[clucas]

> Well, they made its own category for it and asked Sama to collect images of several other categories, but somehow it was lost in communication that for one of theses categories, no images should be collected.

Be careful here. Read the article closely, here is what it says:

> [Sama] said in a statement that its agreement to collect images for OpenAI did not include any reference to illegal content, and it was only after the work had begun that OpenAI sent “additional instructions” referring to “some illegal categories.”

Note how carefully this is worded - if Time could confidently say that OpenAI asked for C4 images, they would have absolutely put that in the article. Now, this is filtered through PR statements, but it reads to me like a poorly-worded email went out from OpenAI that didn't actually ask for C4 images, but one of Sama's employees interpreted it as an ask, and started collecting without raising any red flags up the chain. And they got fired for it.

[simiones]

If your interpretation were true, it would be hard to understand why Sama also cancelled the entire deal with OpenAI. It's much more likely that a (possibly rogue) employee of OpenAI asked an employee of Sama for those images explicitly as part of additional work on the existing contract. The Sama employee agreed, but when the hire ups found out, they fired them and cancelled the whole deal, since they were not comfortable handling this material (whether for legal reasons, moral reasons, or both is of course unknowable).

[eliasdaler]

Plausible deniability. "Rogue employee" is what they always use when doing damage control.

[vagabund]

I think you're reading too much into this. The natural reading is quite clearly that the illegal categories referred to were or included "C4", and it'd be highly unethical for them to have framed the paragraph in that manner if they believed that not to be the case. It's worth noting that OpenAI's PR statement only goes so far as to call the situation a miscommunication, and doesn't directly assign blame to Sama, while Sama explicitly claims OpenAI asked for illegal categories in subsequent instructions.

Also, I'm not up on the laws regarding this stuff, but are the other, awful categories illegal to collect? If not, there's not much room for ambiguity.

[thinking4real]

“if Time could confidently say that OpenAI asked for C4 images, they would have absolutely put that in the article.”

All your word salad ignores this reality.