Florida sues OpenAI and Sam Altman over AI risks

Funny that they are not suing Google, xAI, Amazon or Anthropic? Seems to be politically driven given that Musk has a beef with Altman.

> The facts are pretty bad.

The facts alleged in initial complaints usually do look pretty bad. But the causes of action which are still standing after summary judgement and discovery tend to look a lot less bad. So I tend to heavily discount, if not outright dismiss, the facts alleged in initial complaints. But I'm jaded having seen too many damning alleged facts evaporate before trial.

To be clear, I'm no fan of OAI or Altman. I think Altman, Brockman et al did pretty much subvert a non-profit. Unfortunately, I also think the OAI's board (past and recent) screwed up in a series of remarkably bone-headed ways which allowed Altman, Brockman, et al to get away with it. It's ironic that some of OAI's board members most aligned with the EA (Effective Altruism) movement ended up being so ineffective in fulfilling the governance duties of a non-profit board member.

But the fact OAI is run by dudes who could have been sent by central casting for the role of "Smarmy Asshole Tech Bro #1 & #2" nor that ChatGPT said unimaginably horrific things to vulnerable people, fulfills ALL the prongs of each test required to get a conviction on these causes of action. Even if ChatGPT literally gave Hitler a detailed plan and an upbeat "Okay, let's do this!" to executing the actual Holocaust, that's still just the first prong. And hitting the first prong a million times harder doesn't move any of the other required prongs even a bit.

Even in cases where the accused is obviously guilty, proving all the required prongs beyond a reasonable doubt can still be very hard. It's going to come down to a bunch of the details I mentioned in my other reply to you like: sales and usage context as well as claimed features of the product along with disclaimers, disclosures, existing practice, prior knowledge of actual harm, average user competence, etc. In short, it's not enough that the 'product' actually caused horrific things. IANAL and I don't know Florida liability law but, in broad strokes, cases like this need to prove that an average reasonable person would clearly know these exact bad things were likely to happen based on what OAI knew at the time, and that OAI had an express duty to prevent those things, and was directly negligent in fulfilling those duties and knew they were negligent. Each of those involve nuanced situational judgements based on a lot of facts and timing not yet in evidence and if just one of them isn't quite provable beyond a reasonable doubt enough to convince 100% of a Florida jury, the whole case can fail. LLM chatbots being so new and unknown creates a lot of reasonable doubt for the prosecution to overcome. That's why I'm confident the prosecution has no desire to actually try this case.

> The fact that without that exemption, gun manufacturers would be liable

Uh, okay? But the topic wasn't about guns per se, someone just brought guns up as one example of a dangerous product which can be sold to consumers. They just happened to pick a uniquely poor example due to a special exception. My point was that you seized on the exception to reject that one poor example but never addressed the poster's underlying point.

Given HN's community preference to engage in good faith by interpreting other poster's in the most charitable way possible, you could have replied, "Well, guns aren't a good example to support your point due to a unique exception, but... to your point, there are other dangerous products which ARE sold to consumers without special exemptions, so in those cases..." and then added your point or counter-point.

I still don't know if you had a point which refutes or even addresses that a lot of very dangerous products are legally sold to consumers, so a product actually being dangerous isn't enough by itself to make OAI guilty of anything. In saying "that proves the rule" you seemed to be implying that without a special exemption like guns have, dangerous products would be liable for any harm they cause - which clearly isn't always the case.

Effective politicians (which SA is) have by now realized that every tragedy is an opportunity to convince people to give away their rights for the vague notion of safety, as defined by them.

Chemtrails are generally just weather modification, which is obviously real and happening. Although that's not to say we've never been sprayed with other things before - and the culprits vary, from military exercises all the way to rival agro companies taking out another companies yield. To pretend like people, organizations and governments don't engage in creative malicious behavior for a wide assortment of reasons is so incredibly naive.