You need to be able to use these models for the real world and not for some imaginary world where everything is safe and nice and happy all the time, while at the same time intensely surveilled in the name of CYA and the latest panic about whether speech THAT ISN'T EVEN BETWEEN TWO PARTIES is considered "wrong".

I'm a free speech fan that acknowledges there are lots of boundaries of free speech (fraud, perjury, blackmail, defamation), but the one thing that all of the boundaries have in common is that a second party must be involved for them to make any sense at all.

Maybe the courts will uphold this, maybe they won't, but don't take the risk!

I think Anthropic did the right thing here; but the sheriff's office are probably demonstrating why she dislikes them. Writing a diary entry to a chatbot is clearly not how this law was intended to be used.

EDIT: Actually, on reflection, making this report to the people she was upset about was probably not the right call. If they'd sent it to the FBI, there'd be a much lower chance that someone felt the need to assert their "authority".

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.

And here we all are, happily typing our stuff into these spy chatbots. "AI" happily made our fears go away. Hopefully we're not planning anything criminal like this woman, but still.

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.

> 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.

It should catch normal people becoming unstable so that they can receive help. It is just highly unfortunate that the US legal system works in ways where now this woman's name is public.

___

Of course, we also want purely private tech, but that needs a certain level of merit and sanity filter.

— via https://www.leg.state.fl.us/Statutes/index.cfm?App_mode=Disp...

The DA is serious about "in any matter."

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.

1791144575 | Florida woman used Claude as a diary, then Anthropic reported an entry to police | https://www.techspot.com/news/114091-florida-woman-used-clau... | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49957340 | 0 comments

1791147034 | Florida woman used Claude as a diary, then Anthropic reported an entry to police | https://www.techspot.com/news/114091-florida-woman-used-clau... | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49957692 | 0 comments

1791149399 | Florida woman used Claude as a diary, then Anthropic reported an entry to police | https://www.techspot.com/news/114091-florida-woman-used-clau... | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49958089 | 3 comments

1791213096 | Florida woman arrested for allegedly making threats in an AI chat | https://www.theverge.com/ai-artificial-intelligence/1004747/... | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49965895 | 2 comments

If they were to offer total privacy, is it ok for the public to use chat to get advice on _how_ to commit a crime? Basically everyone agrees that crime-committing advice is inappropriate…but if it is not ok to get advice, that means there must be a portal for law enforcement to step in when that may have happened. Then the question becomes what is the line for when to report? In other words, the issue needs to be adjudicated.

But we don’t want OpenAI/Claude to have some $20/hour reviewer making decisions that are this high stakes…we need the courts to do the judicial work because they (1) have a public charter, (2) have meaningful expertise and specialization at interpreting the law and (3) we can hold them accountable.

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?)

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.

Anthropic (in discussion with Pentagon) claimed mass surveillance is their red line.

Yet, they do automated mass surveillance of their users on behalf of police.

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.

I think the defendant could successfully defend themselves by claiming they did not know (or intend!) the message could be viewed by another person, as they were plainly using it as a private diary.

Every single lie of yours is exposed in the past few months.

A diary constitutes making a threat?

Oh boy the roleplaying part of LLM world is in for a bad time

Then again, I wish this worked in a way that would give users more privacy and agency, instead of less.

How does a LLM prompt satisfy this? I guess it'll be an easy win for her.

https://www.politico.com/news/2023/08/30/desantis-warns-hurr...

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?

Intent matters here. Did you intend somebody else to view it? Does a reasonable person have expectation of privacy with a chatbot?

Claude: Law enforcement has been notified, you are now under arrest.

Snitching on the people - good mass surveillance company.

On the other hand, people need to learn to not trust these companies. It reminds me of others being surprised when a self-driving car reported a gun in the car. I mean, do people not think? Besides, of course, it's already messed up to want to have a gun. And it is constantly one country that has such issues, more so than many other countries.

Can the public also immediately get alerted when a cop or politician does some bad shit, though?

Thought crimes are real when you're sharing your thoughts with Claude