This is the paradoxical times we live in right now.
Don't do something? She walks into the office and start shooting the place up. Several officers and innocent people are killed. Cue the media claiming, "You should've known she was talking about this an AI bot! Why didn't the bot tell anybody she was planning a mass shooting?!"
Do something? She gets rolled up by the cops and questioned about what she was talking about and brought to the cop station and interviewed. Cue the media claiming, "This is an unethical way to use AI, this is an infringement on free speech! This is authoritarian!"
I believe in free speech as much as the next person. But in this day and age, its almost better to be safe than to have to explain to someone's loved ones you had to chance to prevent this and did nothing.
So this conundrum is at least partly of their own making.
It's always been complicated like this. That's why certain professions (psych, lawyer, clergy) come with rules around when and if disclosure is allowed[ required, and/or admissible].
As a Brit, I'm aware of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twitter_joke_trial
I can't say I actually disagree with the initial prosecution. The penalty was a fine, likely less than the cost of investigating it.
Intended as a joke? Blowing off steam? I can understand that, but given the number of people on social media is large enough to include genuinely unhinged people, you can't expect anyone who receives such as message to take them as a joke.
Same with AI use. A billion users, you have to assume some of them are actually sincere if they write about any act of violence, from self-harm to a plan to steal a nuke and use it in a false-flag attack to trigger WW3 and everything between.
That's a distinction that matters to me. Sending a spicy note to an LLM isn't remotely the same thing as posting it on social media where the entire world can read it.
It absolutely will misclassify things, it doesn't know any better.
(We should all wish each other good luck, because we're going to need it).
While the privacy around ai chatbots is rotten in general, I can’t fault anyone who reported this.
They shouldn’t be in a position to report it at all.
The 3rd Party Doctrine destroyed the 4th amendment and is the reason privacy respecting software has to play legal games. E2EE while a good security practice shouldn't be necessary to protect you against the cops rummaging around your stuff. The bar to establish that information is private shouldn't be "literally mathematically inaccessible but the cops are still allowed to try."
In a "three felonies a day" universe?
Would you use a lawyer knowing they are inclined to turn you into the police if you talk about committing a crime in the future?
The law is the law.
We should be happy about this as for once the AI companies did the right thing.
Does all writing now have to be scanned for thought crime?
To me, journaling your intent in a private journal, whether that's an Apple Journal/Note or a Moleskine in your drawer, feels qualitatively different in some way. But I'm not sure why.
So "I'm going to shoot up the police station" written in your own journal feels somewhat different than "I'm going to shoot up the police station" said to a system that might be able to _interpret_ or _act_ on what was said in some way. Did I just give AI a legal duty, or even a soul I didn't think it had before? I've written up about three or four "what about this, what about that" and deleted them all.
The appropriate question is whether I want to live in Florida. This is much more a Florida law problem than an AI company problem.
It would apply if you happened to use Office 365 to write your diary.
I don’t live in the US. But this kind of broad law is hard to implement without surveilling all users, and it has multiple side effects.
What happens if I use Claude or ChatGPT to research sensitive social topics? Would that be considered a social network interaction and used against me when I apply for a visa?
Many governments (especially in Latin America) copy what the US does, meaning that similar laws will be pushed sooner or later.
Anthropic/OpenAI is not obligated to report your use, as long as it's not violating some terribly written law (like the Florida law). The government won't know about it, so no, you will not be denied a visa.
> Many governments (especially in Latin America) copy what the US does, meaning that similar laws will be pushed sooner or later.
I honestly don't know, but I suspect most US states don't have such an overreaching law.