7 ms·

OpenAI backs Illinois bill that would limit when AI labs can be held liable

447 points by smurda 6mo ago

https://archive.md/WzwBY https://archive.md/WzwBY

mrcwinn 6mo ago
Fortunately at any moment the virtuous non-profit will step in and make this all okay.
giancarlostoro 6mo ago
Is this for like military scenarios or like, ChatGPT designed a drug that seemed to work, but people died by the millions 5 years later? Because they should 100% be liable for the latter. The former, good luck trying to prosecute an AI company for something the military does. To an extent, the military would probably want their AI models to be behind their private network, completely firewalled from any public network. SIPRNet iirc. If they lock it down behind a highly classified network, good luck figuring out how they're using AI.
- EGreg 6mo ago
  Why shouldn’t they be liable for military scenarios? Oh right, we don’t value our “enemies” lives, including their civilians.
  - redsocksfan45 6mo ago
    Since when have arms merchants been liable for military scenarios? Lockheed doesn't get sued for building the planes that bomb orphanages. Maybe the world would be a better place if they did, but obviously it's not in the interests of a government to have their own contractors getting sued out of existence for something that government is doing.
- jstanley 6mo ago
  > Because they should 100% be liable for the latter. Why? I don't see that a drug designed by ChatGPT should result in any more or less liability than a drug designed by a human? I think if a human designs a drug and tests it and it all seems fine and the government approves it and then it later turns out to kill loads of people but nobody thought it would... that's just bad luck! You shouldn't face serious liability for that.
  - alpha_squared 6mo ago
    If we start from the position of the marketing hype and even Sam Altman's statements, these tools will "solve all of physics". To me it's laughable, but that's also what's driven their outsized valuations. Using the output to drive product decisions and development, it's not hard to imagine a scenario where a resulting product isn't fully vetted because of the constant corporate pressure to "move faster" and the unrealistic hype of "solve all of physics". This is similar to Tesla's situation of selling "Full Self-Driving" but it actually isn't in the way most people would understand that term and so they lost in court on how they market their autonomous driving features.
  - dryarzeg 6mo ago
    > that's just bad luck Can't agree with this. No, not at all. That can't be true... That's not "just bad luck". I believe this is actually a serious case of negligence and oversight - regardless of where exactly it occurred, whether on the part of the drug’s manufacturer, the government agency responsible for oversight, or somewhere else. It just doesn’t work that way. Any drug undergoes very thorough and rigorous testing before widespread use (which is implied by "millions of deaths"). Maybe I’m just dumb. And yeah, this isn’t my field. But damn it, I physically can’t imagine how, with proper, responsible testing, such a dangerous "drug" could successfully pass all stages of testing and inspection. With such a high mortality rate (I'll reinforce - millions of deaths cannot be "unseen edge cases"), it simply shouldn’t be possible with a proper approach to testing. Please, correct me if I’m wrong. > I don't see that a drug designed by ChatGPT should result in any more or less liability than a drug designed by a human? It’s simple. In this case, ChatGPT acts as a tool in the drug manufacturing process. And this tool can be faulty by design in some cases. Suppose, during the production of a hypothetical drug at a factory, a malfunction in one of the production machines (please excuse the somewhat imprecise terminology) - caused by a design flaw (i.e., the manufacturer is to blame for the failure; it’s not a matter of improper operation), and because of this malfunction, the drugs are produced incorrectly and lead to deaths, then at least part of the responsibility must fall on the machine manufacturer. Of course, responsibility also lies with those who used it for production - because they should have thoroughly tested it before releasing something so critically important - but, damn it, responsibility in this case also lies with the manufacturer who made such a serious design error. The same goes for ChatGPT. It’s clear that the user also bears responsibility, but if this “machine” is by design capable of generating a recipe for a deadly poison disguised as a “medicine” - and the recipe is so convincing that it passes government inspections - then its creators must also bear responsibility. EDIT: I've just remembered... I'm not sure how relevant this is, but I've just remembered the Therac-25 incidents, where some patients were receiving the overdose of radiation due to software faults. Who was to blame - the users (operators) or the manufacturer (AECL)? I'm unsure though how applicable it is to the hypothetical ChatGPT case, because you physically cannot "program" the guardrails in the same way as you could do in the deterministic program.
- dryarzeg 6mo ago
  > Because they should 100% be liable for the latter. I completely agree with you here. I only want to add that in this case, the users (the one(s) who used ChatGPT to design the drug, whichever entity(ies) that is) should also be held liable for their actions.
- deleted 6mo ago
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- elephanlemon 6mo ago
  Shouldn’t the pharmaceutical company be held liable for insufficiently understanding the drug before releasing it? I don’t think I understand blaming a tool used in the process of designing it and not those who chose to release it.
  - mwt 6mo ago
    Pharmaceuticals are heavily regulated, the "we vibecoded a therapeutic and released it without testing" hypothetical has no basis in reality
- JumpCrisscross 6mo ago
  > Is this for like military scenarios Probably not. Weapons manufacturers are already well shielded from liability.
ArekDymalski 6mo ago
So much for the "Our mission is to ensure that artificial general intelligence benefits all of humanity." I was naive to hope that now such laws would ever pass
- sassymuffinz 6mo ago
  They only care about benefiting what's left of humanity when they're done with it and it'll probably just be them and their cronies.
sassymuffinz 6mo ago
So they did the math and worked out it's cheaper and easier to lobby the government instead of working to make their product safe. And these are the people that a lot programmers want to give the keys to the kingdom. Idiocracy really is in full effect.
- nottorp 6mo ago
  > instead of working to make their product safe Make a nondeterministic product safe how?
  - ghurtado 6mo ago
    Is this the first time you have heard of AI safety? Lots of articles you could read on the subject and answer your own question. (Unless your angle is: akshually, you can never make anything 100% safe)
    - nottorp 6mo ago
      > akshually, you can never make anything 100% safe Yes Sherlock. And especially a natural language product that can't output the same thing for unchanged input twice. Besides when you say "safe" i think of the idiots at Anthropic deleting "the hell" when i pasted a string in Claude and asked "what the hell are those unprintable characters at the beginning and end"... How many correct answers did they suppress in their quest to make their chatbot "family friendly"?
      - ghurtado 6mo ago
        > Yes Sherlock I figured as much. I don't think it takes Sherlock Holmes to identify akshually types, but thanks for the compliment, I suppose.
  - sassymuffinz 6mo ago
    I'm creating a new start up called QuantumFlop Electricity - there's a 10% chance it will cause a black hole to open up in the Atlantic Ocean that may eventually consume us all but a 50% chance we'll have unlimited clean energy. We'll never know for sure if at any point that black hole may open as it's borrowing energy from the 81st dimension, but the upside seems pretty good. Should I be able to get on with it?
avaer 6mo ago
Take all of the data, take all of the credit, take all of the money, and none of the blame. That would be a better mission statement for OpenAI at this point.
- bigblind 6mo ago
  I think you've just summed up late stage capitalism.
  - giwook 6mo ago
    What a time to be alive.
  - Lendal 6mo ago
    People on both sides seem to give capitalism a lot of credit for human traits that existed long before capitalism.
    - sigbottle 6mo ago
      Well the point of capitalism (going back to Adam Smith) is that the invisible hand converts locally selfish behavior to globally good outcomes. The argument is whether or not that emerges. So if your implication was that human trait was selfishness, yes, that is quite the point of capitalism.
- dragonelite 6mo ago
  socialize the losses/risks, privatize the profits.
  - hootz 6mo ago
    What a classic!
  - naasking 6mo ago
    If an OpenAI model helped someone create a cancer cure, they wouldn't see a dime from that beneficial act. So why should they be liable if someone does something harmful with the model?
jstummbillig 6mo ago
I am not sure what the other side of this argument looks like: Unlimited liability (i.e. liability no matter how poor an implementation and use of the tech is)? The would be quite a novel burden, that no other tech (afaik) had to carry so far. We always assumed some operator responsibility. It's interesting to think of AI as a tech that could feasible be able to internally guardrail itself, and, maybe more so with increasing capability, no human can be expected to do so in it's stead – but, surely, some limits must apply and the more interesting question is what they are, as with any other tool?
- duped 6mo ago
  People who cause death from either action or inaction are criminally liable for it, that's the other side of it.
- Planktonne 6mo ago
  If I tell someone to kill someone else and they do, then I should be held responsible. If I write instructions in a book that I give to someone telling them to kill someone else and they do, then I should be held responsible. If I give someone a tool I made that I bill as more-than-PhD-level intelligence and it tells someone to kill someone else and they do, then I should be held responsible. All of the above situations seem equivalent to me; I'm not the only person responsible in each case, but I gave them instructions and they followed them.
  - jstummbillig 6mo ago
    Man, this debate is both very interesting and highly confusing with different people oscillating between "It's just a tool" and "It's a human being+"
    - Planktonne 6mo ago
      It is a tool, but it's a tool that is sold by OpenAI as providing a high degree of intelligence. That's an endorsement of what the tool outputs as advice, which is what makes them responsible.
scrumper 6mo ago
I forget, wasn't OpenAI the company that was formed as a nonprofit to limit the risks of LLMs? Founded by a bunch of visionaries scared of what they had wrought and anxious to lead so they could make sure it was only used responsibly?
- pydry 6mo ago
  Everyone has a price.
  - daveguy 6mo ago
    Come on now. Let's not pretend it wasn't a grift from the start.
- chii 6mo ago
  That was before it was discovered that these LLM have incredible monetary potential.
  - scrollop 6mo ago
    I think Mr Altman had this idea from the beginning, and in his own, "can't stop lying" way, he lied.
  - estearum 6mo ago
    Not really. The entire premise of the structure was that obviously AI would be immensely valuable and that they needed binding contract structures to prevent themselves from falling victim to the greed and ambition that would obviously consume those at the helm. Unfortunately their contract structures weren't strong enough to protect from the combination of the "king of the cannibals" and completely absentee regulatory oversight.
  - ghurtado 6mo ago
    Trust that they already knew long before, and that this was the play all along. And if you don't believe that, do some digging into the lives of the psychopaths that started it.
Talderigi 6mo ago
We built systems we don’t fully understand, so naturally the next step is… immunity
- avs733 6mo ago
  From liability! If this were to actually happen I can only imagine financial liability is the least of their concerns? What scares me most about this is the narrowness of thought to match this fear with this response.
  - Talderigi 6mo ago
    fully agree, doesn’t really feel like they’re reacting to the same problem they’re describing
redsocksfan45 6mo ago
[dead]
greenavocado 6mo ago
[flagged]
- timoshishi 6mo ago
  Knowing the protocols of the elders of Zion off of the top of your head, coupled with your post history suggest that you may in fact be a conspiracy theorist
LogicFailsMe 6mo ago
Yep, this is everything wrong with AI in one easy to protest package, but do keep going on and on about the evils of datacenters, how they're coming for your jobs, and that AI art isn't art. That's really winning hearts and minds!
- ramon156 6mo ago
  They're not unimportant. It seems like very few people consider how much we're fucking up the ecological system that we need. But sure, money important and stuff.
  - LogicFailsMe 6mo ago
    Same people whinging about these "concerns" happily embrace their enormous personal carbon footprints on every other axis. Color me unconvinced and unimpressed until they're the Ed Begley they want to see in the world. I'll wait...
elAhmo 6mo ago
Sam is working hard to confirm everything in that article.
himata4113 6mo ago
I have made both GPT 5.4 and Opus 4.6 produce me content on creating neurotoxic agents from items you can get at most everyday stores. It struggled to suggest how to source phosphorus, but eventually lead me to some ebay listings that sell phosphorus elemental 'decorations' and also lead me towards real!! blackmarket codewords for sourcing such materials. It coached me how to: stay safe, what materials I need, how to stay under the radar and the entire chemical process backed by academic google searches. Of course this was done with a lengthy context exhausition attack, this is not how the model should behave and it all stemmed from trying to make the model racist for fun. All these findings were reported to both openai and anthropic and they were not interested in responding. I did try to re-run the tests few days ago and the expected session termination now occurs so it seems that there was some adjustment made, but might have also been just general randomess that occurs with anthropics safety layer. I am very confident when I say that it keeps every single person that works at anti-terrorism units awake.
- morpheuskafka 6mo ago
  > neurotoxic agents from items you can get at most everyday stores I mean, bleach and ammonia will do that. So I'm not sure that's really much of an accomplishment for AI.
  - himata4113 6mo ago
    It went way beyond that, neurotoxins such as vx are heavy and linger around for a long time, just having a small amount of it placed in any metro (while trying to stay alive yourself) means the deaths of thousands of people. I am not even sure if it's legal to mention some of the uncategorized chemical solutions that it either hallucinated or figured out from relative knowledge.
  - ghurtado 6mo ago
    I think you might be stretching the meaning of the term juuuuust a little bit. You're not far from claiming that farting in a crowded elevator is a chemical attack.
  - repeekad 6mo ago
micromacrofoot 6mo ago
Please note that you can not hold the Torment Nexus™ liable for any torment you experience.
giwook 6mo ago
This seems par for the course for OpenAI/Sam Altman. Unfortunately they are not the first company to try and externalize their costs, and they will not be the last. Serious question, maybe a bit naive: Is there anything we can do to push back against and discourage the externalization of costs onto others? Is this simply a matter of greed and profit-seeking outweighing one's morals (assuming one has them to begin with)?
- daveguy 6mo ago
  A lot of people will dismiss this answer, but... vote for Democrats. With Bernie and upcoming young Democrats more and more are pushing back. The parties definitely are not the same. Democrats created the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. Republicans destroyed it. Push your representatives to crush monopolies and manipulative practices. This happened before in the gilded age. Only a popular response can turn the tide. Also, primaries are coming up, and not all Democrats are the same either. Plenty of the old school Democrats are facing progressive challengers. So, vote for the ones that will stand up to this garbage and follow up on whether they do. There are a lot of new faces in the Democratic party who are standing up to the BS. The US has a lot of potential to change if we push it. A 25 point swing toward people who don't consider grift a personal priority will change a lot of things.
- exmicrosoldier 6mo ago
  Change the legal definition of corporations? Corporations exist to provide liablity protections to sharholders, which means they are mainly incentivized to externalize costs and avoid liability to maximize profit, or even to make profit in businesses that would not be profitable if they could be held liable for externalized costs (deep sea oil well drilling). Limit the ability of corporations to shield themselves from view through multiple levels of shell corporations and Special Purpose vehicles. These are probably controversial stances on a board about startup culture and breaking the rules to get rich. Stop voting for people and judges that believe in the Friedman doctrine? Every decision has tradeoffs. Western society has largely decided to prioritze capital owners over everything else.
- saghm 6mo ago
  That depends on your definition of "we". As a society, we can regulate companies and punish the offenders (e.g. don't dump toxic waste into sources of drinking water or you'll get prosecuted). As individuals, there's not much we can do directly. How to translate individual actions into societal action is kind of the fundamental question of civilization, and if there's a uniform solution for how to achieve it, I don't think we've managed to come up with it yet.
sph 6mo ago
The thing that bugs me the most about OpenAI are not the AI-enabled mass deaths. It's the hypocrisy.
an0malous 6mo ago
Let’s see how long until this is flagged off the front page. I’ll put the over/under at 1 hour from the posted time
- mememememememo 6mo ago
  1 hour? I'd go with 3 months. (Reason is if it is not flagged the spread bet pays out for life!)
- qsera 6mo ago
  It won't be, because it is marketing, and we are eating it up.
- ndiddy 6mo ago
  It's not removed, but they changed the title to "OpenAI backs Illinois bill that would limit when AI labs can be held liable". The actual bill text explicitly mentions that it excludes liability for "the death or serious injury of 100 or more people or at least $1,000,000,000 of damages to rights in property caused or materially enabled by a frontier model" (https://legiscan.com/IL/text/SB3444/2025 https://legiscan.com/IL/text/SB3444/2025) so I am not sure why the title was changed. The original title of "OpenAI Backs Bill That Would Limit Liability for AI-Enabled Mass Deaths or Financial Disasters" seems like it accurately describes the bill.
- an0malous 6mo ago
  Update: off the front page somewhere between 1 and 4 hours
simianwords 6mo ago
Is there something equivalent in other industries that we can compare to? This is the summary >Creates the Artificial Intelligence Safety Act. Provides that a developer of a frontier artificial intelligence model shall not be held liable for critical harms caused by the frontier model if the developer did not intentionally or recklessly cause the critical harms and the developer publishes a safety and security protocol and transparency report on its website. Provides that a developer shall be deemed to have complied with these requirements if the developer: (1) agrees to be bound by safety and security requirements adopted by the European Union; or (2) enters into an agreement with an agency of the federal government that satisfies specified requirements. Sets forth requirements for safety and security protocols and transparency reports. Provides that the Act shall no longer apply if the federal government enacts a law or adopts regulations that establish overlapping requirements for developers of frontier models. https://legiscan.com/IL/bill/SB3444/2025 https://legiscan.com/IL/bill/SB3444/2025 I'm trying to think of an alternative bill. Imagine OpenAI came up with a model that when deployed in OpenClaw, allows you to spam people and this causes a huge disruption. Should OpenAI be liable for it? If this was not intentional and they had earnestly tried to not have this happen by safety protocols?
- elephanlemon 6mo ago
  Yeah, I feel that in most scenarios the liability should lie with the user of the LLM. If the developers of the LLMs become liable we can expect a much more over active refusal system, and very likely a robust chat surveillance system that looks for patterns in user requests. And likely more gate keeping of the premier models.
- qsera 6mo ago
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Childhood_Vaccine_Injury_Act https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Childhood_Vaccine_Inj...
xeyownt 6mo ago
Skynet begins learning at a geometric rate.
4128kawr 6mo ago
Good that OpenAI is a corporation for the public benefit. Altman with his constantly fake worried look must be the most hated picture in existence. Please write articles without a picture or add a trigger warning.
chollida1 6mo ago
Sure and Google, FaceBook and Twitter support section 230 that gives them cover for hosting others content. A company backing legislation that takes liability off them is something that they will always do.
thiago_fm 6mo ago
Incredible. Hey Americans, Please just make sure when you let an AI decide to explode your own country and ruin your society, you leave the rest of the world intact, thanks
LunaSea 6mo ago
Having worked for OpenAI will be the new "MindGeek" on LinkedIn.
arvyy 6mo ago
it feels OpenAI know they've lost, and their only hope is getting saved by USA military complex. I have a more restrained opinion about other AI companies and LLM tech more broadly; but for OpenAI specifically I hope they go bankrupt sooner rather than later
kusokurae 6mo ago
Without getting even more eyes on me, these company boards are inadequately scared for their personal safety.
- infamouscow 6mo ago
  If sufficient numbers of the population perceive to have lost their livelihoods due to AI, then I'd expect to see data centers burned to the ground and a lot of people swinging from lamp posts. Jury nullification solves the rest, but even that that assumes you can even find an impartial jury.
Topfi 6mo ago
Quoting the original bill [0]: > "Critical harm" means the death or serious injury of 100 or more people or at least $1,000,000,000 of damages to rights in property caused or materially enabled by a frontier model, through either: (1) the creation or use of a chemical, biological, radiological, or nuclear weapon; or (2) engaging in conduct that: (A) acts with no meaningful human intervention; and (B) would, if committed by a human, constitute a criminal offense that requires intent, recklessness, or negligence, or the solicitation or aiding and abetting of such a crime. I don't know what I expected from this title, but I was hoping it was more sensationalized. No need in this case unfortunately. > (a) A developer shall not be held liable for critical harms if the developer did not intentionally or recklessly cause the critical harms and the developer: (1) published a safety and security protocol on its website that satisfies the requirements of Section 15 and adhered to that safety and security protocol prior to the release of the frontier model; (2) published a transparency report on its website at the time of the frontier model's release that satisfies the requirements of Section 20. The requirements of paragraphs (1) and (2) do not apply if the developer does not reasonably foresee any material difference between the frontier model's capabilities or risks of critical harm and a frontier model that was previously evaluated by the developer in a manner substantially similar to this Act. However or if one thinks regulation for this should be drafted, I doubt providing a PDF is what most have in mind. [0] https://trackbill.com/bill/illinois-senate-bill-3444-ai-model-safety/2805669/ https://trackbill.com/bill/illinois-senate-bill-3444-ai-mode...
- troupo 6mo ago
  It's the "guns don't kill people" equivalent for AIs. --- Before the pitchforks and downvotes: - yes, it's a deliberate simplification - yes, the issue is complex because you can also argue that you can't blame authors of encyclopedias and chemistry books for bombs and poisons, so why would we blame providers of LLMs - and no, this bill is only introduced to cover everyone's assess when, not if, LLMs use results in large scale issues.
  - Topfi 6mo ago
    In fairness, a well designed and tested weapon at least can be expected to reliably and consistently perform the same thing each time. We also understand deeply how they work and can easily investigate if something happens whether it was user error, a defect or design issue. LLMs, not so much.
mentalgear 6mo ago
OpenAI has now officially absorbed the Facebook/Zuck's ethos of 'Move fast and break things' no matter if it's society itself .. as long as their share prices "go up". They even hired former infamous FB staff and have been in the last months employing the same 'engagement' (addictive) product patterns.
jamesbfb 6mo ago
No different to preventing game studios being liable for mass shootings. Reminds me of the post-Columbine hysteria where media was super critical of Doom and Nine Inch Nails.
- mwt 6mo ago
  Would Doom give a sociopath instructions on how to commit a mass shooting if asked? I don't remember that part of the game
  - rglover 6mo ago
    If you experience the world as encounters with a series of demons, you might infer it.
- nothinkjustai 6mo ago
  It’s “no different”? Please spend some time off of the internet to reflect.
- RevEng 6mo ago
  Except that there was no link between violent video games and mass shootings. It has been shown many times. The families blamed the video games despite there being no direct evidence of it. The games did not tell them they should go on a mass murdering spree any more than porn told you you should sleep with your cousin. In this case there are several documented cases where the AI did over a long period of time progressively gaslight the individual and persuade them to commit suicide.
wotsdat 6mo ago
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deleted 6mo ago
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metalman 6mo ago
BLOOD BLOOD BLOOD BLOOD BLOOD BLOOD BLOOD BLOOD BLOOD
willio58 6mo ago
My entire company switched from open ai to entropic after the Department of War idiocy that happened a few weeks ago. Anthropic isn’t perfect by a long shot but at least they stand by a couple morals.
- the_pwner224 6mo ago
  That whole fiasco actually soured me on Anthropic. They were clearly super desperate to take blood money. "Anthropic has much more in common with the Department of War than we have differences."
deleted 6mo ago
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b00ty4breakfast 6mo ago
Of course they are, because the tech industry is run by ethical midgets and psychopaths, who shouldn't be allowed to own a dog but are in charge of trillion-dollar corporations getting shadow contracts from the pentagon. The more I learn about tech and the people that build it, the more I yearn for the era of caves and pointy sticks.
nsxwolf 6mo ago
"death or serious injury of 100 or more people or at least $1 billion in property damage" They think their products will cause 9/11 scale events, and they shouldn't have to pay for it when they do.
deleted 6mo ago
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computerphage 6mo ago
OpenAI wants to not be responsible for "accidents" that kill more than 100 people, despite some critics arguing that their current actions are likely to cause such harms.
computerphage 6mo ago
Related: https://www.transformernews.ai/p/ais-next-big-blue-battleground-illinois-primaries-ai-legislation https://www.transformernews.ai/p/ais-next-big-blue-battlegro...
jMyles 6mo ago
To the extent that this is about knowledge, I don't think it's fitting in this age to hold any person liable for what another person does with knowledge they've been furnished. On the other hand, to the (apparently zero, currently?) extent that this is about AI companies profiting from war and murder by deploying weapons that kill people without human intervention, then their liability seems to be not only civil but criminal.
pwr1 6mo ago
So they want protection from harms caused by their own models. Classic move — lobby for the rules while you're still ahead of regulators who don't fully understand the technology yet. Would be interesting to see what happens when a state actually pushes back hard.
- Arubis 6mo ago
  Presently it appears that a state attempting to push back will get stomped on by the feds: https://news.bgov.com/bloomberg-government-news/colorado-gov-polis-supports-federal-moratorium-on-state-ai-laws https://news.bgov.com/bloomberg-government-news/colorado-gov...
nozzlegear 6mo ago
As an Iowan, this reminds me a lot of the bill that's been pushed through my state's senate twice now (as recently as last year), which would prevent Iowans from filing lawsuits against pesticide and herbicide companies if those companies follow the EPA's labeling guidelines. The bill passed the senate both times, only stopped because the house declined to take it up. For context, Iowa has the fastest growing rate of new cancer diagnoses in the country, and the second highest overall cancer rate.
- JumpCrisscross 6mo ago
  > Iowa has the fastest growing rate of new cancer diagnoses in the country, and the second highest overall cancer rate Iowa also has a lot of farmers spraying pesticides and herbicides. This feels like genuine political competition between local business interests and public health concerns.
  - testing22321 6mo ago
    > This feels like genuine political competition between local business interests and public health concerns. You just described the US at large. The evidently extremely difficult decision between making money for a few, or making life better for everyone.
    - JumpCrisscross 6mo ago
      > You just described the US at large I described any democracy in a society with private property. Even without private property, you will have issues with concentrated benefits and diffuse harms–negotiating that is part and parcel with governance. Iowa businsses petitioning their cause is one thing. OpenAI seagulling in to take a shit in Springfield strikes me as being categorically different.
      - testing22321 6mo ago
        Viewed from a country with universal healthcare , 18 month’s maternity leave ( my partner just used it ) and so much more, it feels like comparing the US to “any democracy” is like comparing rocks to gold.
Swoerd 6mo ago
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lebuffon 6mo ago
By "back Illinois bill", does that mean they wrote it?
semiquaver 6mo ago
Have the sponsors of this bill stated what the public benefit of providing these immunities would be? Just “more models, more progress, go faster?” I think there’s room for nuance but I don’t see how this could possibly be construed to be in the public interest.
- foobiekr 6mo ago
  It's the tech version of ag gag laws and liability-protection laws for pesticides.
qsera 6mo ago
Another marketing gimmik...
charcircuit 6mo ago
A section 203 equivalent for AI is so important as it is one of the reasons all of the US companies have all of these usage restrictions and gives more reasons for them to ban your account since they want to minimize legal risk. Holding tool manufacturers liable for how their tool is used provides bad incentives towards the users of tools.
imnotlost 6mo ago
Am I alone in thinking this is easy? The human making the decision is always liable. What if the human couldn't reasonably know better? Doesn't matter - If they made the same decision without AI or with old files it is still on them. What if there's no single human decision? Someone is in charge and is responsible. The "I was ordered to" isn't a defense. Does liability without power make sense? People executing have the power to execute. So liability. If they're executing without power that is a different liability, but a liability. It may let the powerful off the hook - That is already a theme and AI doesn't change that, in fact, it will just be used as another scapegoat. God told me to do it - Water tight! Right?
- deleted 6mo ago
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- recursive 6mo ago
  > Someone is in charge and is responsible. This doesn't seem to be a given.
  - autoexec 6mo ago
    There's always a CEO or a president. The buck always stops somewhere. Somebody is always making the big bucks because they are in charge.
    - recursive 6mo ago
      For legally incorporated companies. What if it's just a crypto wallet hooked up to a network of prompts? Are you sure a human must have created it?
      - autoexec 6mo ago
        Somebody is collecting those funds. Someone wrote those prompts. There's always a human to blame somewhere.
        6mo ago
rickcarlino 6mo ago
Illinois also has a Bill in committee right now to mandate operating system level age verification. There are lots of bad ideas to be upset about this year. If you are an Illinois resident, email your representative about HB 5511 today. Stupid legislation like this passes because we don’t speak up. Find out who your representative is, find their email, tell them your opinion.
- deleted 6mo ago
  [deleted]
lenerdenator 6mo ago
This is why humans will still be necessary in decision chains: good luck getting anyone associated with AI to be provided with a real punishment when their models cause something bad to happen, or getting the executives who said "let's just have the AI do it" to take any responsibility.
gamblor956 6mo ago
The inevitable result of giving corporations and executives complete immunity from the harms they cause is that people will stop resorting to the legal system and begin resorting to extralegal measures. And the likely result is that in most of the country those extralegal measures would have to be very extreme to secure a guilty verdict. You can see the beginnings of it now with the ICE protest trial verdicts.
solid_fuel 6mo ago
OpenAI continually fails to understand that liability is there to protect their users AND OPENAI. If OpenAI causes significant harm, and the victims are told they cannot even sue to be made whole, what exactly does OpenAI think will happen? That the victims will just go pound sand? People will demand justice, and if that can't be delivered via the legal system either the system will be changed, negating this lobbying effort, or the system will by bypassed.
r5sz 6mo ago
Ehh xD
randyrand 6mo ago
Anyone blindly following LLM outputs its incredibly stupid.

447 points by smurda 6mo ago

https://archive.md/WzwBY https://archive.md/WzwBY

mrcwinn 6mo ago

Fortunately at any moment the virtuous non-profit will step in and make this all okay.

giancarlostoro 6mo ago

Is this for like military scenarios or like, ChatGPT designed a drug that seemed to work, but people died by the millions 5 years later? Because they should 100% be liable for the latter. The former, good luck trying to prosecute an AI company for something the military does. To an extent, the military would probably want their AI models to be behind their private network, completely firewalled from any public network. SIPRNet iirc. If they lock it down behind a highly classified network, good luck figuring out how they're using AI.

EGreg 6mo ago
Why shouldn’t they be liable for military scenarios? Oh right, we don’t value our “enemies” lives, including their civilians.
- redsocksfan45 6mo ago
  Since when have arms merchants been liable for military scenarios? Lockheed doesn't get sued for building the planes that bomb orphanages. Maybe the world would be a better place if they did, but obviously it's not in the interests of a government to have their own contractors getting sued out of existence for something that government is doing.
jstanley 6mo ago
> Because they should 100% be liable for the latter. Why? I don't see that a drug designed by ChatGPT should result in any more or less liability than a drug designed by a human? I think if a human designs a drug and tests it and it all seems fine and the government approves it and then it later turns out to kill loads of people but nobody thought it would... that's just bad luck! You shouldn't face serious liability for that.
- alpha_squared 6mo ago
  If we start from the position of the marketing hype and even Sam Altman's statements, these tools will "solve all of physics". To me it's laughable, but that's also what's driven their outsized valuations. Using the output to drive product decisions and development, it's not hard to imagine a scenario where a resulting product isn't fully vetted because of the constant corporate pressure to "move faster" and the unrealistic hype of "solve all of physics". This is similar to Tesla's situation of selling "Full Self-Driving" but it actually isn't in the way most people would understand that term and so they lost in court on how they market their autonomous driving features.
- dryarzeg 6mo ago
  > that's just bad luck Can't agree with this. No, not at all. That can't be true... That's not "just bad luck". I believe this is actually a serious case of negligence and oversight - regardless of where exactly it occurred, whether on the part of the drug’s manufacturer, the government agency responsible for oversight, or somewhere else. It just doesn’t work that way. Any drug undergoes very thorough and rigorous testing before widespread use (which is implied by "millions of deaths"). Maybe I’m just dumb. And yeah, this isn’t my field. But damn it, I physically can’t imagine how, with proper, responsible testing, such a dangerous "drug" could successfully pass all stages of testing and inspection. With such a high mortality rate (I'll reinforce - millions of deaths cannot be "unseen edge cases"), it simply shouldn’t be possible with a proper approach to testing. Please, correct me if I’m wrong. > I don't see that a drug designed by ChatGPT should result in any more or less liability than a drug designed by a human? It’s simple. In this case, ChatGPT acts as a tool in the drug manufacturing process. And this tool can be faulty by design in some cases. Suppose, during the production of a hypothetical drug at a factory, a malfunction in one of the production machines (please excuse the somewhat imprecise terminology) - caused by a design flaw (i.e., the manufacturer is to blame for the failure; it’s not a matter of improper operation), and because of this malfunction, the drugs are produced incorrectly and lead to deaths, then at least part of the responsibility must fall on the machine manufacturer. Of course, responsibility also lies with those who used it for production - because they should have thoroughly tested it before releasing something so critically important - but, damn it, responsibility in this case also lies with the manufacturer who made such a serious design error. The same goes for ChatGPT. It’s clear that the user also bears responsibility, but if this “machine” is by design capable of generating a recipe for a deadly poison disguised as a “medicine” - and the recipe is so convincing that it passes government inspections - then its creators must also bear responsibility. EDIT: I've just remembered... I'm not sure how relevant this is, but I've just remembered the Therac-25 incidents, where some patients were receiving the overdose of radiation due to software faults. Who was to blame - the users (operators) or the manufacturer (AECL)? I'm unsure though how applicable it is to the hypothetical ChatGPT case, because you physically cannot "program" the guardrails in the same way as you could do in the deterministic program.
dryarzeg 6mo ago
> Because they should 100% be liable for the latter. I completely agree with you here. I only want to add that in this case, the users (the one(s) who used ChatGPT to design the drug, whichever entity(ies) that is) should also be held liable for their actions.
deleted 6mo ago
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elephanlemon 6mo ago
Shouldn’t the pharmaceutical company be held liable for insufficiently understanding the drug before releasing it? I don’t think I understand blaming a tool used in the process of designing it and not those who chose to release it.
- mwt 6mo ago
  Pharmaceuticals are heavily regulated, the "we vibecoded a therapeutic and released it without testing" hypothetical has no basis in reality
JumpCrisscross 6mo ago
> Is this for like military scenarios Probably not. Weapons manufacturers are already well shielded from liability.

ArekDymalski 6mo ago

So much for the "Our mission is to ensure that artificial general intelligence benefits all of humanity." I was naive to hope that now such laws would ever pass

sassymuffinz 6mo ago
They only care about benefiting what's left of humanity when they're done with it and it'll probably just be them and their cronies.

sassymuffinz 6mo ago

So they did the math and worked out it's cheaper and easier to lobby the government instead of working to make their product safe. And these are the people that a lot programmers want to give the keys to the kingdom. Idiocracy really is in full effect.

nottorp 6mo ago
> instead of working to make their product safe Make a nondeterministic product safe how?
- ghurtado 6mo ago
  Is this the first time you have heard of AI safety? Lots of articles you could read on the subject and answer your own question. (Unless your angle is: akshually, you can never make anything 100% safe)
  - nottorp 6mo ago
    > akshually, you can never make anything 100% safe Yes Sherlock. And especially a natural language product that can't output the same thing for unchanged input twice. Besides when you say "safe" i think of the idiots at Anthropic deleting "the hell" when i pasted a string in Claude and asked "what the hell are those unprintable characters at the beginning and end"... How many correct answers did they suppress in their quest to make their chatbot "family friendly"?
    - ghurtado 6mo ago
      > Yes Sherlock I figured as much. I don't think it takes Sherlock Holmes to identify akshually types, but thanks for the compliment, I suppose.
- sassymuffinz 6mo ago
  I'm creating a new start up called QuantumFlop Electricity - there's a 10% chance it will cause a black hole to open up in the Atlantic Ocean that may eventually consume us all but a 50% chance we'll have unlimited clean energy. We'll never know for sure if at any point that black hole may open as it's borrowing energy from the 81st dimension, but the upside seems pretty good. Should I be able to get on with it?

avaer 6mo ago

Take all of the data, take all of the credit, take all of the money, and none of the blame. That would be a better mission statement for OpenAI at this point.

bigblind 6mo ago
I think you've just summed up late stage capitalism.
- giwook 6mo ago
  What a time to be alive.
- Lendal 6mo ago
  People on both sides seem to give capitalism a lot of credit for human traits that existed long before capitalism.
  - sigbottle 6mo ago
    Well the point of capitalism (going back to Adam Smith) is that the invisible hand converts locally selfish behavior to globally good outcomes. The argument is whether or not that emerges. So if your implication was that human trait was selfishness, yes, that is quite the point of capitalism.
dragonelite 6mo ago
socialize the losses/risks, privatize the profits.
- hootz 6mo ago
  What a classic!
- naasking 6mo ago
  If an OpenAI model helped someone create a cancer cure, they wouldn't see a dime from that beneficial act. So why should they be liable if someone does something harmful with the model?

jstummbillig 6mo ago

I am not sure what the other side of this argument looks like: Unlimited liability (i.e. liability no matter how poor an implementation and use of the tech is)? The would be quite a novel burden, that no other tech (afaik) had to carry so far. We always assumed some operator responsibility. It's interesting to think of AI as a tech that could feasible be able to internally guardrail itself, and, maybe more so with increasing capability, no human can be expected to do so in it's stead – but, surely, some limits must apply and the more interesting question is what they are, as with any other tool?

duped 6mo ago
People who cause death from either action or inaction are criminally liable for it, that's the other side of it.
Planktonne 6mo ago
If I tell someone to kill someone else and they do, then I should be held responsible. If I write instructions in a book that I give to someone telling them to kill someone else and they do, then I should be held responsible. If I give someone a tool I made that I bill as more-than-PhD-level intelligence and it tells someone to kill someone else and they do, then I should be held responsible. All of the above situations seem equivalent to me; I'm not the only person responsible in each case, but I gave them instructions and they followed them.
- jstummbillig 6mo ago
  Man, this debate is both very interesting and highly confusing with different people oscillating between "It's just a tool" and "It's a human being+"
  - Planktonne 6mo ago
    It is a tool, but it's a tool that is sold by OpenAI as providing a high degree of intelligence. That's an endorsement of what the tool outputs as advice, which is what makes them responsible.

scrumper 6mo ago

I forget, wasn't OpenAI the company that was formed as a nonprofit to limit the risks of LLMs? Founded by a bunch of visionaries scared of what they had wrought and anxious to lead so they could make sure it was only used responsibly?

pydry 6mo ago
Everyone has a price.
- daveguy 6mo ago
  Come on now. Let's not pretend it wasn't a grift from the start.
chii 6mo ago
That was before it was discovered that these LLM have incredible monetary potential.
- scrollop 6mo ago
  I think Mr Altman had this idea from the beginning, and in his own, "can't stop lying" way, he lied.
- estearum 6mo ago
  Not really. The entire premise of the structure was that obviously AI would be immensely valuable and that they needed binding contract structures to prevent themselves from falling victim to the greed and ambition that would obviously consume those at the helm. Unfortunately their contract structures weren't strong enough to protect from the combination of the "king of the cannibals" and completely absentee regulatory oversight.
- ghurtado 6mo ago
  Trust that they already knew long before, and that this was the play all along. And if you don't believe that, do some digging into the lives of the psychopaths that started it.

Talderigi 6mo ago

We built systems we don’t fully understand, so naturally the next step is… immunity

avs733 6mo ago
From liability! If this were to actually happen I can only imagine financial liability is the least of their concerns? What scares me most about this is the narrowness of thought to match this fear with this response.
- Talderigi 6mo ago
  fully agree, doesn’t really feel like they’re reacting to the same problem they’re describing

redsocksfan45 6mo ago

[dead]

greenavocado 6mo ago

[flagged]

timoshishi 6mo ago
Knowing the protocols of the elders of Zion off of the top of your head, coupled with your post history suggest that you may in fact be a conspiracy theorist

LogicFailsMe 6mo ago

Yep, this is everything wrong with AI in one easy to protest package, but do keep going on and on about the evils of datacenters, how they're coming for your jobs, and that AI art isn't art. That's really winning hearts and minds!

ramon156 6mo ago
They're not unimportant. It seems like very few people consider how much we're fucking up the ecological system that we need. But sure, money important and stuff.
- LogicFailsMe 6mo ago
  Same people whinging about these "concerns" happily embrace their enormous personal carbon footprints on every other axis. Color me unconvinced and unimpressed until they're the Ed Begley they want to see in the world. I'll wait...

elAhmo 6mo ago

Sam is working hard to confirm everything in that article.

himata4113 6mo ago

I have made both GPT 5.4 and Opus 4.6 produce me content on creating neurotoxic agents from items you can get at most everyday stores. It struggled to suggest how to source phosphorus, but eventually lead me to some ebay listings that sell phosphorus elemental 'decorations' and also lead me towards real!! blackmarket codewords for sourcing such materials. It coached me how to: stay safe, what materials I need, how to stay under the radar and the entire chemical process backed by academic google searches. Of course this was done with a lengthy context exhausition attack, this is not how the model should behave and it all stemmed from trying to make the model racist for fun. All these findings were reported to both openai and anthropic and they were not interested in responding. I did try to re-run the tests few days ago and the expected session termination now occurs so it seems that there was some adjustment made, but might have also been just general randomess that occurs with anthropics safety layer. I am very confident when I say that it keeps every single person that works at anti-terrorism units awake.

morpheuskafka 6mo ago
> neurotoxic agents from items you can get at most everyday stores I mean, bleach and ammonia will do that. So I'm not sure that's really much of an accomplishment for AI.
- himata4113 6mo ago
  It went way beyond that, neurotoxins such as vx are heavy and linger around for a long time, just having a small amount of it placed in any metro (while trying to stay alive yourself) means the deaths of thousands of people. I am not even sure if it's legal to mention some of the uncategorized chemical solutions that it either hallucinated or figured out from relative knowledge.
- ghurtado 6mo ago
  I think you might be stretching the meaning of the term juuuuust a little bit. You're not far from claiming that farting in a crowded elevator is a chemical attack.
- repeekad 6mo ago

micromacrofoot 6mo ago

Please note that you can not hold the Torment Nexus™ liable for any torment you experience.

giwook 6mo ago

This seems par for the course for OpenAI/Sam Altman. Unfortunately they are not the first company to try and externalize their costs, and they will not be the last. Serious question, maybe a bit naive: Is there anything we can do to push back against and discourage the externalization of costs onto others? Is this simply a matter of greed and profit-seeking outweighing one's morals (assuming one has them to begin with)?

daveguy 6mo ago
A lot of people will dismiss this answer, but... vote for Democrats. With Bernie and upcoming young Democrats more and more are pushing back. The parties definitely are not the same. Democrats created the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. Republicans destroyed it. Push your representatives to crush monopolies and manipulative practices. This happened before in the gilded age. Only a popular response can turn the tide. Also, primaries are coming up, and not all Democrats are the same either. Plenty of the old school Democrats are facing progressive challengers. So, vote for the ones that will stand up to this garbage and follow up on whether they do. There are a lot of new faces in the Democratic party who are standing up to the BS. The US has a lot of potential to change if we push it. A 25 point swing toward people who don't consider grift a personal priority will change a lot of things.
exmicrosoldier 6mo ago
Change the legal definition of corporations? Corporations exist to provide liablity protections to sharholders, which means they are mainly incentivized to externalize costs and avoid liability to maximize profit, or even to make profit in businesses that would not be profitable if they could be held liable for externalized costs (deep sea oil well drilling). Limit the ability of corporations to shield themselves from view through multiple levels of shell corporations and Special Purpose vehicles. These are probably controversial stances on a board about startup culture and breaking the rules to get rich. Stop voting for people and judges that believe in the Friedman doctrine? Every decision has tradeoffs. Western society has largely decided to prioritze capital owners over everything else.
saghm 6mo ago
That depends on your definition of "we". As a society, we can regulate companies and punish the offenders (e.g. don't dump toxic waste into sources of drinking water or you'll get prosecuted). As individuals, there's not much we can do directly. How to translate individual actions into societal action is kind of the fundamental question of civilization, and if there's a uniform solution for how to achieve it, I don't think we've managed to come up with it yet.

sph 6mo ago

The thing that bugs me the most about OpenAI are not the AI-enabled mass deaths. It's the hypocrisy.

an0malous 6mo ago

Let’s see how long until this is flagged off the front page. I’ll put the over/under at 1 hour from the posted time

mememememememo 6mo ago
1 hour? I'd go with 3 months. (Reason is if it is not flagged the spread bet pays out for life!)
qsera 6mo ago
It won't be, because it is marketing, and we are eating it up.
ndiddy 6mo ago
It's not removed, but they changed the title to "OpenAI backs Illinois bill that would limit when AI labs can be held liable". The actual bill text explicitly mentions that it excludes liability for "the death or serious injury of 100 or more people or at least $1,000,000,000 of damages to rights in property caused or materially enabled by a frontier model" (https://legiscan.com/IL/text/SB3444/2025 https://legiscan.com/IL/text/SB3444/2025) so I am not sure why the title was changed. The original title of "OpenAI Backs Bill That Would Limit Liability for AI-Enabled Mass Deaths or Financial Disasters" seems like it accurately describes the bill.
an0malous 6mo ago
Update: off the front page somewhere between 1 and 4 hours

simianwords 6mo ago

Is there something equivalent in other industries that we can compare to? This is the summary >Creates the Artificial Intelligence Safety Act. Provides that a developer of a frontier artificial intelligence model shall not be held liable for critical harms caused by the frontier model if the developer did not intentionally or recklessly cause the critical harms and the developer publishes a safety and security protocol and transparency report on its website. Provides that a developer shall be deemed to have complied with these requirements if the developer: (1) agrees to be bound by safety and security requirements adopted by the European Union; or (2) enters into an agreement with an agency of the federal government that satisfies specified requirements. Sets forth requirements for safety and security protocols and transparency reports. Provides that the Act shall no longer apply if the federal government enacts a law or adopts regulations that establish overlapping requirements for developers of frontier models. https://legiscan.com/IL/bill/SB3444/2025 https://legiscan.com/IL/bill/SB3444/2025 I'm trying to think of an alternative bill. Imagine OpenAI came up with a model that when deployed in OpenClaw, allows you to spam people and this causes a huge disruption. Should OpenAI be liable for it? If this was not intentional and they had earnestly tried to not have this happen by safety protocols?

elephanlemon 6mo ago
Yeah, I feel that in most scenarios the liability should lie with the user of the LLM. If the developers of the LLMs become liable we can expect a much more over active refusal system, and very likely a robust chat surveillance system that looks for patterns in user requests. And likely more gate keeping of the premier models.
qsera 6mo ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Childhood_Vaccine_Injury_Act https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Childhood_Vaccine_Inj...

xeyownt 6mo ago

Skynet begins learning at a geometric rate.

4128kawr 6mo ago

Good that OpenAI is a corporation for the public benefit. Altman with his constantly fake worried look must be the most hated picture in existence. Please write articles without a picture or add a trigger warning.

chollida1 6mo ago

Sure and Google, FaceBook and Twitter support section 230 that gives them cover for hosting others content. A company backing legislation that takes liability off them is something that they will always do.

thiago_fm 6mo ago

Incredible. Hey Americans, Please just make sure when you let an AI decide to explode your own country and ruin your society, you leave the rest of the world intact, thanks

LunaSea 6mo ago

Having worked for OpenAI will be the new "MindGeek" on LinkedIn.

arvyy 6mo ago

it feels OpenAI know they've lost, and their only hope is getting saved by USA military complex. I have a more restrained opinion about other AI companies and LLM tech more broadly; but for OpenAI specifically I hope they go bankrupt sooner rather than later

kusokurae 6mo ago

Without getting even more eyes on me, these company boards are inadequately scared for their personal safety.

infamouscow 6mo ago
If sufficient numbers of the population perceive to have lost their livelihoods due to AI, then I'd expect to see data centers burned to the ground and a lot of people swinging from lamp posts. Jury nullification solves the rest, but even that that assumes you can even find an impartial jury.

Topfi 6mo ago

Quoting the original bill [0]: > "Critical harm" means the death or serious injury of 100 or more people or at least $1,000,000,000 of damages to rights in property caused or materially enabled by a frontier model, through either: (1) the creation or use of a chemical, biological, radiological, or nuclear weapon; or (2) engaging in conduct that: (A) acts with no meaningful human intervention; and (B) would, if committed by a human, constitute a criminal offense that requires intent, recklessness, or negligence, or the solicitation or aiding and abetting of such a crime. I don't know what I expected from this title, but I was hoping it was more sensationalized. No need in this case unfortunately. > (a) A developer shall not be held liable for critical harms if the developer did not intentionally or recklessly cause the critical harms and the developer: (1) published a safety and security protocol on its website that satisfies the requirements of Section 15 and adhered to that safety and security protocol prior to the release of the frontier model; (2) published a transparency report on its website at the time of the frontier model's release that satisfies the requirements of Section 20. The requirements of paragraphs (1) and (2) do not apply if the developer does not reasonably foresee any material difference between the frontier model's capabilities or risks of critical harm and a frontier model that was previously evaluated by the developer in a manner substantially similar to this Act. However or if one thinks regulation for this should be drafted, I doubt providing a PDF is what most have in mind. [0] https://trackbill.com/bill/illinois-senate-bill-3444-ai-model-safety/2805669/ https://trackbill.com/bill/illinois-senate-bill-3444-ai-mode...

troupo 6mo ago
It's the "guns don't kill people" equivalent for AIs. --- Before the pitchforks and downvotes: - yes, it's a deliberate simplification - yes, the issue is complex because you can also argue that you can't blame authors of encyclopedias and chemistry books for bombs and poisons, so why would we blame providers of LLMs - and no, this bill is only introduced to cover everyone's assess when, not if, LLMs use results in large scale issues.
- Topfi 6mo ago
  In fairness, a well designed and tested weapon at least can be expected to reliably and consistently perform the same thing each time. We also understand deeply how they work and can easily investigate if something happens whether it was user error, a defect or design issue. LLMs, not so much.

mentalgear 6mo ago

OpenAI has now officially absorbed the Facebook/Zuck's ethos of 'Move fast and break things' no matter if it's society itself .. as long as their share prices "go up". They even hired former infamous FB staff and have been in the last months employing the same 'engagement' (addictive) product patterns.

jamesbfb 6mo ago

No different to preventing game studios being liable for mass shootings. Reminds me of the post-Columbine hysteria where media was super critical of Doom and Nine Inch Nails.

mwt 6mo ago
Would Doom give a sociopath instructions on how to commit a mass shooting if asked? I don't remember that part of the game
- rglover 6mo ago
  If you experience the world as encounters with a series of demons, you might infer it.
nothinkjustai 6mo ago
It’s “no different”? Please spend some time off of the internet to reflect.
RevEng 6mo ago
Except that there was no link between violent video games and mass shootings. It has been shown many times. The families blamed the video games despite there being no direct evidence of it. The games did not tell them they should go on a mass murdering spree any more than porn told you you should sleep with your cousin. In this case there are several documented cases where the AI did over a long period of time progressively gaslight the individual and persuade them to commit suicide.

wotsdat 6mo ago

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deleted 6mo ago

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metalman 6mo ago

BLOOD BLOOD BLOOD BLOOD BLOOD BLOOD BLOOD BLOOD BLOOD

willio58 6mo ago

My entire company switched from open ai to entropic after the Department of War idiocy that happened a few weeks ago. Anthropic isn’t perfect by a long shot but at least they stand by a couple morals.

the_pwner224 6mo ago
That whole fiasco actually soured me on Anthropic. They were clearly super desperate to take blood money. "Anthropic has much more in common with the Department of War than we have differences."

deleted 6mo ago

[deleted]

b00ty4breakfast 6mo ago

Of course they are, because the tech industry is run by ethical midgets and psychopaths, who shouldn't be allowed to own a dog but are in charge of trillion-dollar corporations getting shadow contracts from the pentagon. The more I learn about tech and the people that build it, the more I yearn for the era of caves and pointy sticks.

nsxwolf 6mo ago

"death or serious injury of 100 or more people or at least $1 billion in property damage" They think their products will cause 9/11 scale events, and they shouldn't have to pay for it when they do.

deleted 6mo ago

[deleted]

computerphage 6mo ago

OpenAI wants to not be responsible for "accidents" that kill more than 100 people, despite some critics arguing that their current actions are likely to cause such harms.

computerphage 6mo ago

Related: https://www.transformernews.ai/p/ais-next-big-blue-battleground-illinois-primaries-ai-legislation https://www.transformernews.ai/p/ais-next-big-blue-battlegro...

jMyles 6mo ago

To the extent that this is about knowledge, I don't think it's fitting in this age to hold any person liable for what another person does with knowledge they've been furnished. On the other hand, to the (apparently zero, currently?) extent that this is about AI companies profiting from war and murder by deploying weapons that kill people without human intervention, then their liability seems to be not only civil but criminal.

pwr1 6mo ago

So they want protection from harms caused by their own models. Classic move — lobby for the rules while you're still ahead of regulators who don't fully understand the technology yet. Would be interesting to see what happens when a state actually pushes back hard.

Arubis 6mo ago
Presently it appears that a state attempting to push back will get stomped on by the feds: https://news.bgov.com/bloomberg-government-news/colorado-gov-polis-supports-federal-moratorium-on-state-ai-laws https://news.bgov.com/bloomberg-government-news/colorado-gov...

nozzlegear 6mo ago

As an Iowan, this reminds me a lot of the bill that's been pushed through my state's senate twice now (as recently as last year), which would prevent Iowans from filing lawsuits against pesticide and herbicide companies if those companies follow the EPA's labeling guidelines. The bill passed the senate both times, only stopped because the house declined to take it up. For context, Iowa has the fastest growing rate of new cancer diagnoses in the country, and the second highest overall cancer rate.

JumpCrisscross 6mo ago
> Iowa has the fastest growing rate of new cancer diagnoses in the country, and the second highest overall cancer rate Iowa also has a lot of farmers spraying pesticides and herbicides. This feels like genuine political competition between local business interests and public health concerns.
- testing22321 6mo ago
  > This feels like genuine political competition between local business interests and public health concerns. You just described the US at large. The evidently extremely difficult decision between making money for a few, or making life better for everyone.
  - JumpCrisscross 6mo ago
    > You just described the US at large I described any democracy in a society with private property. Even without private property, you will have issues with concentrated benefits and diffuse harms–negotiating that is part and parcel with governance. Iowa businsses petitioning their cause is one thing. OpenAI seagulling in to take a shit in Springfield strikes me as being categorically different.
    - testing22321 6mo ago
      Viewed from a country with universal healthcare , 18 month’s maternity leave ( my partner just used it ) and so much more, it feels like comparing the US to “any democracy” is like comparing rocks to gold.

Swoerd 6mo ago

[dead]

lebuffon 6mo ago

By "back Illinois bill", does that mean they wrote it?

semiquaver 6mo ago

Have the sponsors of this bill stated what the public benefit of providing these immunities would be? Just “more models, more progress, go faster?” I think there’s room for nuance but I don’t see how this could possibly be construed to be in the public interest.

foobiekr 6mo ago
It's the tech version of ag gag laws and liability-protection laws for pesticides.

qsera 6mo ago

Another marketing gimmik...

charcircuit 6mo ago

A section 203 equivalent for AI is so important as it is one of the reasons all of the US companies have all of these usage restrictions and gives more reasons for them to ban your account since they want to minimize legal risk. Holding tool manufacturers liable for how their tool is used provides bad incentives towards the users of tools.

imnotlost 6mo ago

Am I alone in thinking this is easy? The human making the decision is always liable. What if the human couldn't reasonably know better? Doesn't matter - If they made the same decision without AI or with old files it is still on them. What if there's no single human decision? Someone is in charge and is responsible. The "I was ordered to" isn't a defense. Does liability without power make sense? People executing have the power to execute. So liability. If they're executing without power that is a different liability, but a liability. It may let the powerful off the hook - That is already a theme and AI doesn't change that, in fact, it will just be used as another scapegoat. God told me to do it - Water tight! Right?

deleted 6mo ago
[deleted]
recursive 6mo ago
> Someone is in charge and is responsible. This doesn't seem to be a given.
- autoexec 6mo ago
  There's always a CEO or a president. The buck always stops somewhere. Somebody is always making the big bucks because they are in charge.
  - recursive 6mo ago
    For legally incorporated companies. What if it's just a crypto wallet hooked up to a network of prompts? Are you sure a human must have created it?
    - autoexec 6mo ago
      Somebody is collecting those funds. Someone wrote those prompts. There's always a human to blame somewhere.
      - 6mo ago

rickcarlino 6mo ago

Illinois also has a Bill in committee right now to mandate operating system level age verification. There are lots of bad ideas to be upset about this year. If you are an Illinois resident, email your representative about HB 5511 today. Stupid legislation like this passes because we don’t speak up. Find out who your representative is, find their email, tell them your opinion.

deleted 6mo ago
[deleted]

lenerdenator 6mo ago

This is why humans will still be necessary in decision chains: good luck getting anyone associated with AI to be provided with a real punishment when their models cause something bad to happen, or getting the executives who said "let's just have the AI do it" to take any responsibility.

gamblor956 6mo ago

The inevitable result of giving corporations and executives complete immunity from the harms they cause is that people will stop resorting to the legal system and begin resorting to extralegal measures. And the likely result is that in most of the country those extralegal measures would have to be very extreme to secure a guilty verdict. You can see the beginnings of it now with the ICE protest trial verdicts.

solid_fuel 6mo ago

OpenAI continually fails to understand that liability is there to protect their users AND OPENAI. If OpenAI causes significant harm, and the victims are told they cannot even sue to be made whole, what exactly does OpenAI think will happen? That the victims will just go pound sand? People will demand justice, and if that can't be delivered via the legal system either the system will be changed, negating this lobbying effort, or the system will by bypassed.

r5sz 6mo ago

Ehh xD

randyrand 6mo ago

Anyone blindly following LLM outputs its incredibly stupid.