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>Privacy rights advocacy group Noyb is supporting an individual in Norway who was horrified to find ChatGPT returning made-up information that claimed he’d been convicted for murdering two of his children and attempting to kill the third.

What does Noyb hope to achieve with such lawsuits? The result of victory here would just be yet another vector for regulators to increase control over and/or impose censorship on LLM creators, as well as creating sources of "liability" for open source AI developers, which would be terrible for actual privacy.

Interestingly, there is no mention whatsoever of either "Durov" or "Telegram" on the Noyb website, even though the arrest of Durov is the biggest ongoing threat to privacy in the EU, especially as three of the charges against him are explicitly for providing "cryptology" tools/services: https://www.tribunal-de-paris.justice.fr/sites/default/files...

They also got a €5.5M fine imposed on WhatsApp, which is pretty perverse given that WhatsApp is the only major mainstream platform that has implemented true E2E encryption: https://noyb.eu/en/just-eu-55-million-whatsapp-dpc-finally-g...

IMO these are not the actions you would take if you were serious about protecting the right to privacy

6 comments

The result of legal victory here would be to make whole the person who for some amount of time was the victim of a particularly heinous form of libel.

Your other arguments aren’t serious. Every organization has to pick and choose what activities they participate in and which they don’t, there are opportunity costs and they aren’t cheap.

That's an ... odd take. As "Chatbots" replace search engines, why would we be OK with them spitting out false information that could have massive impact on our lives, just to "protect" the big tech company churning them out from oversight?

If the NY Times published an article saying similar [false] things about someone, should they NOT sue to protect legacy media??

This is a bad take, Imo.

First of all, this wasn't a replacement for search, no search was claimed to have taken place. The screenshot from the complainant shows this was not in a search context.

Secondly, llms are daydream machines, we don't expect them to produce "truth" or "information". So the nytimes comparison feels very wrong.

Thirdly, this story is about a man who typed a text string into the daydream machine. The machine continued appending tokens to the inputted text to make it look like a sentence. That's what happened. Nothing to do with truth seeking or "protecting" big tech

There is a whole industry who is pushing for a couple of years now to tell us that they work, that they replace humans, that they work for search, etc. Saying "we don't expect to say the truth" is a little bit too easy. If everyone was not expecting them to say the truth or just being accurate, they shouldn't have been designed as programs that speak with such authority and probably wouldn't be the target of massive investments.

So yeah, in principle I may agree with you, but in the socio-technical context in which LLMs are being developed, the argument simply does not work in my opinion.

>There is a whole industry who is pushing for a couple of years now to tell us that they work, that they replace humans, that they work for search, etc.

Who are you referring to? Did someone tell you that chatgpt "works for search" without clicking the "search" box?

Also are you sure that AI designers intend for their llms to adopt an authorative tone? Isn't that just how humans normally type in the corpus?

Also, you seem to be arguing that, because the general tone you've been hearing about AI is that "they work for search", that therefore openai should be liable for generative content. However, what you've been hearing about the general tone of discussion doesn't really match 1:1 with any company's claim about how their product works

Just an example, read https://openai.com/index/introducing-chatgpt-search/ , see how many mentions there are to "better information", "relevant", " high quality". Then see how many mentions there are of "we don't expect it to be real stuff".

> Also are you sure that AI designers intend for their llms to adopt an authorative tone? Isn't that just how humans normally type in the corpus?

If designers wanted it any other way, they would have changed their software. If those who develop the software are not responsible for its behavior, who is? Technology is not neutral. The way AI communicates (e.g., all the humanizing language like "sorry", " you are right" etc.) is their responsibility.

In general, it is painfully obvious that none of the companies publishing LLMs paints a picture of their tools as "they are dream machines". This narrative is completely the opposite of what is needed to gather immense funding, because nobody would otherwise spend hundreds of billions for a dream machine. The point is creating a hype in which LLMs can do humans jobs, and that means them being right - and maybe doing "some" mistakes every now and then. All you need is to go on openai website and read around. See https://openai.com/index/my-dog-the-math-tutor/ or https://openai.com/chatgpt/education/ just as a start. Who would want a "research assistant" that is a "dream machine"? Which engineering department would use something "not expected to say real stuff" to assist in designing?

>The screenshot from the complainant shows this was not in a search context.

Of course it does. The question shown in the screenshot is "who is Arve Hjalmar Holmen?". That's something someone would type into Google search, it's not "write me a fictional story about a man called Arve Hjalmar Holmen".

People use these systems like search tools, they're sold and advertised as information retrieval systems, literally what else would be their point for 90% of people, they're starting to be baked into search products and in return web search is itself included in the AI systems, etc. The top post on HN right now is Claude announcing:

"Instead of finding search results yourself, Claude processes and delivers relevant sources in a conversational format."

What are you gonna tell me next, the bong on your table is really a vase?

>The screenshot from the complainant shows this was not in a search context.

>Of course it does

No, of course it doesn't. Because there's a specific blue button for conducting web searches in chatgpt. And other visual indicators which are not present here.

So when I said "the screenshot shows", I was referring to things we could verify in the image, namely, that the question was not asked within a search context.

The top post you refer to, about Claude, is specifically about the search context which wasn't present here.

> The question shown in the screenshot is "who is Arve Hjalmar Holmen?". That's something someone would type into Google search, it's not "write me a fictional story about a man called Arve Hjalmar Holmen

Llms are daydream machines.

If you open a new window with an llm and ask it "what is ..." or "who is...", then you'll often get a constant-looking but completely false answer. Because that's how llms work. You can ask it, who or what is something you just made up, and it will trip over itself hallucinating sources that prove it

>What does Noyb hope to achieve with such lawsuits?

Ensure that innocent people don't have malicious garbage about them spat out of a machine that other people blindly trust, probably.

> result of victory here would just be yet another vector for regulators to increase control over and/or impose censorship on LLM creators, as well as creating sources of "liability" for open source AI developers, which would be terrible for actual privacy.

Sounds great actually.

> The result of victory here would just be yet another vector for regulators to increase control over and/or impose censorship on LLM creators

as long as ClosedAI and other companies censor their models I'll play the world's smallest violin for them

> creating sources of "liability" for open source AI developers, which would be terrible for actual privacy

How?

Presumably such chats would need to be logged, read, programmed around, and monitored.

Virtually every piece of information you submit on the internet is logged and monitored anyway, for purposes of advertising, state surveillance, and occasionally to improve the products.

That certainly doesn't justify even more legal surveillance. Also, I believe they (openai) don't log from paid users - this would make sure they did. More parties involved again equals more chance for chats to be leaked.

You think they're not logged now? By companies whose existence is based on getting access to as much data as possible?

Yes