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Comment by duskdozer | Hacker News Reader

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?

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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.

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.

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.

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.

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?

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

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

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