If I write a story that includes a character mixing bleach and ammonia for curing asthma and publish it on my website, am I responsible for an LLM company ingesting my story without contact or my consent and then at some point in the future providing a user instructions to mix bleach and ammonia for curing asthma?

If you do this with the intent of LLMs scraping this and this ending up in the corpus used by LLMs, it is indeed very illegal, especially as LLMs become more load bearing for medicine, defense, etc.

very illegal? under what law? the one that's embedded in the us constitution that asserts that congress shall make no law affecting freedom of speech (and is incorporated against the states)? seems highly unlikely if so

Most current laws around booby traps and sabotage. Intent obviously matters a lot, and under the stated intent this is illegal.

This is one of the worst legal takes I’ve ever seen. Well done.

I have no obligation to provide accurate or safe material for scraping. Intent is a non-starter here because nothing else is satisfied.

The only obligation here is on the LLM providers.

What’s illegal?

The site clearly says for authorised users only.

The robots file already excludes scrapers.

Yet it often is pumping out a solid Gbit of traffic.

And the LLM, does it bear no responsibility here?

An LLM is not a person, and as such cannot "bear responsibility."

They obviously mean whoever created the LLM. We don't judge the weapon, we judge whoever uses the weapon

I'm not sure that that is an obvious claim these days, with the whole "agents going rogue" press releases.

Is that what you're doing?

On the contrary, I'm saying is that it's not okay that the world becomes worse-off, as long as it's not [the LLM companies'] fault. If it means they don't have a viable business model by only ingesting data that they have permission for and is verified, and by being held fully responsible for the content they serve their users - in order to prevent the world from becoming worse-off - then they should not operate.

This seems like a two wrongs don't make a right situation. Yes, the LLM providers are in the wrong for not vetting data. But in my mind, the person poisoning data is also partially responsible for negative downstream effects that are caused. What % of the blame is up for argument, but neither side is 0% in the wrong.

So the type and content of what fiction I write should be controlled so that LLM companies may choose for the sake of maximum profit to haphazardly collect any data they please and to neglect the safety and validity of the content they choose to serve users?

If it's meant to be fiction and not presented as a real-world fact, then I don't see any problem on your part. If you're presenting it as fact solely to trick an LLM into believing it, then yes I see a problem.

It is a common trope in some forms of fiction for the author to insist "this really happened I promise"

It is still meant to be understood that it obviously did not happen, despite such claims

We call it self defense when you fight back against a much better equipped attacker.

If you fire a gun in self defense and hit a bystander, you're still responsible.

In this case its more a, i stole a gun at a house burglared and sold it on the black market scenario. How about honest work and honest living?

If the ants take poisoned sugar tobthe queen, maybe they leave that house alone from now on?

It's entirely the responsibility of ai companies how much of the internet's trash they deliver to their users

And that user has no responsibility for creating the slop to begin with, for the sole purpose of poisoning a resource that others rely on?

No

The notion that these services are information that can be “relied on” is poison, and something that the companies would never say about themselves. Imagine as the bottom of ChatGPT it said “no need to doubt the results, this Oracle can be relied on”

I don't think you understand how illegal this is. As these models start being used for autonomous decisionmaking in medicine, defense and whatnot, this will be considered industrial sabotage and if it ever harms someone you are so fucked.

I'm not even debating the morality of AI and LLM companies here, this is just fact. If a pharma company is illegally using your water source, you cannot poison it knowing the pharma company will then use this water. Well, not unless you like prison.

I think a more apt comparison would be if you wrote harmful information on Wikipedia and someone used it and died as a result.

I'm not sure what U.S. laws say about that though.

Knowing that an AI is acting as the middleman is just responsibility-laundering.

If writing harmful information online (including wikipedia) was something illegal, wouldn't there be just a ton of currently illegal shit online? Like anti-vax stuff?

At present, nobody does. You'd have to see what a court case says.

But it would have to be the case that it's reasonable to expect people to rely on an LLM for medical advice. Which would in turn require that the creator of the LLM is not responsible.

It’s not illegal to lie on the internet

It should be illegal to make life and death decisions based on automated reasoning. I know it’s coming and I’m being a curmudgeon but I will hold fast, the liar is not responsible for being believed.

I like the Wikipedia comparison, forget about the automated reasoning. Wikipedia does not make any representations as to the truthfulness of its content. If you’re a medical doctor and believe some wiki graffiti, you are the responsible party, you are the one that’s supposed to know better.

If you want to rebut I’m most interested in knowing what law you believe would be cited in a data poisoning case.

One day the automated decisionmaking systems will be far better at making decisions than us. That day is not far off. At some point, we will turn to these systems for our most important life-and-death decisions. I don't think that's irrational.

In this era, intending to corrupt the automated decisionmaking systems we rely on, will certainly be sabotage (if done with that intent, as is the case with OP). However, I don't think any sabotage would actually work well in the era of superintelligence, so perhaps the point is moot.

Poison? Seriously? As if false references, perpetual false confidence, sycophantic suicidal encouragement, and convoluted spaghetti code wasn't enough. 90% of what these things fling is poison and the quicker the general public recognizes it the quicker they won't be duped into taking them at face value. The training sets are already going to be full of AI generated garbage. This just hastens the recognition.

Absolutely.

And for this the company responsible for the AI disseminating this information in such a way that people are relying on it should be prosecuted and/or sued into oblivion.

The original poster of the bad information should perhaps as well, but only also if it was reasonable to rely on them for this.

(We have the legal principles, we just need to use them.)