This is a civil case not a criminal one, and just because it is the same broad act does not mean courts apply it the same way in civil and criminal contexts.
And Amazon LOST at this stage in the linked appeal, with the 9th Circuit finding that they were not entitled to a preliminary injunction because they were unlikely to succeed on the “access” prong of the CFAA or CDAFA claim against Perplexity.
So, it is doubly weird to conclude “all agentic automations are crimes now” based on the case linked here.
The US companies talking about “pacing” aren't actually talking about slowing down their own development efforts, they are talking about slowing down competition. That is, specifically, they are seeking to have government, on the pretext of “safety”:
(1) Give the big AI incumbents an anti-trust exemption so the they can coordinate without it being an illegal agreement not to compete, and
(2) Adopt mandatory supervision (by giving priveleged access to monitors) to the shared safety protocols of the big labs, by a nonprofit funded by the big labs, of everyone training, distributing, or hosting models.
(3) Adopt a policy of seeking international agreements to extend substantially the same rules to foreign actors training, distributing, and hosting models.
The part they are doing voluntarily isn't to promote the lobbying effort for these mandates isn't slowing down, it is giving their pet nonprofit the access for “independwht supervision” of their own operations to their own existing safety rules.
I've seen two theories as to what's going on. One is the theory you've espoused, that AI companies are trying to do regulatory capture. The other theory is that they're starting to worry about running out of cash, so they want to do a Washington Naval Treaty-style pause to lower the amount of money they have to shovel at model development to stay competitive.
These theories aren't entirely incompatible with each other, so both could be true at the same time.
> I've seen two theories as to what's going on. One is the theory you've espoused
This theory is just what the AI firms have concretely asked for from government and described themselves as doing voluntarily in the same documents to which people have attributed a commitment to a slowdown based on the titles and non-concrete framing verbiage.
> The other theory is that they're starting to worry about running out of cash, so they want to do a Washington Naval Treaty-style pause to lower the amount of money they have to shovel at model development to stay competitive.
That’s not really a different theory as to what they are trying to do, it’s just an explanation that goes one step further as to why they want the government to step in to protect them from outside competition while also allowing them to gorm an agreement not to compete to reduce internal competition in the existing oligopoly.
The main alternative explanation at the same level is that they are seeing growing threats from good enough foreign/minor-lab/open models, and want to lock in marketshare by excluding competitors, and maybe that’s what you read as implied in my post such that the “running out of money” would be an alternative, and if so you are correct that while they are alternatives, they are not at all mutually exclusive: both can be true (and the emergent competition could partially explain investment drying up, and vice versa via reduced funding making it harder to stay ahead.)
> In the physical world, it seems like when an tool/device/instrument causes harm (or is used to cause harm), we assign blame to either the user of the tool or its creator.
Software executes in the physical world, and is generally not exempt from existing liability rules, and actually (especially with commercial products) blame in traditional liability is non-exclusive and much broader than “either the maker or the user”.
E.g., for a harms caused by a defective automobile it can simultaneously covered by a duty of the owner to maintain it it in safe operating condition that applies indepedently of any defects and liability for defective products which applies to every actor in the chain of commerce between the manufacturer and end user, not just the maker.
If I park my car on a hill but forget to set the parking brake and it rolls down the hill and kills somebody, who is at fault? Me? The Manufacturer? Gravity?
You. Assuming that not having a brake that automatically sets is considered a product defect (it generally is not today, but one can imagine a situation in which it would be), you had bought the car new through normal channels, and your car had this condition as a result of manufacturing problem and not something you did after purchasing it, then under normal product liability law the manufacturer and every other entity in the chain of commerce between them and you would also be liable (and that mat start earlier than the manufacturer of the vehicle but also include the upstream part manufacturer and everyone between them and the vehicle manufacturer in the chain of commerce if the defect was in the manufacture of a part and not just the final vehicle.
But that liability doesn't reduce yours; you and all the entities in the chain of commerce can be “jointly and severally liable”, mean anyone who suffers injury can recover the full amount from any combination of you and those other parties.
Gravity is not legal person and cannot be at fault.
If you forget to set the parking brake, you were negligent
If you set the brake but it didn't work, the car malfunctioned
From the link you sent,
> One of the questions herein was whether there was a defect in the automobile mechanism for locking the transmission gears when the automobile was in a parked position.
> (...)
> The parking lot sloped in that area, and he put the gearshift lever in "park lock," and went into the building.
> (...)
> In response to a hypothetical question, based upon assumed facts justified by and embodied in the evidence, Mr. Nass testified in substance that it was his opinion that the automobile rolled down the slope of the parking lot because the transmission internally was not in park-lock; that it was not in park-lock because the engine was "moving around"; and that the engine and shift console were not in proper synchronization because the motor mounts were not restraining the engine and were not holding the engine in position.
That case had the owner performing an action they were led to believe would have prevented the car from rolling but potential defects prevented it from doing so.
No, literally a small-f fascist, the broader far-right authoritarian ideology named by reference to the Nazi’s Italian ideological cousins but which includes the Nazis among is defining examples, but not literally a member of the National Socialist German Worker’s Party.
(Sure. “Nazi” is frequently used figuratively to mean “fascist”, but that's not “literally”. Except, perhaps, in the sense where literally is itself used figuratively as a intensifier for a figurative description, but at least not literally “literally”.)
> Many people working at frontier labs came out this week with estimates of 10% chance of catastrophic harm or greater.
The only reason people with P(Doom) of around 10% are even noticed these days because we've run out of new voices in the field giving 50%+ P(Doom) speculations (none of them are grounded enough to reasonably be referred to as "estimates".)
Probabilities are subjective states of belief! They have always been subjective states of belief! There is no such thing as a "probability" out there in the real world (ignoring random quantum stuff, which isn't what anybody is talking about). If you took out a coin right now and flipped it, the true odds of it coming up heads are not 50%, but those are (roughly) the correct betting odds for an external observer to assign to it.
“We can’t fight child porn on our platform because it is less moral to run a scanner that may produce false positives and either accept that this may result in blocking some content that isn’t child porn OR pay someone to look at content and verify whether or not it is child porn, so instead we just do the far more moral thing of allowing and profiting from the distribution of child porn" is an interesting, if not exactly convincing, argument.
> In quite a few countries, a false positive can lead to someone getting put in prison
That can only happen if it is either (1) used by government, or (2) used by private entities in a process flow that includes reports to government.
"There exist countries with criminal justice systems with weak enough standards of proof that a false positive on a scan alone would result in prison", even if 100% true, is not a justification for a firm not making efforts to block child porn distribution on its networks. (It is, OTOH, a justification for working to reform the criminal justice systems in those countries, but that is rather far from the topic here.)
Intentionally viewing what you think is child porn is a crime, but not catching it is not a crime. If you think it's stupid, lobby Congress to change the law.
> Intentionally viewing what you think is child porn is a crime
The entire argument for why verification was even an issue is that the allegedly the scan is not sufficient reason to actually believe that something is child pornoography. But whether or reviewing such a report may or may not be a crime in some jurisdiction somewhere on Earth, the certainty that arguments like that would detract from the point is the reason that of the two (moral and legal) issues raised in the post I responded to, I only said that one of them was ridiculous, and it wasn't the legal one.
NCMEC is the only organization legally allowed to view child porn. For everyone else, they have no legal way to verify. If you don't trust NCMEC to give correct results, the only legal option is not to play.
IME, most users of the term “AI slop” use it for all (identified) uses of AI because they believe that use of AI is itself inherently an indication of poor taste and low effort that invalidates the work independently of what quality the work would have viewed independently of the mode of creation.
There are definitely people who accept AI use generally who try to make “AI slop” a distinction within the universe of AI creation rather than a label for the entire universe of AI creation, but that seems to be a minority use of the term.
Sure, sounding damning is kind of the point of this kind of statement. But its also cheap and easy since there is no requirement that any of the claims are justified by any facts.
And Amazon LOST at this stage in the linked appeal, with the 9th Circuit finding that they were not entitled to a preliminary injunction because they were unlikely to succeed on the “access” prong of the CFAA or CDAFA claim against Perplexity.
So, it is doubly weird to conclude “all agentic automations are crimes now” based on the case linked here.
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