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

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

#141
post #85
post #66

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 commit…

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 l…

This dodges the moral argument behind "guns don't kill people", which is worth confronting directly. I think people can reasonably disagree about whether second/third/fourth/etc. order effects carry moral/legal responsibility.

In light of such disagreement, and given the lack of any higher authority among free, equal, people to arbitrate it, the only reasonable way to coexist peacefully is to avoid imposing your ideas on others. This is the foundation of a liberal society.

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

#142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

You don't think they would use that fact to promote themselves?

Sure they would, just like people would use the bad PR to smear OpenAI if someone did something bad with knowledge their model created. The situation is totally symmetrical and fair as it is, and my point is that expecting them to liable is asymmetric and unfair. If they can be held liable, then they should also be able reap the rewards in order to offset those risks.

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

#143

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…

When my brother started to study Chemisty, he was told a) that it was easy to make meth b) the profit he would make and c) that the police would no doubt catch him, as only university students would make meth so pure. By the time he was done, he knew enough to commit mass murder in half a dusin different very hard to track ways. I am sure doctors know how to commit murder and make it look natural. My brother never ki…

> The solution is the same: punish people for their crimes, don’t punish people for wanting to know things.

The LLMs aren't being punished for wanting* to know things.

The problem for LLMs is, they're incredibly gullible and eager to please and it's been really difficult to stop any human who asks for help even when a normal human looking at the same transcript will say "this smells like the users wants to do a crime".

One use-case people reach for here is authors writing a novel about a crime. Do they need to know all the details? Mythbusters, on (one of?) their Breaking Bad episode(s?) investigated hydrofluoric acid, plus a mystery extra ingredient they didn't broadcast because it (a) made the stuff much more effective and (b) the name of the ingredient wasn't important, only the difference it made.

* Don't anthropomorphise yourself

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

#145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

This is what I'd expect from companies - I don't see why Facebook would get money because they helped people connect to each other who ended up developing a cancer cure, but they definitely should be held accountable for enabling a genocide. You're allowed to operate a business until you cause harm to society, then we can shut it down. I think the big thing you would need is to see the internal emails - if there was…

> I don't see why Facebook would get money because they helped people connect to each other who ended up developing a cancer cure, but they definitely should be held accountable for enabling a genocide.

Why? What does it even mean to "enable a genocide"? Just saying something isn't an argument.

> if there was ever a case where someone raised a concern about this possibility and it wasn't taken seriously, then they should be liable.

Again, why? How is this any different than electricity as a tool, which has both beneficial and harmful uses? AI is knowledge as a utility, that's the position here.

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

#146
post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 te…

> it simply shouldn’t be possible with a proper approach to testing. It just has to be delayed. Like many years after application. Or trigger on very specific and rare circumstances. Not likely in a trial, but near certain at a population scale. Or both... On top of that, If I remember correctly, this liability wavering also exist for Vaccines.

> It just has to be delayed. Like many years after application.

That's one thing. In this case, I don't really know if it's possible to test for something like delayed effects. I'm not even sure if you can identify them with 100% certainty; if you can prove that these effects come from this particular drug and not from another one.

> Or trigger on very specific and rare circumstances. Not likely in a trial, but near certain at a population scale.

And this is different thing. "Specific and rare circumstances" will not lead to millions of deaths (I apologize if I’m being too nitpicky about this particular phrasing, but I want to speak specifically in the context of “millions of deaths”). “Specific and rare circumstances” occur even with fully effective and "proper" medications - this is called “contraindications.” But such rare cases, as I’ve already said, will not lead to mass deaths - precisely because they are rare. I apologize again for focusing on the "millions", but please don’t confuse the scale of the problem.

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

#147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

socialize the losses/risks, privatize the profits.

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?

[dead]

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

#148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People are not complaining because the information is available people are complaining because it’s way easier now to just download an app ask a bunch of questions in a text box and get a bunch of answers that you personally could not have done unless you had an excessive amount of energy and motivation I personally think all this is great and I’m excited for all information to become trivially available Are they gon…

How much easier is it to ask an app than to ask google?

He’s part of the accelerationist crowd - interesting to see that his hype fuelled posts are pretty tame now.

Months ago he was blabbering on about AGI and peddling the marketing Sam et al want people to fall for.

And indeed - yes we have a new interface? So what. The search cost wasn’t that high - the cost with immense magnitude is reading, absorbing the information and then acting on it.

Also this bozo fails to realise once we are on this path, we go down the path to a hyper centralised internet with an inevitable blocking of vpns.

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

#149

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…

> All these findings were reported to both openai and anthropic and they were not interested in responding

Let’s dive into why. When we run normal bounty and responsible disclosure programs there’s usually some level of disregard for issues that can’t / won’t be fixed. They just accept the risk. Perhaps because LLMs don’t have a clean divide between control and input that’s makes the problem unsolvable. Yes. You can add more guardrails and context but that all takes more tokens and in some cases makes results worse for regular usages.

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

#150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Replace ‘invented’ with ‘facilitated’

Doesn't google facilitate all those things? Doesn't internet itself facilitate?

Facilitation is not an idempotent operation.
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