6 ms·

Good. The true mark of AGI is when a company accepts liability and doesn’t bury “for entertainment purposes only” deep in their TOS. Same as it works with emplo

• deleted 4mo ago
  [deleted]
• MichaelZuo 4mo ago
  Nearly the entire American tech industry has been super heavily selected for people who undervalue the legal language with crazy implications buried everywhere. Otherwise most of it would not even exist. Everyone would have continued paying out the nose to the IBM’s of the world year after year (who had unusual willingness to sign short ambiguously worded custom contracts to their own disadvantage, if paid vast amounts of money). And be on mainframes to this very day… maybe Y combinator and HN wouldnt even exist in that world.
  • deleted 4mo ago
    [deleted]
  • eqvinox 4mo ago
    > Nearly the entire American tech industry has been super heavily selected for people who undervalue the legal language with crazy implications buried everywhere. A lot of people in IT seem to think law and contracts are in a sense mathematical. They aren't; they're more like a high school book report - to be interpreted, as objectively as possible, but definitely also establishing the intent behind the letters. Particularly contracts - no, you can't trick your way into things in most cases. "Surprising" clauses are invalid in most legal systems, in particular if one party to the contract is a layperson.
    • Terr_ 4mo ago
      I sometimes wonder how much blame should be placed at the feet of cartoons which teach viewers that invisibly-small print is legally binding, and that any term is enforceable. I mean, it's not like most people have any kind of curriculum to fix those early assumptions.
    • MichaelZuo 4mo ago
      > "Surprising" clauses are invalid in most legal systems… Yes, except… very notably… the USA… (especially certain parts such as Delaware). Which has a judiciary that entertain such clauses much more often than pretty much any other country I’ve heard of. A clause like: “you agree to deliver your first born son on demand” buried in page 15 would indeed be laughed out of the courtroom. But less severe clauses buried in page 15 might not be immediately laughed out. Causing a lot of expense and heartache before it gets dismissed. Just think about it, if it were really just a total joke… why would large firms (FAANG, etc.) with serious legal departments want to look like clowns producing gibberish, year after year?
  • TalkingCodeMonk 4mo ago
    That is a false dichotomy. The solution to failed laws and regulations is not crime and corruption. The solution is to hold the policial and business leadership accountable; to fix the laws and regulations. The entire American tech industry has exported Americas predatory, parasitic, and unethical consumer laws (the majority of which are ghost written by the wealthy and corporate legal teams). When I studied law in school decades ago, tactics like bait-and-switch, false advertisting, intentionally misleading or deceptive practices etc to sell products or contracts were illegal across the developed world. Those illegal, anti-consumer tactics were the SOP of every tech startup I can think of from the early 2000's onwards; following the same route of initially offering a compelling feature set to attract and entice users – usually for free – until securing a certain number of users or funding, then changing the value proposition to exploit that user base, and extract as much wealth from them as possible, ad infinitum. Today these tactics are known as enshittification, and the average American pseudo-libertarian software engineer will say this is fine, but that's what every anti-consumer parasite and criminal has said in history. Lying, misleading, and exploiting people for financial gain is fundamentally immoral, corrupt, and sociopathic, therefore it should be illegal. Just because it's the norm, or a digital product, you wrote that in the T&C's, or your doing everything behind the liability shield of an LLC, doesn't change that. What ever happened to the concept of building a valuable, quality product and stable returns for generations? Working to improve the quality of life and standard of living of the community? Of the world? I feel like a 1950's traditional conservative when I suggest that, but most Americans are so heavily indoctrinated with corporate greed and sociopathy they'd consider that sentiment radical leftist extremism. I'm an athiest, but ya'll need jesus (the real brown socialist one). Many would argue Americas current institutional collapse is the natural result of this systemic corruption.
    • ElProlactin 4mo ago
      > I feel like a 1950's traditional conservative when I suggest that... I wouldn't argue that America's moral standards haven't declined (significantly) but I also think it's a romanization to suggest that 1950s America was the pinnacle of morality. Lying, misleading, and exploiting people for financial gain has been a part of the fabric of American society since the country was founded. If we're being honest, humans everywhere have demonstrated a high capacity for this behavior since the dawn of civilization.
• Dylan16807 4mo ago
  Why would that mean AGI? You can get into liability-accepting territory by restricting scope, a lot easier than by making your AI smarter. Self-driving cars don't need to be particularly good for companies to make models where they accept liability in some circumstances, and the cars refuse to drive in other circumstances.
  • wombatpm 4mo ago
    Wasn’t Tesla found to have FSD disengaging just before a crash so that the driver would be at fault?
    • Dylan16807 4mo ago
      No. Sometimes it does disengage because things are going wrong, but those incidents are still reported the same as if it stayed engaged. I found one time Musk was using a few seconds of disengagement to insult a driver, but it still would have counted as an FSD crash by Tesla's statistics.
• deleted 4mo ago
  [deleted]
• JumpCrisscross 4mo ago
  > Same for self-driving. Your car is not self-driving until it accepts liability and you count as just a passenger Mercedes-Benz does this in limited cases. Waymo does it generally. (In China, Level 4 and 5 transfers risk to the manufacturer. This is the correct way to do it.)
  • michaellee8 4mo ago
    That's not exactly the case in China, the current state of FSD is still pretty dumb, unless you consider transferring control back to the user at the very last minute before it crashes a proper way to handle risks.
    • ImPostingOnHN 4mo ago
      > unless you consider transferring control back to the user at the very last minute before it crashes a proper way to handle risks I don't think Tesla is based in China
      • michaellee8 4mo ago
        I guess some Tesla are manufactured in China lol. I am just trying to say that the liability that Chinese manufacturers takes aren't more than the US ones.
    • JumpCrisscross 4mo ago
      Huh, have any good sources on self-driving liability in China? I’m beginning to suspect mine are biased.
• throwaway27448 4mo ago
  > The true mark of AGI Can we just trash this as a marketing term? If/when AGI arrives there will be no point quibbling over competency. What we are looking at is just bad search results
  • ben_w 4mo ago
    "No quibble" is more a mark of ASI than AGI; while both are easily coopted as marketing terms[0], "smarter than all humans" is harder to dispute than "general intelligence" (can do some graduate level work, can't drive well enough to render steering wheels obsolete, is it general?) [0] e.g. Zuckerberg: https://www.meta.com/superintelligence/ https://www.meta.com/superintelligence/
    • throwaway27448 4mo ago
      > "smarter than all humans" is harder to dispute I don't think this is the case. It's not clear intelligence is a coherent concept to begin with, let alone a one-dimensional thing you can maximize. What, is it going to write stageplays that puts shakespeare to shame? Find a way to enforce world peace or end greed? I'm not at all convinced we anything more than the simple competency we expect from humans is possible. What would we look for to know it's there?
      • ben_w 4mo ago
        > What, is it going to write stageplays that puts shakespeare to shame? Find a way to enforce world peace or end greed? If it did, who would say "nope, still not super-intelligent"? (I'm sure it's more than "nobody": the least realistic thing to me about my brother's LARP group was that nobody in that universe denied the gods it contained even though they'd immediately smite anyone who did that).
        • deleted 4mo ago
          [deleted]
        • throwaway27448 4mo ago
• wisty 4mo ago
  Banning all technology because someone might misuse it is an illogical extreme. As far as I can tell the ruling is more nuanced. If AI is defaming you, there needs to be a way to correct the record. A company being open to liability does not mean it is always liable, just that it can be if it really messes up (especially if there are aggravating circumstances, e.g. you need to drag them to court to issue a correction).
  • ndsipa_pomu 4mo ago
    However, banning a technology because it produces dangerous misinformation (e.g. showing inaccurate and dangerous results for a liver function test) sounds like a completely sane thing to do.
• heathrow83829 4mo ago
  at the scale that google is at, it doesn't make an ounce of sense to hold a company liable for a potential mistruth. what if there's a 1/1000 chance of some error, then the company could be sued millions of times per day. down vote all you want, but I firmly believe this is an example where the user needs to use some judgement on the information they receive and have some critical thinking skills. google would be right to remove all AI results from germany.
  • gmerc 4mo ago
    So scale of harm creates immunity, is that the argument ?
    • necovek 4mo ago
      Did we not already see that with the financial sector in 2008?
      • intended 4mo ago
        Sort of ? Either way, we do not want a repeat of that. Plus too big to fail as a US malaise, that then toppled the rest of the economy. The EU is taking steps to prevent that, so this is laudable.
    • drfloyd51 4mo ago
      Too big to fail. Lol.
    • onetokeoverthe 4mo ago
      [dead]
  • Swizec 4mo ago
    > at the scale that google is at, it doesn't make an ounce of sense to hold a company liable for a potential mistruth If a Google employee (like a support agent) says a mistruth, the company is liable and you can sue. They can’t just say “hihi oopsies our support agents are useless”
• sva_ 4mo ago
  It doesn't "bury [it] deep in their TOS", it says right under the box: > AI can make mistakes, so double-check responses
  • happymellon 4mo ago
    They decided to hijack search and rewrite other peoples websites as their own. If they want to claim ownership, then they will have to accept responsibility.
    • Rekindle8090 4mo ago
      Search still works the same you just have to scroll down
      • ychnd 4mo ago
        "Just". I.e. not shown by default.
      • happymellon 4mo ago
        So search doesn't still work the same.
  • hansmayer 4mo ago
    [dead]
  • quentindanjou 4mo ago
    Imagine going to a restaurant and when you pass your order "passing an order means accepting that there might be some poison in the food so double check before eating, good luck!"
• beezlewax 4mo ago
  Ai results that nobody wanted in the first place?
• SilverElfin 4mo ago
  Why is it good? Everyone with common sense knows AI can be wrong. And it’s not buried in their TOS. It’s in the chat box. But even if it wasn’t, it’s ridiculous to create liability for AI chatbots.
  • ndsipa_pomu 4mo ago
    Common sense is so rare it might as well be a super power. e.g. The failed marketing of A&W's third-pounder burger as so many people (in the USA) didn't believe that it was bigger than a quarter-pounder. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Third-pound_burger https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Third-pound_burger
  • jqpabc123 4mo ago
    it’s ridiculous to create liability for AI chatbots. Liability isn't being *created* here, it has existed legally for a very long time. False information can cause real harm --- and the legal burden of proof is on the source. Search engines were provided legal exemption on the basis that they were simply quoting/referencing 3rd party sources who where legally liable for the content. LLM chatbots legally exceed these bounds by fabricating info/content on their own ---data that does not exist elsewhere. This is a liability issue waiting to happen as there is no other responsible party/source to blame.
    • WarmWash 4mo ago
      AI overviews cites it's sources though...
      • jqpabc123 4mo ago
        Yes, AI would never list irrelevant sources and fabricate links. https://blog.platinumids.com/blog/ai-hallucination-crisis-courts-2026 https://blog.platinumids.com/blog/ai-hallucination-crisis-co...
        • WarmWash 4mo ago
          AI overviews automatically produces links to it's sources for each statement, so it's trivial to check.
• andrewmutz 4mo ago
  I think it's a completely reasonable position that companies making self-driving cars and question/answer systems are legally liable for any errors. But if you hold that position, you also have to be fine with companies not offering products and services in your country. AI systems will eventually be good enough (in 10-20 years) for companies to be able to deploy such systems with sufficient accuracy to afford the lawsuits. Until that time, such countries would just not have access to systems before they were bulletproof.
  • Swizec 4mo ago
    > Until that time, such countries would just not have access to systems before they were bulletproof. Correct, most jurisdictions do not allow businesses which cannot be held liable for their actions. This is pretty core to a modern society. Imagine if a company selling Knicks tickets was not expected to then actually provide said tickets and there was simply nothing you could do about it. Oopsies our sales page is for entertainment purposes only To be fair, the internet has spent some 30 years figuring out how this works and it’s still not fully resolved. For the most part we’ve agreed that companies must follow the laws of both where they live and where they operate. This wasn’t always obvious!
    • scottyah 4mo ago
      Almost all jurisdictions allow businesses which cannot be held liable for all their actions. Imagine losing you house because someone decided to smother themselves in your infused cooking oil and light themselves on fire. Businesses are made to make it easier to share profits and responsibilities when trying to fulfill users wants. Laws are made to offer protections for consumers (because nobody has time for common sense), but at the end of the day the consumer has to take responsibility or no products can be made. If you're too fat for a chair, it's on you to find or make one that works- not every product is for every person. Laws only stop chairs being sold that are too dangerous for anyone.
      • autoexec 4mo ago
        > Almost all jurisdictions allow businesses which cannot be held liable for all their actions. Imagine losing you house because someone decided to smother themselves in your infused cooking oil and light themselves on fire. How would that be the company's action? The only way the business might be liable is if they advertised their product as safe to use when lighting yourself on fire or if there was already some law that required them to warn customers not to light themselves on fire while using the product and they ignored that law. In this case, it's not about what somebody else did. It's what Google did. There were already laws against lying about companies by saying they did illegal things when they didn't, google broke the law, so that's what google got in trouble for. Consumer protection laws aren't there to replace common sense, they're there to prevent things like outright fraud and poisonings/murder.
• pojntfx 4mo ago
  > But watch as Germany soon loses AI Google results. Oh no! Anyway ...
• Rekindle8090 4mo ago
  [dead]
• themafia 4mo ago
  > But watch as Germany soon loses AI Google results. Time to set my VPN location to Germany. I'm tired of the "udm" trick.
  • cwnyth 4mo ago
    Yeah, I fail to see a down side to this. Those overviews are less than worthless to me.
  • bmacho 4mo ago
    How is it tiring to set up https://www.google.com/search?udm=14&q=%s https://www.google.com/search?udm=14&q=%s in your address bar once?
• phorkyas82 4mo ago
  That'd be so great. No more cursing if I forgot the "-ai" or "-ki" flag in my search and see this odious AI overview processing window rendering slowly and taking up the space where my search results should be.
• aleph_minus_one 4mo ago
  > The true mark of AGI is when a company accepts liability and doesn’t bury “for entertainment purposes only” deep in their TOS. I don't think so. It is easy to imagine the following (currently only fictional) scenario: the AGI does give perfectly correct answers (in a suitable sense), but some people in power consider these answers to be too dangerous, so they sue the company behind the AGI on terms of liability (i.e. the company is liable if the AGI gives answers that those in power don't like and which these people consider to be too dangerous for the public to know).
  • majewsky 4mo ago
    If the system cannot adjust its answers to the role it's currently serving, then it would evidently be significantly less intelligent than a human.
    • aleph_minus_one 4mo ago
      > If the system cannot adjust its answers to the role it's currently serving, then it would evidently be significantly less intelligent than a human. Or the system is very smart and recognizes the insanely deep "logical gaps" in the rules of the role that it is to serve.
  • 3form 4mo ago
    This doesn't disagree with the poster above: they're saying that taking liability is a sign of belief in AGI. You're saying that lack of liability doesn't mean there's no AGI. Logically these two are not exclusive. p => q doesn't mean q => p.
• jqpabc123 4mo ago
  But watch as Germany soon loses AI Google results. But watch as Germany doesn't really mind losing blatant fabrication that mainly benefits Google. Vendors keep ignoring the obvious --- that AI is a liability issue waiting to happen as evidence of it just keeps coming. Otherwise would involve a fundamental overhaul of legal precedent to make lying acceptable.
• deleted 4mo ago
  [deleted]
• elil17 4mo ago
  > But watch as Germany soon loses AI Google results. That would be a boon for Germany in my book. If you wanted AI results you could go use an AI.
  • input_sh 4mo ago
    That's something that would make me always VPN into Germany for sure. When I search, I want to see search results. When I ask AI, I want to ask AI. Combining the two into one is a disaster.
  • dbdr 4mo ago
    Agreed. The problem is that people are used to do search, which returns hits from clearly identified sources. Suddenly, Gemini is interpreting your query and generating its own response. It's an entirely different product. If I expect to find a source, this was just wasted inference. It's especially problematic that the LLM result is the top result, since we all know how much that matters. It's fine to have Gemini as an option, it's also fine to have a combined result page, that should just be something people are able to chose if they want that (even persistently if they want). It should just not be the default.
• deleted 4mo ago
  [deleted]
• cyanydeez 4mo ago
  you mean GAINS google search results, init
• ryukoposting 4mo ago
  Well then you're going to be waiting a long, long time for AGI, friend. None of these companies have any incentive to ever remove that line, even if their chatbots are perfectly accurate over a large sample size. It's pure CYA. Unless it can be proven that the chatbot will always be perfectly accurate (which is not possible), the "entertainment purposes only" line will remain.