Earlier quoted context omitted.
The anarchist cookbook has been around online in some form or another since the mid 90’s.
1971
Was there internet back then?
OpenAI backs Illinois bill that would limit when AI labs can be held liable
291–300 of 343 posts
Re: OpenAI backs Illinois bill that would limit when AI labs can be held liable
#292Earlier quoted context omitted.
Quite an appropriate analogy: gun manufacturers were sued for their responsibility in US mass shootings. They won, so the mass shootings continue.
Wait, you think that if we shut down the gun companies the mass shootings would stop?
Stop no, reduce yes. Same with how seatbelts didn’t end car crash fatalities. Eliminating drunk driving also wouldn’t end road fatalities, but outside of Wisconsin no one believes drunk drivers shouldn’t be in jail.
Re: OpenAI backs Illinois bill that would limit when AI labs can be held liable
#293Let’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
Update: off the front page somewhere between 1 and 4 hours
Re: OpenAI backs Illinois bill that would limit when AI labs can be held liable
#294Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 idea…
“Guns don’t kill people” is actually a pretty strong argument for regulating who can access firearms. Things like red flag laws and background checks.
Re: OpenAI backs Illinois bill that would limit when AI labs can be held liable
#295Earlier quoted context omitted.
Craigslist invented prostitution, Facebook invented suicide, and OpenAI invented terrorism. Ask any trial lawyer in America! The world was perfect in the 1990s without any of these things.
Replace ‘invented’ with ‘facilitated’
Should Ryder be held responsible for the two very serious terror attacks carried out using Ryder trucks in the 90s?
Re: OpenAI backs Illinois bill that would limit when AI labs can be held liable
#296Earlier quoted context omitted.
Information and competency are not the same thing: I know how to build a nuke, I can't actually build one. AI is, and always had been, automation. For narrow AI, automation of narrow tasks. For LLMs, automation of anything that can be done as text. It has always been difficult to agree on the competence of the automation, given ML is itself fully automated Goodhart's Law exploitation, but ML has always been about aut…
Do you know how to build a nuke? You might know the technicaly details of how a nuke is made, but do you know everything that's required, all the parameters and pressure values that are required? I find that unlikely, but AI seems to be increasingly more capable of providing such instructions from cross referenced data.
Even if sources have been lying to me, which is certainly possible, I believe I understand enough to determine cross sections by experiment and from that to determine critical masses; for isotopic enrichment I know about the calutron, which is meh but works and can be designed from scratch with things I know (though caveat have not memorised, just that I know the keywords "proton mass" and "Lorentz force" and what to use them for); for trigger, I would pick a gun-type design rather than implosion, again this is meh but works and is easy.
A few tens of millions of USD mostly spent on electricity, a surprisingly large quantity of natural uranium (because the interesting isotope is a very small percentage), and a few years, and I expect most people on this forum could make a Little Boy type bomb.
Re: OpenAI backs Illinois bill that would limit when AI labs can be held liable
#297Am I alone in thinking this is easy? The human making the decision is always liable. What if the human couldn't reasonably know better? Doesn't matter - If they made the same decision without AI or with old files it is still on them. What if there's no single human decision? Someone is in charge and is responsible. The "I was ordered to" isn't a defense. Does liability without power make sense? People executing have…
> Someone is in charge and is responsible.
This doesn't seem to be a given.
Re: OpenAI backs Illinois bill that would limit when AI labs can be held liable
#298Have the sponsors of this bill stated what the public benefit of providing these immunities would be? Just “more models, more progress, go faster?” I think there’s room for nuance but I don’t see how this could possibly be construed to be in the public interest.
It's the tech version of ag gag laws and liability-protection laws for pesticides.
Re: OpenAI backs Illinois bill that would limit when AI labs can be held liable
#299I 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…
Much longer than that, and was available way before an internet. I graduated STEM high school in St. Petersburg in 1981, and I had several classmates who were big funs of chemistry. That they were able to create from textbooks, school lab ingredients, and understanding:
WWI era poison gas, tear gas, potassium cyanide, and bunch of explosives like acetone peroxide.
LLMs have all of that knowledge in training data
Re: OpenAI backs Illinois bill that would limit when AI labs can be held liable
#300The inevitable result of giving corporations and executives complete immunity from the harms they cause is that people will stop resorting to the legal system and begin resorting to extralegal measures.
And the likely result is that in most of the country those extralegal measures would have to be very extreme to secure a guilty verdict. You can see the beginnings of it now with the ICE protest trial verdicts.