[torben-friis]

I think this is an even clearer case than usual. With software engineers and office work you don’t have legal limitations on who can perform the work, but they exist for lawyers and doctors for example.

So if this is a tool, the fault lies fully in the user, and if this is treated as “another persons work” then the user knowingly passed the work onto someone not authorized to do it. Both end up in the user being guilty.

[jacquesm]

> With software engineers and office work you don’t have legal limitations on who can perform the work

Technically true, but if you want the IP to be covered by copyright you better make sure they're not using AI or you'll find out that there are some serious legal limitations in your future when you aim to either pick up investment or sell your IP.

[cmiles8]

Correct. The US has already ruled that there are no IP protections for AI generated content

[visarga]

An unqualified statement, the user has copyright over the elements they provide. In an image if they make manual edits for example, those are protected. In a modern agentic codebase the code itself is least valuable, what counts more are the specs and tests.

[jacquesm]

Good luck with that argument in court.

[epgui]

> With software engineers […] you don’t have legal limitations on who can perform the work

While in practice that is true, in theory this is why professional engineering accreditations (I mean like P.Eng., not little certificates) exist. Perhaps we will see a broader professionalization of the profession one day.

[gortok]

> So if this is a tool, the fault lies fully in the user, and if this is treated as “another persons work” then the user knowingly passed the work onto someone not authorized to do it. Both end up in the user being guilty.

I am particularly against this point of view, because we as a community have long touted how computers can do the job better and faster, and that computers don’t make mistakes. When there are bugs, they’re seen as flaws in the system and rectified, by programmers.

When there are gaps between user expectations and how the software works, it’s our job to manage those gaps and reduce the gap.

In the case of AI, we are somehow, probably because we know it’s non-deterministic, turning that social contract we had developed with users on its head.

Now, that’s just the way it is and it’s up to them to know if the computer is lying to them. We have absolved ourselves of both the technical and the non-technical responsibilities to ensure the computer doesn’t lie to the user, or subverts their expectations, or acts in a way contrary to human logic.

AI may be different to us in that it’s non-deterministic, but that’s all the more reason that we’re responsible to ensure AI adoption aligns to the social contract we created with users. If we can’t do that with AI then it’s up to us to stop chasing endless dollars and be forthright with users that facts are optional when it comes to AI.

[torben-friis]

You used to trust excel is reliable. You used to also choose to use excel, rather than “Bobby’s super duper calculator”.

The choice of tool is assumed to require expertise. I am not opposed to ai companies being sued for invalid expectations, but I don’t think they have at any point expressed that their current product can be used unsupervised in substitution of a professional.

In other words, companies are to blame for offering professional solutions that aren’t up to the task, but it’s up to every person to not use blindly whatever the conman of the day offers.

[chrisjj]

> we as a community have long touted ... that computers don’t make mistakes.

No community I know.

Otherwise, I agree.

[klibertp]

> No community I know.

Everybody in sales in every software company in the world would be part of that community, I think. Some of the devs, too. Software was always marketed (and discussed with normal people) as something that could automate error-prone tasks, thereby eliminating the inevitable mistakes humans make when performing those tasks. Would Excel be the cornerstone of so many businesses if it sometimes gave the wrong value as a sum of a column?

That marketing (and the fact that, indeed, Excel can sum anything users throw at it without making mistakes) worked; now we have 3 generations of users who believe that once a computer "gets it" (ie. the correct software is installed and properly configured), it will perform a task given to it correctly forever. The fact that it's almost true (true in the absence of bugs and no changes to the setup, no updates, no hardware degradation, no space rays flipping important bits, etc.) doesn't help - that preceding parenthetical is hard to understand and often omitted when a developer talks to a non-developer.

We've always had software that wasn't as reliable as Excel - speech recognition and OCR come to mind. But in those cases, the errors are plainly visible - they cannot be "confidently wrong". Now we have LLMs that can be confidently wrong, and a vast number of users trained to think that software is either always right or, when it's wrong, it's immediately noticeable.

I don't think developers should bear the whole responsibility here - I think marketing had a much larger role in shaping users' minds. However, devs not clearly communicating the risks of bugs to users (for fear of scaring potential customers or out of laziness) over decades makes us partly responsible as well.

[chrisjj]

> Software was always marketed (and discussed with normal people) as something that could automate error-prone tasks, thereby eliminating the inevitable mistakes humans make when performing those tasks.

That's far from a community touting that computers don’t make mistakes.

> Would Excel be the cornerstone of so many businesses if it sometimes gave the wrong value as a sum of a column?

You mean like if it was running on a Pentium with the FDIV bug? :)

I agree there's a perception computer output is generally reliable, and that leaves users at the mercy of snake oil parrots that are generally unreliable and are sold without a warning. But I don't agree the cause is that touting.