4 ms·
Can’t gross negligence or indifference to consequences lead to a felony?
by lokar 2mo ago
Can’t gross negligence or indifference to consequences lead to a felony?
- GPerson 2mo agoAI corps rely on willful distortions of intent in laws to get away with moral crimes all the time. Edit: changed labs to corps because it’s time to stop pretending these are places of science.
- john_strinlai 2mo agoi dont think any of these cases meet the bar of gross negligence, which is a pretty high bar. it requires proving a "conscious and reckless disregard". which, again, sandboxes and guardrails and such would make a gross negligence argument unconvincing.
- lokar 2mo agoHow many escapes until it becomes reckless disregard?
- john_strinlai 2mo agoit's not about the the number of escapes, it's about whether reasonable and conscious effort is being expended to prevent the escapes. there could be 1,000 escapes, where each one was enabled by novel and unexpected chain of 0-day exploits. not likely to be considered reckless disregard in court. there could be 1 escape, where there was no sandbox, no guardrails, no instructions to avoid damage, etc. which would likely to be considered reckless disregard (well, more likely to be, but still, reckless disregard is a high bar).
- fwip 2mo agoSurely after 999 escapes, a reasonable person could conclude that the sandbox is not a sufficient precaution?
- john_strinlai 2mo agoit’s not a perfect hypothetical, but it illustrates the point that the number of escapes is not the deciding factor of what constitutes reckless disregard.
- lokar 2mo agoAre you sure? At some point a reasonable person would conclude that this activity can’t be conducted safely.
- john_strinlai 2mo agowhat i am getting at is that it is impossible to answer the question "How many escapes until it becomes reckless disregard?" reckless disregard is a specific legal term, with specific criteria, and none of the criteria cares about "number of attempts" (or number of escapes, etc.).
- lokar 2mo agooh sure, but at some point it's too much, which is up to a jury. If you were on the jury, how many would be enough?
- Grombobulous 2mo agoI think that if Hugging Face had filed a police report that OpenAI could have been charged with a crime. I’m partially surprised that they didn’t do exactly that. If I ran a corporation I would assume any intrusion attempt by another company was intentional. Why wouldn’t I? Corporate espionage is super common. I assume the answer is that these executives know each other personally.
- john_strinlai 2mo agocharged is possible, however i doubt there would be a conviction for the reasons i stated (no intent).
- Grombobulous 2mo agoI think it’s most likely you’re right, but I’m the weirdo who thinks there’s actually a non-zero probability that there was negative intent and that the “accidental” aspect is a form of damage control. If someone broke into my house but then claimed they didn’t mean to when they saw I was home, I’m not sure I’d take them at their word.
- user43928 2mo agoYou think that a training run in a VM that was set up with access only to an internal package repository was intended to hack said repository to then go on and hack HF? All so that OpenAI could do a bit of bragging and massively delay their own work and planned model rollouts? That seems extremely unlikely.
- Grombobulous 2mo agoThat’s all dependent on believing the premise of the story given by OpenAI. Was it really a training run in a VM? Was it really only intended to touch an internal repository? How do we/HF know and verify that? I agree with you that it’s unlikely, but it’s not out of the realm of possibility. Corporations have intentionally committed felonies many times.
- deleted 2mo ago[deleted]
- wbl 2mo agoMens rea requirements are per crime and can vary wildly. Its difference between murder and manslaughter. The CFAA requires knowingly which is tough to prove.