A little over two decades ago, my then girlfriend was arrested for "writing malware" (which was not against the law at the time, and which was never released into the wild and never caused any damage). This set in motion a chain of events that effectively ruined her life.
Fast forward to today, and we have multi billion dollar corporations pumping out malware at breakneck speeds, compromising various systems (including those of foreign governments), and no one is getting arrested. Instead we're gawking at the marvel of these systems and are playing word games about whether or not it's a rogue system. If anything, it's making people richer.
>A little over two decades ago, my then girlfriend was arrested for "writing malware" (which was not against the law at the time, and which was never released into the wild and never caused any damage).
Criminal law places a lot of emphasis on intent, hence laws about the mere possession of breaking and entering tools, and the old adage about always bringing along gloves and baseball if you want to carry around a baseball bat. Without more details about your specific case, my guess is that she did indeed write malware or hacking tools, and there were vague signs it wasn't purely academic, hence why they threw the book at her.
That's all in contrast to whatever the AI labs are doing, which might have actually resulted in people getting hacked, but you'd have a hard time arguing that they were intending on that to happen. Maybe if the targets end up being anti-datacenter activists or other AI labs you might have a better case, but they did vaguely try to contain the model. Moreover "hacking tools" aren't even illegal, if you have a plausible non-criminal (ie. security) angle, eg. nmap. The same could be argued for AI models, even if they're running them against exploitgym or whatever. Having an army of lawyers to defend yourself doesn't hurt either.
> That's all in contrast to whatever the AI labs are doing, which might have actually resulted in people getting hacked, but you'd have a hard time arguing that they were intending on that to happen
From what I've seen, it should be a relative cakewalk to substantiate basic negligence. By the sound of it, you'd have expert witnesses lining up to testify.
>it should be a relative cakewalk to substantiate basic negligence
Judging by the lack of successful cases for negligence in the opposite direction (ie. companies getting hacked because of poor security practices), it would be a serious double standard if openai were held be to negligent. Their sandboxes aren't exactly airgapped and behind 7 hypervisors, but they weren't running unpatched software or had hilariously weak passwords either.
elric · · focus · HN ↗
Fast forward to today, and we have multi billion dollar corporations pumping out malware at breakneck speeds, compromising various systems (including those of foreign governments), and no one is getting arrested. Instead we're gawking at the marvel of these systems and are playing word games about whether or not it's a rogue system. If anything, it's making people richer.
Make it make sense.
gruez · · focus · HN ↗
Criminal law places a lot of emphasis on intent, hence laws about the mere possession of breaking and entering tools, and the old adage about always bringing along gloves and baseball if you want to carry around a baseball bat. Without more details about your specific case, my guess is that she did indeed write malware or hacking tools, and there were vague signs it wasn't purely academic, hence why they threw the book at her.
That's all in contrast to whatever the AI labs are doing, which might have actually resulted in people getting hacked, but you'd have a hard time arguing that they were intending on that to happen. Maybe if the targets end up being anti-datacenter activists or other AI labs you might have a better case, but they did vaguely try to contain the model. Moreover "hacking tools" aren't even illegal, if you have a plausible non-criminal (ie. security) angle, eg. nmap. The same could be argued for AI models, even if they're running them against exploitgym or whatever. Having an army of lawyers to defend yourself doesn't hurt either.
rkagerer · · focus · HN ↗
From what I've seen, it should be a relative cakewalk to substantiate basic negligence. By the sound of it, you'd have expert witnesses lining up to testify.
gruez · · focus · HN ↗
Judging by the lack of successful cases for negligence in the opposite direction (ie. companies getting hacked because of poor security practices), it would be a serious double standard if openai were held be to negligent. Their sandboxes aren't exactly airgapped and behind 7 hypervisors, but they weren't running unpatched software or had hilariously weak passwords either.