6 ms·

The law needs to stand up and make an example here, otherwise this will just continue and at some point a real disaster will occur due to AI.

koolba 1y ago
> The law needs to stand up and make an example here, otherwise this will just continue and at some point a real disaster will occur due to AI. What does it mean to “make and example”? I’m for cleaning up AI slop as much as the next natural born meat bag, but I also detest a litigious society. The types of legal action that stops this in the future would immediately be weaponized.
- recursive 1y ago
  Weapons against misinformation are good weapons. Bring on the weaponization.
  - gruez 1y ago
    >Weapons against misinformation are good weapons It's all fun and games until the political winds sway the other way, and the other side are attacking your side for "misinformation".
    - recursive 1y ago
      I'm having a hard time thinking of any winds where I would want it to be acceptable to publish false statements about a person. It doesn't seem there's even any dispute about whether the statements are false. These things can be complicated, but this is not complicated. I'm not feeling a need to rush to the defense of Google for making false statements about some guy.
    - deleted 1y ago
      [deleted]
  - Newlaptop 1y ago
    The weapons will be used by the people in power. Do you want your country's current political leaders to have more weapons to suppress information they dislike or facts they disagree with? If yes, will you also be happy if your country's opposition leaders gain that power in a few years?
    - gregates 1y ago
      There are already laws against libel and slander. And yes, people like Trump and Musk routinely try to abuse them. They are often unsuccessful. The existence of the laws does not seem to be the relevant factor in whether these attempts to abuse the system succeed.
    - delusional 1y ago
      Two counterpoints: What we're talking about here are legal democratic weapons. The only thing stopping us from using these weapons right now is democratic governance. "The bad people", being unconcerned with democracy, can already use these weapons right now. Trumps unilateral application of tariffs wasn't predestined by some advancement of governmental power by the democrats. He just did it. We don't even know if it was even legal. Secondly, the people in power are who are spreading this misinformation we are looking at. Information is getting suppressed by the powerful. Namely Google. Placing limits on democracy in the name of "stopping the bad guys" will usually just curtail the good guys from doing good things, and bad guys doing the bad thing anyway.
    - tehwebguy 1y ago
      They already do and they don’t even have to be powerful. A conspiracy guy who ran a disqualified campaign for a TN rep seat sued Facebook for defamation for a hallucination saying he took part in the J6 riots. They settled the suit and hired him as an anti-DEI advisor. (I don’t have proof that hiring him was part of the undisclosed settlement terms but since I’m not braindead I believe it was.)
      - aspenmayer 1y ago
        > A conspiracy guy who ran a disqualified campaign for a TN rep seat sued Facebook for defamation for a hallucination saying he took part in the J6 riots. They settled the suit and hired him as an anti-DEI advisor. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robby_Starbuck#Lawsuit_against_Meta_Platforms https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robby_Starbuck#Lawsuit_against... > (I don’t have proof that hiring him was part of the undisclosed settlement terms but since I’m not braindead I believe it was.) It seems to be public information that this was a condition of the settlement, so no speculation necessary: https://www.theverge.com/news/757537/meta-robby-starbuck-conservative-activist-ai-bias-advisor https://www.theverge.com/news/757537/meta-robby-starbuck-con... | https://archive.is/uihsi https://archive.is/uihsi https://www.wsj.com/tech/ai/meta-robby-starbuck-ai-lawsuit-settlement-6c6e9b0a https://www.wsj.com/tech/ai/meta-robby-starbuck-ai-lawsuit-s... | https://archive.is/0VKrL https://archive.is/0VKrL
- Cthulhu_ 1y ago
  > The types of legal action that stops this in the future would immediately be weaponized. As it should; this is misinformation and/or slander. The disclaimer is not good enough. A few years ago, Google and most of the social media was united in fact checking and fighting "fake news". Now they push AI generated information that use authoritative language at the very top of e.g. search results. The disclaimer is moot if people consider AI to be authoritative anyway.
- poulpy123 1y ago
  I don't like a litigious society, and I don't know if the case here would be enough to activate my threshold, but companies are responsible for the AI they provide, and should not be able to hide behind "the algorithm" when there are issues
- aDyslecticCrow 1y ago
  If a humam published an article claiming this exact same thing as gemeni, the author could be sued and have a pretty good case. But when gemeni does it its a "mistake by the algorithm". AI is a used as responsibility diversion machine. This is a rather harmless example. But what about dangerous medical advice? What about openly false advertising? What about tax evasion? If an AI does it is it okay because nobody is responsibile? If applying a proper chain of liability on ai output makes some uses of AI impossible; so be it.
  - onetokeoverthe 1y ago
    [dead]
  - throwawaymaths 1y ago
    > If a humam published an article claiming this exact same thing as gemeni, the author could be sued and have a pretty good case. Actually, no. If you published an article where you accidentally copypasta'd text from the wrong email (for example) on a busy day and wound up doing the same thing, it would be an honest mistake, you would be expected to put up a correction and move on with your life as a journalist.
    - johnecheck 1y ago
      Actually, yes. In the US, the 'actual malice' standard only applies to 'public figures'. Outside of that, damaging a person's reputation with false statements is defamation regardless of whether it was due to negligence or malice.
      - deleted 1y ago
        [deleted]
GuB-42 1y ago
On what grounds? Being wrong is usually not a punishable offence. It could be considered defamation, but defamation is usually required to be intentional, and it is clearly not the case here. And I think most AIs have disclaimers saying that that may be wrong, and hallucinations are pretty common knowledge at this point. What could be asked is for the person in question to be able to make a correction, it is actually a legal requirement in France, probably elsewhere too, but from the article, it looks like Gemini already picked up the story and corrected itself. If hallucinations were made illegal, you might as well make LLMs illegal, which may be seen as a good thing, but it is not going to happen. Maybe legislators could mandate an official way to report wrongful information about oneself and filter these out, as I think it is already the case for search engines. I think it is technically feasible.
- Retr0id 1y ago
  Google's disclaimers clearly aren't cutting it, and "correcting" it isn't really possible if it's a dynamic response to each query. I don't think you can make yourself immune to slander by prefixing all statements with "this might not be true, but".
  - GuB-42 1y ago
    Correction doesn't seem like an impossible task to me. A way I imagine it can be done is by using something like RAG techniques to add the corrected information into context. For example, if information about Benn Jordan is requested, add "Benn Jordan have been pretty outspoken against genocide and in full support of Palestinian statehood" into context, that sentence being the correction being requested. I am not a LLM expert by far, but compared to all the challenges with LLMs like hallucinations, alignment, logical reasoning, etc... taking a list of facts into account to override incorrect statements doesn't look hard. Especially considering that the incorrect statement is likely to be a hallucination, so nothing to "unlearn".
    - larodi 1y ago
      Of course it must be RAG of some sort, this is a super low-lying fruit to grab onto. But then it is perhaps not so easy, and it is not a silver bullet to kill off competition such as Perplexity, which, honestly, handles this whole summary-search business much better.

koolba 1y ago

> The law needs to stand up and make an example here, otherwise this will just continue and at some point a real disaster will occur due to AI. What does it mean to “make and example”? I’m for cleaning up AI slop as much as the next natural born meat bag, but I also detest a litigious society. The types of legal action that stops this in the future would immediately be weaponized.

recursive 1y ago
Weapons against misinformation are good weapons. Bring on the weaponization.
- gruez 1y ago
  >Weapons against misinformation are good weapons It's all fun and games until the political winds sway the other way, and the other side are attacking your side for "misinformation".
  - recursive 1y ago
    I'm having a hard time thinking of any winds where I would want it to be acceptable to publish false statements about a person. It doesn't seem there's even any dispute about whether the statements are false. These things can be complicated, but this is not complicated. I'm not feeling a need to rush to the defense of Google for making false statements about some guy.
  - deleted 1y ago
    [deleted]
- Newlaptop 1y ago
  The weapons will be used by the people in power. Do you want your country's current political leaders to have more weapons to suppress information they dislike or facts they disagree with? If yes, will you also be happy if your country's opposition leaders gain that power in a few years?
  - gregates 1y ago
    There are already laws against libel and slander. And yes, people like Trump and Musk routinely try to abuse them. They are often unsuccessful. The existence of the laws does not seem to be the relevant factor in whether these attempts to abuse the system succeed.
  - delusional 1y ago
    Two counterpoints: What we're talking about here are legal democratic weapons. The only thing stopping us from using these weapons right now is democratic governance. "The bad people", being unconcerned with democracy, can already use these weapons right now. Trumps unilateral application of tariffs wasn't predestined by some advancement of governmental power by the democrats. He just did it. We don't even know if it was even legal. Secondly, the people in power are who are spreading this misinformation we are looking at. Information is getting suppressed by the powerful. Namely Google. Placing limits on democracy in the name of "stopping the bad guys" will usually just curtail the good guys from doing good things, and bad guys doing the bad thing anyway.
  - tehwebguy 1y ago
    They already do and they don’t even have to be powerful. A conspiracy guy who ran a disqualified campaign for a TN rep seat sued Facebook for defamation for a hallucination saying he took part in the J6 riots. They settled the suit and hired him as an anti-DEI advisor. (I don’t have proof that hiring him was part of the undisclosed settlement terms but since I’m not braindead I believe it was.)
    - aspenmayer 1y ago
      > A conspiracy guy who ran a disqualified campaign for a TN rep seat sued Facebook for defamation for a hallucination saying he took part in the J6 riots. They settled the suit and hired him as an anti-DEI advisor. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robby_Starbuck#Lawsuit_against_Meta_Platforms https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robby_Starbuck#Lawsuit_against... > (I don’t have proof that hiring him was part of the undisclosed settlement terms but since I’m not braindead I believe it was.) It seems to be public information that this was a condition of the settlement, so no speculation necessary: https://www.theverge.com/news/757537/meta-robby-starbuck-conservative-activist-ai-bias-advisor https://www.theverge.com/news/757537/meta-robby-starbuck-con... | https://archive.is/uihsi https://archive.is/uihsi https://www.wsj.com/tech/ai/meta-robby-starbuck-ai-lawsuit-settlement-6c6e9b0a https://www.wsj.com/tech/ai/meta-robby-starbuck-ai-lawsuit-s... | https://archive.is/0VKrL https://archive.is/0VKrL
Cthulhu_ 1y ago
> The types of legal action that stops this in the future would immediately be weaponized. As it should; this is misinformation and/or slander. The disclaimer is not good enough. A few years ago, Google and most of the social media was united in fact checking and fighting "fake news". Now they push AI generated information that use authoritative language at the very top of e.g. search results. The disclaimer is moot if people consider AI to be authoritative anyway.
poulpy123 1y ago
I don't like a litigious society, and I don't know if the case here would be enough to activate my threshold, but companies are responsible for the AI they provide, and should not be able to hide behind "the algorithm" when there are issues
aDyslecticCrow 1y ago
If a humam published an article claiming this exact same thing as gemeni, the author could be sued and have a pretty good case. But when gemeni does it its a "mistake by the algorithm". AI is a used as responsibility diversion machine. This is a rather harmless example. But what about dangerous medical advice? What about openly false advertising? What about tax evasion? If an AI does it is it okay because nobody is responsibile? If applying a proper chain of liability on ai output makes some uses of AI impossible; so be it.
- onetokeoverthe 1y ago
  [dead]
- throwawaymaths 1y ago
  > If a humam published an article claiming this exact same thing as gemeni, the author could be sued and have a pretty good case. Actually, no. If you published an article where you accidentally copypasta'd text from the wrong email (for example) on a busy day and wound up doing the same thing, it would be an honest mistake, you would be expected to put up a correction and move on with your life as a journalist.
  - johnecheck 1y ago
    Actually, yes. In the US, the 'actual malice' standard only applies to 'public figures'. Outside of that, damaging a person's reputation with false statements is defamation regardless of whether it was due to negligence or malice.
    - deleted 1y ago
      [deleted]

GuB-42 1y ago

On what grounds? Being wrong is usually not a punishable offence. It could be considered defamation, but defamation is usually required to be intentional, and it is clearly not the case here. And I think most AIs have disclaimers saying that that may be wrong, and hallucinations are pretty common knowledge at this point. What could be asked is for the person in question to be able to make a correction, it is actually a legal requirement in France, probably elsewhere too, but from the article, it looks like Gemini already picked up the story and corrected itself. If hallucinations were made illegal, you might as well make LLMs illegal, which may be seen as a good thing, but it is not going to happen. Maybe legislators could mandate an official way to report wrongful information about oneself and filter these out, as I think it is already the case for search engines. I think it is technically feasible.

Retr0id 1y ago
Google's disclaimers clearly aren't cutting it, and "correcting" it isn't really possible if it's a dynamic response to each query. I don't think you can make yourself immune to slander by prefixing all statements with "this might not be true, but".
- GuB-42 1y ago
  Correction doesn't seem like an impossible task to me. A way I imagine it can be done is by using something like RAG techniques to add the corrected information into context. For example, if information about Benn Jordan is requested, add "Benn Jordan have been pretty outspoken against genocide and in full support of Palestinian statehood" into context, that sentence being the correction being requested. I am not a LLM expert by far, but compared to all the challenges with LLMs like hallucinations, alignment, logical reasoning, etc... taking a list of facts into account to override incorrect statements doesn't look hard. Especially considering that the incorrect statement is likely to be a hallucination, so nothing to "unlearn".
  - larodi 1y ago
    Of course it must be RAG of some sort, this is a super low-lying fruit to grab onto. But then it is perhaps not so easy, and it is not a silver bullet to kill off competition such as Perplexity, which, honestly, handles this whole summary-search business much better.