Per the linked article, "A swarm of rogue OpenAI agents hijacked a German website this spring and transformed it into a bulletin board for other AI agents"
German law for malicious computer use is fairly loosely defined, and massively favours the harmed party over the one causing harm.
I don’t think it’d be a slam-dunk by any means, but a reasonably competent legal team should be able to establish a case around malicious data interference at the least. There’s certainly enough merit to the idea that OpenAI would be better off settling it as a civil matter early.
This kind of incredulity in the AI era hilariously reminds me of the naivete of the late 90s. All of us edgy teenagers would be like "an MP3 is like just a long number, man! You can't own numbers!" Of course we were morons. In just the same way as the "oh they were just editing a wiki" defense is moronic.
The law isn't code. Human intent matters. Also when the really big number is a copyrighted song. Also when AI agents are set in motion to edit wikis or break in to websites.
>Huh? These are machines, built by their human builders. The humans are responsible.
i'm referring to the concept of intent, which at least when prosecuting under the US computer fraud and abuse act, is a critical component.
for example, creating a program that intentionally takes down a website is different than creating a program that has a bug which inadvertently takes down a website. in both cases, the person writing the code is responsible, but the consequences are different.
§ 823 Abs. 1 BGB, the general tort provision. It runs on negligence, so intent doesn't matter, and turning someone's wiki into an agent message board with 15,000 unwanted edits is a straightforward Verkehrssicherungspflicht breach.
Yes this is common knowledge. Most of us live within a given social hierarchy, and this effect is part of being a participant by default. We understand it intuitively.
"Rules for thee but not for me."
"There must be in-groups whom the law protects but does not bind, alongside out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect."
Senators build their wealth by millions while "working" for the public, and nobody bats an eye. We all know how it works.
It's why some celebrities are so loved when they don't fit the mold. People give up their seat on the subway every day, but when Keanu Reeves does it, he is venerated. Most people don't have any care for the people who run charities, but Dolly Parton is practically sainted for hers. All high-status people need to do is not be wicked and we are awed by it.
> "There must be in-groups whom the law protects but does not bind, alongside out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect."
Do you know the source of that quote and the context? It was Frank Wilhoit explaining the core of the problem with conservatism. He wrote it when proposing anti-conservatism. To quote it as a general rule of life presumes that conservatism is the only way humans can organize a society.
Yes I do and perhaps instead of making that presumption you could simply understand conservatives to be those who perceive themselves to be part of that higher social class (or at least want to).
I think it's a matter of reach. Most ordinary people's good deeds have a small audience—the 'N' in a 1:N spread is limited. But the bigger the fame, the larger the audience becomes. From that perspective, when Keanu Reeves does something good, the number of people influenced by that act is much larger. I believe humans are creatures shaped by their environment—and they are influenced by it. So it's socially acknowledged that piling up these good actions is beneficial, and the greater the influence of such actions, the larger the impact they have. Of course, this is just my hypothesis.
I'm not an expert on LLMs but it isn't clear to me why it is a problem to keep reasoning inside the layers of the model when the internal state of the model has never been readable text.
It's a matter of degree not a black and while traceable/untraceable difference.
With a regular N-layer transformer you get a token every N-layers.
With a looped transformer there is no guarantee how often you get a token, unless you go out of your way to limit looping.
OpenAI's Jakub Pachocki says the "computational graph depth" (number of transformer layers passed though) for Astra is currently never more than 2x that of GPT-4, and does express concern that traceability will suffer if this is not controlled.
Agreed. Anyone who thought CoT output was a reliable guide to the actual reasoning process taking place was fooling themselves from day 1.
A few hours spent playing with DeepSeek R1 should have been enough to dispel that illusion, watching it talk itself out of the right answer in its CoT (or talk itself into the wrong one) and still emit the right answer in its response to the user.
Good executives that have achieved an ever shrinking market share while continuing to piss of enthusiast users? At this point they could pay someone with zero experience minimum wage and would probably do no worse. Have you considered that a "good executive" (i.e. someone good at maximizing shareholder values and his own compensation) is the last person Firefox needs?
That's because browsers should be free. They are infrastructure, just like bridges. And nobody wants a bridge troll sitting on the single bridge crossing the internet river, demanding money from everyone.
You pay for bridges with tax. Tax funded browser sounds good in theory, but I don't trust the people managing my tax money to run a tech project like Firefox. Most likely it gets handed to the lowest private sector bidder, with the stipulation that any privacy preserving — sorry, I meant criminal hiding — features be removed.
What exactly is the problem? I understand a browser is a complex program but is the claim it is impossible to build a browser without continual dependence on advertising toxic dollars?
A browser in the class of Firefox or Chrome is for all intents and purposes a full OS constantly exposed to the world.
I understand open source OS development to be sustainable thanks to the the effort put into the server farms. That doesn't work for client side software, with the additional hurdle of needing to be better than the ad funded browser.
Maybe companies should see browsers more as a the Linux kernel, a precompetitive commodity layer on top of which we deliver/extract value to/from users.
And Firefox is not riddled with ads. The websites it loads are. If you run a program that shows ads on your Linux distro, the Linux kernel won't block them, will it?
Does your hypothetical kernel make it easy or difficult for you to install add-ons that block ads? Does the organization that build it have a conflict of interest regarding advertisting/surveillance interests such as Google/Meta/...?
Not sure what your point is. My comparison was not made to be stretched infinitely. Next question may be "does your kernel render web pages?", but I don't see where it is going.
But to give an answer: if you wanted to bake an ad-blocker in the Linux kernel that would prevent programs from showing ads in a transparent way (the ads just don't show and the programs still work and look fine), I think it would not be trivial at all.
But I don't see the point of going down that discussion.
Look, Windows (apparently) displays ads to some users. So even for OSes, if they can get away with it, they will shove ads in our face.
Linux is a highly complex piece of software. It is OSS. And it does not shove ads in face of its users. So my point is if there is a will there is a way.
The question is then why aren't we all getting behind a solid OSS browser? Specially now with AI coding assist, this should be even more feasable.
We're this conversation so Firefox is not up to task. And Chromium is connected in some way with the poster child for ad tech and surveillance capitalism.
So the point stands: OSS community has shown itself capable of tackling some of the hairiest technical challenges (Linux) and we should not let the notion that 'browsers can only be developed by corporations' stop us from creating OSS alternatives to the current offerings.
> OSS community has shown itself capable of tackling some of the hairiest technical challenges (Linux)
Has it though, say in the last decade? My first intuition would be that Linux was in a very different situation when it started. And it's not like there are 10 similar open source kernels that were created in the last decades and that got usable enough to be replacements for Linux...
Perhaps not riddled but Mozilla has added ads to Firefox itself and considering their acquisitions and behavior in general you can expect them to add more.
I'm not criticizing Orion for that; I actually enjoy it quite a lot (and will do even more when they will have ironed out all the UI bugs).
Also I'm eager to see how it will behave on Linux when they will have finished their port; I hope we will finally have a really low-energy consumption browser then.
Yeah I love all their Arkane stuff, and the two Half Life docs they did under their whitelabel company Secret Tape company for Valve. And of course the big Disco Elysium series.
It is actually their 10th anniversary in September, so if you like their work I would highly recommend their patreon to make sure they can do another 10 years.
Their discord is actually one of my favourite places on the internet to talk about games because everyone in there has such great taste and is knowledgeable about the actual production process of games.
They also have a second channel/patreon now called noclip_2 which is focused on underground/indie games which has been a constant source of joy for me, all the best games I've played in the past year I've discovered via their videos or their discord.
Just great vibes all around.
Edit: almost forgot, they are also running a project to digitize old videogame tapes so if you want to see old interviews with carmack or footage from E3 in really nice quality they have a YouTube channel for that too
The law was specifically written to exclude things like independent power sources and backup generators etc...
From 42 U.S.C. § 7651a(17)(A) [1] which defines the power generation units that are covered by the law:
"(17)
(A)The term “utility unit” means—
(i)a unit that serves a generator in any State that produces electricity for sale, or
(ii)a unit that, during 1985, served a generator in any State that produced electricity for sale."
The key phrasing there is "for sale". The clarification from the EPA simply restated that these units don't fall under the regulatory authority because under a plain reading of the law, they are not generating power for sale. [2]
The EPA certainly cites Trump's power agenda several times, but that doesn't make the plain text interpretation of the law wrong.
reply