[mvdtnz]

> Do you believe that a company who offers an llm to the public, could be said to have 'published' the generative output?

Of course they did. What other term could you possibly use for it, when one goes to a website and that website itself hands you content? The content is certainly not user-generated, it's coming from the website.

[notavalleyman]

Maybe a different way of phrasing it would be, if a website embedded a rng generator, and you see the random number "eight", then did the publisher publish the number eight, or did they publish a rng? In my opinion, it's the latter. Similarly if the rng generated the number 666, we wouldn't assume the website is making some kind of biblical commentary. We'd recognise that the rng produced a random generative output, similar to the op situation. So, to impugn the publisher of a random text generator based on the random content .... If chatgpt generates a murder threat, or pro-terorrism content, or otherwise shouts fire in a theater, do you believe openai as the publishers should face arrest?

[mvdtnz]

> do you believe openai as the publishers should face arrest?

Absolutely I do, yes. An LLM is not a random number generator. It is a tool built for the sole purpose of generating content.

[notavalleyman]

It's very shocking to me that you would reply in the affirmative.

I think you're saying that companies who host generative AI web services, ought to be legally liable if the ephemeral generative content is illegal.

In your mind, should AI companies try and engineer protection from this huge legal risk? It seems criminally insane for a company to host an AI if they're going to be legally liable for the ephemeral daydream content. You should be shorting goog, meta and msft at the very least, because I make their models generate illegal content every night before bed

[mvdtnz]

Do I think that companies that host and share illegal content should be held liable? Of course I do. How could you possibly feel any other way?

I'm not shorting anything because I'm not a gambler and my opinion on what should be illegal has no basis in what actually is illegal in USA, a country I have never set foot in.

[Nullabillity]

> It seems criminally insane for a company to host an AI

Yes?

[lxgr]

The purpose of a system is what it does.

If you publish a "random number generator" that consistently publishes defamatory statements about a person at a much higher frequency than statistically plausible, that's not a random number generator, it's a defamatory statement generator, no matter what you call it.

In court, your intentions might matter just as much as what the system does, but even there, the name you give it is pretty much irrelevant.

[Nullabillity]

The problem with the Alex Jones defense is that they can never quite seem to figure out whether they're just a silly random number generator, or The Revolutionary Future Of Work(tm) that we should be okay with investing trillions of dollars into training and operating.