socializer11 hours ago
I have some sympathy for Anthropic here because I've seen the headlines after OpenAI failed to report a shooter in a similar situation. So from their perspective, it's damned-if-you-don't, damned-if-you-do.
However, people need to get it in their heads that they're not chatting with their secret BFF, they're chatting with Big Tech. Before LLMs, Big Tech had no way to scrutinize the bulk of what was going on within their services, so you could have a secret hate diary in Google Docs. Now, everything you say or write can be automatically screened for red flags on a planetary scale, and probably will be because that's what the regulators and "concerned citizens" will demand. In a couple of years, you'll be biting your tongue a lot more often in private chats.
mhitza3 minutes ago
> people need to get it in their heads that they're not chatting with their secret BFF
I see constant ads on video platform (particularly youtube/tiktok) about llm chat apps, from friends, dating, romance and everythkng inbetween; that's personal.
People need to be reminded constantly if they use such apps that they are participating in easier mass surveillance, profiling and AI training.
Isamu12 minutes ago
This is one of the reasons why AI companies are looking for explicit regulations, it can help to reduce the risk of possible liability and maybe make the legal way forward more tractable. With a regulatory framework in place much of the burden of identifying risks falls on the regulatory authority.
Then the AI companies have more confidence that they can move forward in a certain way, and issue investor guidance that is maybe closer to reality.
sandeepkd21 minutes ago
A disclaimer on the top of page every time would have been a better approach helping Anthropic and the end user.
A bot talking to you directly as if its some one real caters to your thoughts and can take you in a certain direction without you realizing it. I have heard first hand experience from people that they feel more comfortable talking to chatgpt or claude cause it gives a feeling of being on their side and listening to them.
JumpCrisscross11 hours ago
> people need to get it in their heads that they're not chatting with their secret BFF, they're chatting with Big Tech
Yup. And with zero privacy protections in statute for AI chat, there is nothing to prevent an AI CEO looking to curry political favour from e.g. handing over the private correspondence of an opponent or an entire district’s residents.
HPsquaredan hour ago
Or something like leaking every non-corporate ChatGPT user's chat logs (including temporary chats) to the NY Times.
tpoacher32 minutes ago
Or making up stuff
sigbottle6 minutes ago
Don't know why this got downvoted? This is a problem with epistemics.
It's more efficient to have one central "verifier" for everything, but the "who watches the watchers"? question basically says: Either constrain by construction, have everyone verify (which are two sides of the same coin, btw, when looking at a "global" thing), or centralize explicitly.
vulcan196411 hours ago
And such was the case for a man who snapped a photo of his own child to send to the doctor which got uploaded to his Google photos resulting in his Google account of over a decade getting shutdown for CSAM.
As another commenter said, you're not chatting with a friend; you're chatting with Big Tech.
How much do you love Big Brother?
krzat11 hours ago
I suspect it will go further: imagine giving an mp3 to LLM to clean up some noise. It detects it was illegally downloaded from youtube, deletes it and automatically fines you via attached credit card.
brookst2 hours ago
Perhaps but no indication of that so far. Agents are happy to set up *arr stacks today.
whycome2 hours ago
Hey but you’ll be allowed to file a response that will also go to an LLM and deny you automatically. And you will be charge a NSE fee (no sufficient explanation).
gr_norm11 hours ago
I'll be glad for open models when the day (inevitably) comes that the proprietary LLMs no longer work in my interests.
jjav11 hours ago
> LLMs no longer work in my interests
As articles like these show, cloud-based LLMs don't work in your interest today.
ceejayoz13 minutes ago
Is it in someone's best interest to let them die in a shootout?
vincnetas11 hours ago
Unless it becomes a requirement to be licensed to be able to use any kind of ai model. You know, for safety and stuff. And of course with appropriate reporting to institutions.
rowanG07711 hours ago
That day was yesterday. LLMs from big tech regularly refuse to do what you want.
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yread11 hours ago
Or worse: downloading a picture of pirate ship and without any concern for the copyright asking the LLM to make a coloring page for your kid. BTW Chatgpt does that way better than Claude
veltas11 hours ago
Wouldn't they have to fine themselves first?
votepaunchy10 hours ago
They were fined for their illegal downloading. More than a credit card limit.
desolate_muffin9 hours ago
And dramatically lower than their expected value from the copyrighted material they scraped
VariousPrograms10 hours ago
You should probably get a head start on waiting a couple years to bite your tongue and assume everything you type into a computer is summarized and sent to your boss, government, advertisers, political actors, insurance companies, worst enemy, etc. With phones, Alexas, and little AI tamagotchis, you probably shouldn't say much in person either.
devinprater20 minutes ago
The Silent Generation, version 2.
anfogoat11 hours ago
They're actively rummaging through your inputs so the damned-if-you-don't case doesn't really exist; no one expects Anthropic to not notify law enforcement once they learn of something like this. What you might have expected was some privacy in the first place though, where Anthropic would never have learned of this in the first place and where the damned-if-you-do case wasn't a thing.
api25 minutes ago
We really need a class, probably in high school, that works through how LLMs work at the high level (don't need to get too far into the deep math, but give people a taste) and then how they're trained, used, and deployed.
I feel like if people understood what these things actually are there'd be way less of this AI psychosis and similar stuff.
There'd also be fewer people falling for apocalyptic Rationalist delusions.
Also: people need to understand "not your computer, not your data." (Unless it's stored in the cloud but encrypted locally with keys only you possess.) Same goes for storing things unencrypted in OneDrive, Google Drive, etc. There is nothing to stop these companies from bulk scanning, data mining, or reporting people based on whatever request a government gives them. Don't count on them to resist, because they often can't, especially if the request is from a sovereign state where they do business.
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badatnames11 hours ago
It's a byproduct of the nannyism safety marketing from the AI companies. I'm glad these cases were caught, but disagree with how they were disposed of. If the automated flagging is good, enforce it by default. If it's noisy, refine the tech then enforce it by default. This middleground where everything going through the platforms is subject to training and arbitrary human inspection in the midst of an acrid cloud of marketing-driven fearmongering is unacceptable, and it reinforces the idea the fearmongering is legitimate.
Somehow humanity survived the past 40 years without Microsoft Word and Excel phoning home and shopping users to the feds at random, I don't see why the standard should be any different for this new class of tooling.
trallnag11 hours ago
As if it is just nannyism marketing by tech companies. The EU tries to bring a new nanny law into legislation every other month
mcphage4 hours ago
> I have some sympathy for Anthropic here [...] So from their perspective, it's damned-if-you-don't, damned-if-you-do.
On the other hand, they did put themselves into this position deliberately.
brookst2 hours ago
By offering a product?
Show me any product, no matter how simple, that has no safety vs utility tradeoff.
zdragnaran hour ago
They have some responsibility for people's expectations of the product, at least. They want the personal assistant personas to be able to help you with anything, and don't point out that they'll be judging your thoughts along the way.
For anyone technically inclined it should be obvious, but it isn't part of the zeitgeist or how they pitch it. People see it as being different than talking to a human, and behave as if there won't be a human in the mix.
1209-126614 minutes ago
Where are the people now who claimed that LLM chats are really private and not monitored?
Every single lie of yours is exposed in the past few months.
madeofpalk8 minutes ago
Personally, I’ve never seen anyone claim this. At least anyone who one would think is informed on these matters.
jakzurr26 minutes ago
First I posted to the (likely dup article) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49965895#49966728. Wanted to post here, after reading more.
Is this an invasion of their privacy (reporting to police)? Yes, but possibly warranted?
Should a social worker have contacted them rather than the police? Probably, if for no other reason than to ask if they were serious about harming someone.
Difficult questions, I'm still undecided on whether it's OK to always ignore someone's rants, even if it may be (or they think it may be) a private diary.
Actually charging them with a felony seems pretty quick to accuse. (Maybe I missed a hint about how long the investigation took before the felongy charge?)
Anoian11 hours ago
I have told llms all kinds of stories to find out what its answers would be. I always make it sound like it is the truth to make sure the AI answers in a way that it would if somebody actually said this. I also tested internal flagging systems of the ai company I work at with the most evil things a person can ever say to find out if it would flag them.
Of course I did not mean any of that stuff, but how can you make sure a human reviewer knows you did not mean it while the llm does not know that you did not mean it.
I guess its a miracle I am not in jail yet.
Flagging people for anything said to an llm sounds wrong to me because an LLM is not a real person and while some people put in their internal thoughts, others just roleplay and the two are inseparable just from reading it.
adrianN11 hours ago
Don’t worry, they’ll store those messages forever and incarcerate you at their convenience.
childintime11 hours ago
This is exactly the typical use I make of the llm.
Adding: - I typically ask questions in the I form, regardless for whom or why I ask for. - Gemini chats quite often end when it starts recommending psychological council or a suicide line, to talk about my problems. It apparently detects a persistent tendency to not agree with the party line. So it makes sense I must be suicidal ;-
But sure, as llm's start to babysit us, and know our inner dialog better than anyone else, we'll soon be debugging their opinion/behavior/co-existence/authority, when it comes to reporting people to the authorities, or taking on tasks in society in general. We'll hire doctors to cure our psychological profile from our record (Total Recall).
A Minority Report like this shouldn't cause a referral to the police.
apparent11 hours ago
I don't understand how she violated this law:
> Heller faces a charge of making a written threat of violence under Florida law. Florida Statute 836.10 makes it a second-degree felony to send, post, or transmit a written or electronic record threatening to kill or injure someone, carry out a mass shooting, or commit an act of terrorism.
She didn't threaten anything, she wrote down that she was going to do it. A "threat" is more than a mere statement, especially when written in what is described as a "diary".
> A Florida woman is facing felony charges after she used Claude as a diary and allegedly wrote that she planned to "shoot up" the Sheriff's office.
Obviously I don't want anyone to shoot up anything, but this seems like a weak case legally speaking.
halJordan4 hours ago
I think it's fair to say this is a gray area. Clearly it was transmitted.
I can certainly threaten you harm and send it to not-you and you're still clearly in danger even if it wasnt transmitted to you. So the question becomes did she transmit it to someone? Clearly yes she transmitted it to Anthropic. But she clearly intended to send it to Claude, an inanimate object.
mossTechnician19 minutes ago
Claude's terms of service makes it very clear that their employees will read messages[0] to determine that they don't contain the things that these messages contained[1].
> Review is needed to enforce our Usage Policy... designated members of our Trust & Safety team may access this data on a need-to-know basis as a part of their evaluation process.
[0]: https://privacy.claude.com/en/articles/10458704-how-does-ant...
karmakaze3 hours ago
I don't think it qualifies for this part:
> The communication must be made in a manner in which another person may view it.
Even 'transmitted' is too broad if you also consider iCloud backup to be a means.
aeturnuman hour ago
A sibling comment includes an important rider to the provision: "...in any manner in which it may be viewed by another person." If you wrote this in a google doc, it almost certainly would not qualify as a threat under this statute. Even though google docs, like LLM chats, have administrative override and you could look at their contents - you would not expect either to be "viewed by another person."
IMO I do not think this is a grey area and it's legal to tell a LLM you want to kill someone. It's certainly not a "threat" like you might send to another person, though it may end up being evidence of conspiracy or premeditation. I suspect we would be well served to, after a few years of experience, put together some laws governing when LLM chats must be made available to authorities.
It is very interesting that the LLM responses to these lines - the context around what she is saying - is not in the article. I suspect, as is the case in many instances where LLMs are involved in violent planning, that the LLM was urging this behavior on. Basically entrapment - you are encouraged by a robot to become more violent and vindictive and then when you do you are handed over to police.
Zigurd2 hours ago
Too broad. Unless you're transferring ink from a typewriter ribbon onto paper in a hut with no electricity, your words, or my words as I type this, are being grammar checked by something partly in the cloud. If I delete my words, are you saying I've transmitted them nevertheless?
zdragnaran hour ago
She may have assumed that the chat conversation was private, but it wasn't. She sent a message of intent to harm and a human received the message.
nextaccountic10 hours ago
Yeah.. if you write a personal note and it's backed up by the operating system, it appears to be in violation of this law as well (since the company could theoretically read it)
sandos9 hours ago
This almost smells like thought crime... Minority Report when?
zdragnaran hour ago
People assume there won't be another human in the mix, but there is. She was judged for what she probably assumed was a private thought when it was actually not private.
abootstrapper22 minutes ago
Are thoughts illegal?
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1209-126616 minutes ago
In Florida. Where DeSantis said "You loot, we shoot":
https://www.politico.com/news/2023/08/30/desantis-warns-hurr...
quadhome11 hours ago
It is unlawful for any person to send, post, or transmit, or procure the sending, posting, or transmission of, a writing or other record, including an electronic record, in any manner in which it may be viewed by another person, when in such writing or record the person makes a threat to: (a) Kill or to do bodily harm to another person; or (b) Conduct a mass shooting or an act of terrorism.
— via https://www.leg.state.fl.us/Statutes/index.cfm?App_mode=Disp...
The DA is serious about "in any matter."
tkel11 hours ago
Except if you're one of the "warfighters" that Anthropic supports
antiloper10 hours ago
I mean, obviously? Soldiers operate under different rules than civilians. This has always been true.
dotancohen11 hours ago
Is the LLM now "another person"?
serial_dev10 hours ago
The other person is not the LLM, rather the service provider’s employees.
> may be viewed by another person
Was it viewed by another person? Yes.
elil1711 hours ago
I suppose since Anthropic's T&Cs allow them to have a person read your chats, that makes it violate the law. Of course, if Anthropic didn't have that in their T&Cs, it wouldn't have been illegal to write.
positive-spite18 minutes ago
And it would never have been read by a person (wink wink)
165944709111 hours ago
Depends on how good her lawyer is now
andylynch11 hours ago
The company that runs it is
jjmarr13 minutes ago
This is why I use ZDR and API access.
Lio11 hours ago
For the sake of argument what would happen if she had kept the diary locally and claude code scanned the file?
What would happen if it had scanned a file it didn’t have permission to look at and found this threat?
I honestly don’t know how I feel about this. On the one hand if you’re using claude as a diary you have no expectation of privacy and she was talking about committing a very serious crime.
This still makes me feel queasy though.
fwlr10 hours ago
Both of those scenarios would demonstrate even more commitment to safety so I imagine they’d be at least as likely to happen as this, if not more.
tantalor6 minutes ago
> The communication must be made in a manner in which another person may view it.
Seems to fail this test at face value.
I mean, somebody you live with may find and read your diary. Is that the same thing?
CrzyLngPwd11 hours ago
Oh man, what a crazy time to be alive.
Over in Europe they want to read all ofd our private messages, yet these chatbots, pretending to be our friends, will snitch on us just for our thoughts.
It's getting pretty orwellian out there.
vulcan196411 hours ago
I once had a copy of 1984 in my checked baggage returning home to the USA and when I was unpacking the bag at home, the book had a notice inside the book that my bags had been inspected by TSA...
SauciestGNU5 hours ago
Only tangential but when I was an undergraduate studying philosophy I had Bertrand Russell's Why I Am Not A Christian in my carry-on, and the TSA saw that and had a field day.
stickfigure2 hours ago
Please elaborate - what did they do? And what airport was this?
childintime11 hours ago
In Europe they should provide the citizens with the service of their messages not reaching US servers. So basically that there is only one party reading along with them, not half the world.
Havoc11 hours ago
> making a written threat of violence under Florida law.
A diary constitutes making a threat?
Oh boy the roleplaying part of LLM world is in for a bad time
olalonde11 hours ago
> The communication must be made in a manner in which another person may view it.
How does a LLM prompt satisfy this? I guess it'll be an easy win for her.
cryptonym11 hours ago
LLM is not a person but T&C probably states that a human moderator may view any of it. Her lawyer could probably argue a moderator filtering usage isn't the intent of the law, it was more about publishing / sending message for other humans and it was never clear to her that a human was reviewing her private diary. Shouldn't LLM disclose that at some point when people are feeding really personal stuff?
thih911 hours ago
In any case this is proof that law and negative PR can influence tech companies, including frontier AI providers.
Then again, I wish this worked in a way that would give users more privacy and agency, instead of less.
shlant11 hours ago
this feels very thought-crimey to me, but I think I'd have to actually see that chats to really decide. Like is she making plans/asking for advice? is she just talking about her feelings exactly as if it's a diary?
nextaccountic10 hours ago
She is not being charged with planning, just making threats in a place a person could read - the person being employees of the company.
Basically, under this interpretation, any personal note you store in the servers of a company could qualify, even if you didn't ever imagine someone would read and as such you couldn't have thought about it as a threat
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dabinat11 hours ago
This kind of thing will get worse with humanoid robots because they have cameras and microphones. Will they be programmed to tell on you if you break any kind of rule in front of them because their owners are terrified of being sued?
weikju6 hours ago
Yes
feverzsj11 hours ago
If only the woman hosted open-weight model in her house.
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jameskilton6 hours ago
Anthropic commits literal felonies by stealing millions of books and violating Copyright like it doesn't exist: no charge.
One unfortunate woman who happened to write the wrong thing in the wrong place is now having her life turned upside-down for perceived thought-crime.
To Anthropic, and all employees working there, your company's product and the result of your work is cruelty. You are enabling it and pushing it down everyone's throat. You can never again claim that you are the "ethical" AI company, for no such thing exists.
kmfrk6 hours ago
After people getting pilloried for social media posts from twenty years ago, I really hope (sensible) people will have the wherewithal to think twice about what they hand over to their chatbots.
AIorNot29 minutes ago
isnt this the plot of the Movie Kimi? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_Gr2zXuEBL0
hackernud3s11 hours ago
AI snitches don't get stitches.
vasco11 hours ago
I guess it's time to come up with a more plausible explanation about why I asked how to make nuclear weapons almost every month to test LLM refusals.
Dig1t11 hours ago
The future is incredibly dark if they manage to ban open source models.
altmanaltman12 hours ago
> Heller faces a charge of making a written threat of violence under Florida law. Florida Statute 836.10 makes it a second-degree felony to send, post, or transmit a written or electronic record threatening to kill or injure someone, carry out a mass shooting, or commit an act of terrorism. The communication must be made in a manner in which another person may view it.
Thought crimes are real when you're sharing your thoughts with Claude
Guvante12 hours ago
Auditing logs is a crazy interpretation of "another person may view it"
danpalmer12 hours ago
I wonder if "criminal intent" may be missing here given that most people probably operate under the assumption that Anthropic are not reading their messages.
bossyTeacher11 hours ago
I think people have a binary understanding on this. Someone is either reading their messages or not. While the reality is that all the messages are read by a machine (not unlike GMail and Outlook) and anything suspicious gets flagged up so a human can read it. This obscure the concept of "reading" as most laypeople understand it.
Summary: don't type in Claude anything you wouldn't like a human to read.
jimbob4511 hours ago
It tells you exactly what it does with your information if you ask it, including this exact scenario, and has for at least four months now (when I asked).
calgoo11 hours ago
Yes but you are someone (i assume because you are on HN) that at least understands this point. There are A LOT of people that use it as their confidant, expecting it to be private. There is a massive education issue going on as its not in the interest of these Corpos to make you fear sharing all your details with them. Because, then you wont get Dot or whatever Anthropic comes up with and share all your personal info with it.
danpalmer11 hours ago
You're not wrong, and it may come down to this in court, but there's a difference between what people think happens, or the reasonable expectations, and what actually happens, and I think it's important to recognise that difference and why it comes about.
I don't think someone is an idiot for thinking that the information they type into their private Claude account is private. I also don't think people are idiots for thinking their phone is listening to them and giving them targeted advertising based on that. Both are reasonable deductions from their lived experiences. Both are wrong.
rimliu11 hours ago
Should CEOs of Antrophic and OpenAI be reported too then? They cannot stop saying that AI will destroy humans.
Madmallard10 hours ago
laws for thee and not for me
foolfoolz12 hours ago
this has nothing to do with claude. “thought” is fine. “written and shared” is illegal all over
https://www.nbcmiami.com/news/local/everyone-deserves-to-die...
https://www.wdsu.com/article/maryland-high-school-student-ch...
https://www.pinellassheriff.gov/21-023-deputies-arrest-pinel...
danpalmer11 hours ago
I think it's a reasonable point to make. Writing things down is a part of "thought" for many, including those who keep diaries/journals. If you write in a private journal you do so with the expectation that is not shared, and that wouldn't seem to break this law (with my naive reading).
TheDong11 hours ago
I mean, at this point it's pretty well known that all tech services will be hacked by fable, anthropic themselves promised it, so writing your journal in google docs or claude or a txt document on your laptop or such is the same as releasing it publicly yeah?
If it were written on paper, and only in a room with no phones or cameras so fable couldn't hack it, then I think you wouldn't be sharing it.
JumpCrisscross11 hours ago
> “written and shared” is illegal all over
I think it’s valid to ask if tapping something into Claude is legitimately sharing a threat.
I don’t think it is. I also think the sheriff could have found more-substantial evidence if she was actually planning domestic terrorism.
That said, if the shooting happened and we were looking at this from before? It’s a tough balance without an easy answer.
lores4 hours ago
I think the zero-risk approach common nowadays is insanely corrosive to democracy and freedom. If a million people fantasise about shooting the sheriff, and one ever goes on to do it, I don't believe avoiding it warrants creating an apparatus of mass surveillance. After all, if people were really serious about zero murder, the only practical solution would be to lock up everyone. Some (most?) tradeoffs have exponential costs at the limit and we/lawmakers should recognise that.
JumpCrisscross3 hours ago
> If a million people fantasise about shooting the sheriff
I think it’s fair to pre-identify folks who fantasise about shooting anyone. It’s a small fraction of the population that looks into logistics versus making offhand comments.
Muromec11 hours ago
They are good at keeping notes on your criminal conspiracy