago

I'd see it exactly the opposite way: If we don't hold LLM companies accountable for their products at all, we're leaving an important feedback loop open. There's definitely a sweet spot, but "no consequences whatsoever" is probably too far on the other side of "overwhelming flood of regulations/lawsuits".

quantified 2y ago

Sure is desired. Put yourself in the position of being defamed. Air Canada was forced to honor bogus-low prices described by its chatbot, for example. That doesn't stop Air Canada or anyone else from using LLM chatbots, but (in Canada) clarified that there can be liability.

acdha 2y ago

Flip that argument around: if your company can’t offer a product without rejecting any responsibility for its reliability, is it really a good product? That doesn’t mean that companies can’t use LLMs, it only means that they have to market them accurately and use them appropriately. The problem is that companies want to oversell their capabilities because most of the valuable applications need accuracy. Just as we don’t exempt restaurants from hygiene requirements because it’s burdensome, we shouldn’t let the get-rich-quick guys sell something they can’t actually deliver.

rsynnott 2y ago

> Is that really the desired outcome? And if it is, it ought to be decided by democratic legislatures, not courts. It would be up to governments to change the laws if they don't want courts doing this on the basis of existing law. Courts work with the laws they have, and in most countries if you (where you is a person or other legal entity, including a company) negligently lie about a normal person, you may be civilly liable (in many places the bar is higher for _public figures_, but that's not relevant in this case). There is no "magic robot did it" get-out clause.