Live data from Hacker News

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

wired.com

211–220 of 343 posts

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

#211

Is this for like military scenarios or like, ChatGPT designed a drug that seemed to work, but people died by the millions 5 years later? Because they should 100% be liable for the latter. The former, good luck trying to prosecute an AI company for something the military does. To an extent, the military would probably want their AI models to be behind their private network, completely firewalled from any public networ…

> Is this for like military scenarios

Probably not. Weapons manufacturers are already well shielded from liability.

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

#212
As an Iowan, this reminds me a lot of the bill that's been pushed through my state's senate twice now (as recently as last year), which would prevent Iowans from filing lawsuits against pesticide and herbicide companies if those companies follow the EPA's labeling guidelines. The bill passed the senate both times, only stopped because the house declined to take it up.

For context, Iowa has the fastest growing rate of new cancer diagnoses in the country, and the second highest overall cancer rate.

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

#213

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…

While scary, information like this has been pretty accessible for 20-30 years now. In the wild west days of the early internet, there were whole forums devoted to "stuff the government doesn't want you to know" (Temple Of The Screaming Electron, anyone?). I suppose the friction is scariest part, every year the IQ required to end the world drops by a point, but motivated and mildly intelligent people have been able to…

I categorize this kind of stuff as "Crisis of accessibility" . AI is not alone in this territory, happens all over the place. Basically it's a problem that's existed for ages but the barrier to entry was high enough we didn't care.

Think 3D printing, it's not all that hard to make a zip gun or similar home-made firearm, but it's still harder than selecting an STL and hitting print.

You could always find info about how to make a bomb or whatnot but you had to like, find and open a book or read a pdf, now an LLM will spoon-feed it to you step by step lowering the barrier.

"Crisis of accessibility" is simultaneously legitimate concern but also in my mind an example of "security by obscurity". that relying on situational friction to protect you from malfeasance is a failure to properly address the core issue.

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

#214
post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> instead of working to make their product safe Make a nondeterministic product safe how?

I'm creating a new start up called QuantumFlop Electricity - there's a 10% chance it will cause a black hole to open up in the Atlantic Ocean that may eventually consume us all but a 50% chance we'll have unlimited clean energy. We'll never know for sure if at any point that black hole may open as it's borrowing energy from the 81st dimension, but the upside seems pretty good. Should I be able to get on with it?

Funny, I was just rereading the Hyperion series. It says there clearly that it was the AIs that created the black hole that led to the destruction of Old Earth. Intentionally.

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

#215
post #203

So they want protection from harms caused by their own models. Classic move — lobby for the rules while you're still ahead of regulators who don't fully understand the technology yet. Would be interesting to see what happens when a state actually pushes back hard.

Presently it appears that a state attempting to push back will get stomped on by the feds: https://news.bgov.com/bloomberg-government-news/colorado-gov...

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

#216

Let’s see how long until this is flagged off the front page. I’ll put the over/under at 1 hour from the posted time

1 hour? I'd go with 3 months.

(Reason is if it is not flagged the spread bet pays out for life!)

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

#217

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…

> 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 Wait, I'm confused. This is gatekeeping, right? I thought gatekeeping was a Bad Thing!

Powerful AI models change the dynamics by greatly reducing the amount of effort that's required to perform complex understanding. A lot of information which did not previously need to be gatekept now needs to be if we cannot somehow keep LLMs from discussing it. (State of the art models still can't do complex understanding reliably, but if 10 times as many people are now capable of attempting some terrible thing, you're still in trouble if AI hallucinations catch 1/4 or 1/2 of them.)

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

#218

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you have a background in biochemistry? I've mostly worked with ChatGPT and Claude on topics I have expertise in. And I one hundred percent have seen them make stupid shit up that a non-expert would think looks legitimate. More broadly, has anyone tried following LLM instructions for any non-trivial chemistry?

So what you are saying is we can expect the number of accidental home-made chlorine-gas (and the like) toxic events go up.

> what you are saying is we can expect the number of accidental home-made chlorine-gas (and the like) toxic events go up

Maybe? One of the quirks of gaining even a surface-level understanding of infrastructure is realising how vulnerable it is to a smart, motivated adversary. The main thing protecting us isn't hard security. It's most Americans having better shit to do than running a truck of fertiliser and oxidiser into a pylon.

Similarly, I'd expect way more people to be trying to make their own designer drug, and hurting themselves that way, than trying to make neurotoxins.

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

#219
post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not directly, but very friendly to the movement and people in it.

Looks to me like the rationalist/AI researcher/EA cohort of (admittedly odd) people was quite deliberately hijacked by a sociopath

The movement itself is consistently aligned with Tech Bros interests, the philosophical foundation is interesting, but the movement itself is quite problematic

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

#220

As an Iowan, this reminds me a lot of the bill that's been pushed through my state's senate twice now (as recently as last year), which would prevent Iowans from filing lawsuits against pesticide and herbicide companies if those companies follow the EPA's labeling guidelines. The bill passed the senate both times, only stopped because the house declined to take it up. For context, Iowa has the fastest growing rate of…

> Iowa has the fastest growing rate of new cancer diagnoses in the country, and the second highest overall cancer rate

Iowa also has a lot of farmers spraying pesticides and herbicides. This feels like genuine political competition between local business interests and public health concerns.

Post reply on HN