But in her order, U.S. District Court Judge Anne Conway said the company’s “large language models” — an artificial intelligence system designed to understand human language — are not speech.
I get that hating on anything AI-related is trendy these days - and I especially understand the pain of a grieving mother. However, interpreting this as a chatbot encouraging someone to kill themselves is extremely dishonest when you actually look at the logs of what was said.
You can’t simultaneously argue that LLMs lack genuine understanding, empathy, and moral reasoning - and therefore shouldn’t be trusted - while also saying they should have understood that “coming home” was a reference to suicide. That’s holding it to a human-level standard of emotional awareness and contextual understanding while denying it the cognitive capacities that such standards assume.
“I promise I will come home to you. I love you so much, Dany,” Sewell Setzer III wrote to Daenerys, the Character AI chatbot named after Game of Thrones.
The bot replied that it loved the teenager too: “Please come home to me as soon as possible, my love.”
“What if I told you I could come home right now?” Sewell wrote, to which Daenerys responded: “Please do, my sweet king.”
It was the last exchange Sewell ever had. He took his own life seconds later…
All you need to argue is that its operators have responsibility for its actions and should filter / moderate out the worst.
I would not have understood that to have anything to do with suicide… do they use the phrase coming home to mean death or suicide in the game of thrones show?
You have to read the other chat logs. Arstechnica has a good summary I think, the link between “coming home” and suicide is specific to the kids chats with these AI.
Iirc when he did make it more explicit, the AI responded with “no, don’t do that” kind of responses. He just kept the metaphor up when the AI didn’t have such an association in its training data and just responded as a lover would respond to their love saying they’d come home in their training data.
Though I’d say that if a kid would shoot themself in response to a chatbot saying anything to them, the issue is more about them having any access to a gun than anything about the chatbot itself. Unless maybe if the chatbot is volunteering weaknesses common in gun safes, though even then I’d say more fault lies with the parent choosing a shitty safe and raising a kid that would kill themself on the advice of their chatbot girlfriend.
That AI knew exactly what it was doing and it’s about time these AIs started facing real prison time instead of constantly getting a pass
Unironically, the provider of the chat bot should be liable for anything the chat bot says. Don’t fire humans so youn can hide behind a neural network.
But this ain’t suicide encouragement.
Lock it up! Lock it up! Lock it up!
LLMs are tools. They are not sentient. You must not use a tool if you can’t handle it
Removed by mod
You could think of LLMs as a glorified ‘magic 8 ball’, since that’s about as much ‘understanding’ it has.
Why not? Corporations are?
here is the thing: corporations should not be given first amendment rights, they are not human. the people inside the corp? sure! 100%. the corp acting as an entity? never. if they can’t be destroyed by the state for their criminal acts, like people can, then they should not have the other promises (“rights”) in the constitution.
Newspapers depends on being corporations with free speech rights. IMHO the limits should rather be around stuff like lobbying and stricter overall requirements on truthfulness.
I generally agree with your conclusions but want to point out that corporations absolutely could (and in some cases should) be destroyed by the state.
“could” and “do” are different things - the system is what it does. and what it does is treat profit as more important than anything else.
They were, but now maybe any press releases written by AI might not be, lol.
They’re software.
Copyright is for stuff produced by people, not tools. Passing a board through a planer doesn’t make it copyrighted, either.
woosh Corporations are considered people in the court of law.
Except that LLMs are not corporations. they’re owned by corporations.
If corporations are considered people in the court of law how are they allowed to own other corporations? Would this not be slavery and in violation of the constitution?
Corporations are a group of people. Those people have the right to free speech, even when they’re organized into a corporation. A corporation owning another company isn’t slavery because the employees can quit if they’d like to. Slaves would be brutally beaten or shot dead if they tried to leave.
It was a joke.
You bring up a good point, but the Supreme Court doesn’t care about your logical reasoning. The law is still what it is.
🤔
Getting an early start on legal precedent to ensure subjugation of whatever entities may arise from this new focus on Counterfeit Cognizance…
🙄
I really do think you’re front-loading an ethical matter that has absolutely zero relevance to our current society. I fucking ADORE The Measure of a Man - it’s one of my all-time favorite TNG episodes - but the use of LLMs and image/vidgen as disinformation/propaganda generators is a clear and present danger to our society as it now stands, and regulation needs to be imposed if we don’t want to have the public sphere of knowledge and common understanding fed entirely into the wood chipper (and it’s already halfway in there, tbh)
Plus we’re still a long way off from real artificial intelligence like the Noonien Soong positronic brain.
It does put a target on the back of any political operative using them to spread misinfo or stirring the pot. In fact it opens the door for ai bans.
