OpenAI whistleblower found dead in San Francisco apartment • Hacker News Board

Re: OpenAI whistleblower found dead in San Francisco apartment

#351

Post by visarga » Sat, Dec 14, 2024, 3:17 PM UTC

sharkjacobs wrote: post #13

http://suchir.net/fair_use.html When does generative AI qualify for fair use? by Suchir Balaji

> training on copyrighted data without a similar licensing agreement is also a type of market harm, because it deprives the copyright holder of a source of revenue

I would respond to this by

1. authors don't actually get revenue from royalties, instead it's all about add revenue which leads to enshittification. If they were to live on royalties they would die of hunger, artists, copywriters and musicians.

2. copyright is increasingly concentrated in the hands of a few companies and don't really benefit the authors or the readers

3. actually the competition to new creative works is not AI, but old creative works that have been accumulating for 25 years on the web

I don't think restrictive copyright is what we need. Instead we have seen people migrate from passive consumption to interactivity, we now prefer games, social networks and search engines to TV, press and radio. Can't turn this trend back, it was created by the internet. We have now wikipedia, github, linux, open source, public domain, open scientific publications and non-restrictive environments for sharing and commenting.

If we were to take the idea of protecting copyrights to the extreme, it would mean we need to protect abstract ideas not just expression, because generative AI can easily route around that. But if we protected abstractions from reuse, it would be a disaster for creativity. I just think copyright is a dead man walking at this point.

Re: OpenAI whistleblower found dead in San Francisco apartment

#352

Post by insapio » Sat, Dec 14, 2024, 3:30 PM UTC

lxgr wrote: post #349

KMnO4 wrote: post #331

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Needlessly tied to crypto Let’s unpack that. By “crypto” you probably mean cryptocurrency, but let’s not forget it’s the same crypto as in cryptography. You absolutely want cryptography involved in something like this for obvious reasons. You’ve probably also heard the term blockchain and immediately think of speculative currency futures. So throw that to the wind for a second and imagine how useful a distributed l…

How can a smart contract “keep a secret” in a trustless way? Isn’t effectively all the trust still in the party releasing it at the right time, or not releasing it otherwise? If so, is the blockchain aspect anything other than decentralization theater? I guess one thing you can do with a blockchain is keeping that trusted party honest and accountable for not releasing at the desired date and in the absence of a liven…

You can create a timelock smart contract requiring a future state of the blockchain to have been reached. Once that time has been reached, you can freely execute the function on the contract to retrieve the information. Tested it years ago, to lock up 1 ETH in essentially a CD for a year.

The trust is held in your own code implementation of the contract and that ETH will continue to exist and not be hard-forked or Shor'd or something.

Re: OpenAI whistleblower found dead in San Francisco apartment

#353

Post by krisoft » Sat, Dec 14, 2024, 3:30 PM UTC

hilux wrote: post #184

XorNot wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To what, encourage whistleblowers to not come forward because "everyone knows they'll get killed"? The only benefit of turning it into gossip is to dissuade other whistleblowers, without the inconvenience of actually having to kill anyone.

How exactly is post-death gossip going to dissuade other whistleblowers?

I’m not sure what you are asking. There is someone who knows some ugly secret and is considering if they want to publicly release it. If they can recall many dead whistleblowers who were rumoured to have been assasinatend over that kind of action then they are more likely to stay silent. Because they don’t want to die the same way.

And the key here is that the future would be whistleblowers hear about it. That is where the gossip is important.

In fact it doesn’t even have to be a real assasination. Just the rumour that it might have been is able to dissuade others.

Which part of this is unclear to you? Or which part are you asking about?

Re: OpenAI whistleblower found dead in San Francisco apartment

#354

Post by im3w1l » Sat, Dec 14, 2024, 3:30 PM UTC

stavros wrote: post #308

im3w1l wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If your enemy knows how your switch works it is more feasible to disable it. In this case taking control of either that service or your email should do the trick.

I run that service, and, so far, no issues. It's definitely not secure against server takeover, but it's much easier than making your own switch reliable.

I'm just cautioning people against disclosing how they set up their switch. Not criticizing your service in particular.

Re: OpenAI whistleblower found dead in San Francisco apartment

#355

Post by stavros » Sat, Dec 14, 2024, 3:33 PM UTC

im3w1l wrote: post #354

stavros wrote: post #308

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I run that service, and, so far, no issues. It's definitely not secure against server takeover, but it's much easier than making your own switch reliable.

I'm just cautioning people against disclosing how they set up their switch. Not criticizing your service in particular.

I know, I'm just pointing out that it might not be secure against the NSA. And yep, definitely don't tell powerful enemies where your switch is.

Re: OpenAI whistleblower found dead in San Francisco apartment

#356

Post by DennisP » Sat, Dec 14, 2024, 3:34 PM UTC

lxgr wrote: post #349

KMnO4 wrote: post #331

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Needlessly tied to crypto Let’s unpack that. By “crypto” you probably mean cryptocurrency, but let’s not forget it’s the same crypto as in cryptography. You absolutely want cryptography involved in something like this for obvious reasons. You’ve probably also heard the term blockchain and immediately think of speculative currency futures. So throw that to the wind for a second and imagine how useful a distributed l…

How can a smart contract “keep a secret” in a trustless way? Isn’t effectively all the trust still in the party releasing it at the right time, or not releasing it otherwise? If so, is the blockchain aspect anything other than decentralization theater? I guess one thing you can do with a blockchain is keeping that trusted party honest and accountable for not releasing at the desired date and in the absence of a liven…

A smart contract can still help. Use Shamir's secret sharing to split the decryption key. Each friend gets a key fragment, plus the address of the smart contract that combines them.

Now none of your friends have to know each other. No friend can peek on their own, they can't conspire with each other, and if one of them gets compromised, it doesn't put the others at risk. It's basically the same idea as "social recovery wallets," which some people use to protect large amounts of funds.

If you don't have any friends then as you suggest, a conceivable infrastructure would be to pay anonymous providers to deposit funds in the contract, which they would lose they don't provide their key fragment in a timely manner after the liveness signal fails. For verification, the contract would have to hold hashes of the key fragments. Each depositor would include a public key with the deposit, which the whistleblower can use to encrypt and post a key fragment. (Of course the vulnerability here is the whistleblower's own key.)

The contract should probably also hold a hash of the encrypted document, which would be posted somewhere public.

Re: OpenAI whistleblower found dead in San Francisco apartment

#357

Post by nilamo » Sat, Dec 14, 2024, 3:34 PM UTC

IAmGraydon wrote: post #346

adrianmonk wrote: post #201

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Isn't it? A dead man's switch is a device that triggers an automatic action upon your death. Information and instructions given to a lawyer fits that definition.

I see. I guess I think of it as something that triggers automatically if you don’t reset it every day and doesn’t rely on another person. For example, a script that publishes the information if you don’t input the password every day.

And then it's published if you experience a temporary power outage. If it's important that it's only released if you're actually dead, putting it in the hands of a person is your only real option.

Re: OpenAI whistleblower found dead in San Francisco apartment

#358

Post by [deleted] » Sat, Dec 14, 2024, 3:38 PM UTC

neuroelectron wrote: post #293

ALittleLight wrote: post #214

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Stealing data" seems pretty strong. Web scraping is legal. If you put text on the public Internet other people can read it or do statistical processing on it. What do you mean he was "stealing data"? Was he hacking into somewhere?

When you use some webpages, it forces you to agree to an EULA that might preclude web scraping. NYTimes is such a webpage which is why they were sued. This is evidence that OpenAI didn't care about the law. Someone with internal communications about this could completely destroy the company!!!

[deleted]

Re: OpenAI whistleblower found dead in San Francisco apartment

#359

Post by jll29 » Sat, Dec 14, 2024, 3:41 PM UTC

calf wrote: post #80

lolinder wrote: post #18

Normally the word "whistleblower" means someone who revealed previously-unknown facts about an organization. In this case he's a former employee who had an interview where he criticized OpenAI, but the facts that he was in possession of were not only widely known at the time but were the subject of an ongoing lawsuit that had launched months prior. As much as I want to give this a charitable reading, the only explana…

> Normally the word "whistleblower" means someone who revealed previously-unknown facts about an organization. A whistleblower could also be someone in the process of doing so, i.e. they have a claim about the organization, as well as a promise to give detailed facts and evidence later in a courtroom. I think that's the more commonsense understanding of what whistleblowers are and what they do. Your remark hinges on…

Technically, the term "insider witness of the prosecution" could fit his role.

Re: OpenAI whistleblower found dead in San Francisco apartment

#360

Post by DennisP » Sat, Dec 14, 2024, 3:46 PM UTC

krisoft wrote: post #353

hilux wrote: post #184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How exactly is post-death gossip going to dissuade other whistleblowers?

I’m not sure what you are asking. There is someone who knows some ugly secret and is considering if they want to publicly release it. If they can recall many dead whistleblowers who were rumoured to have been assasinatend over that kind of action then they are more likely to stay silent. Because they don’t want to die the same way. And the key here is that the future would be whistleblowers hear about it. That is whe…

The only way to prevent that is to not report whistleblower deaths at all. It's not like people can't privately have their own suspicions, and if I were a potential whistleblower, I'd want to know that any apparent accidents or suicides get very thoroughly investigated due to public outcry.