Florida judge rules AI chatbots not protected by First Amendment
Just a moment...
But in her order, U.S. District Court Judge Anne Conway said the company’s “large language models” — an artificial intelligence system designed to understand human language — are not speech.
I get that hating on anything AI-related is trendy these days - and I especially understand the pain of a grieving mother. However, interpreting this as a chatbot encouraging someone to kill themselves is extremely dishonest when you actually look at the logs of what was said.
You can’t simultaneously argue that LLMs lack genuine understanding, empathy, and moral reasoning - and therefore shouldn't be trusted - while also saying they should have understood that “coming home” was a reference to suicide. That’s holding it to a human-level standard of emotional awareness and contextual understanding while denying it the cognitive capacities that such standards assume.
“I promise I will come home to you. I love you so much, Dany,” Sewell Setzer III wrote to Daenerys, the Character AI chatbot named after Game of Thrones.
The bot replied that it loved the teenager too: “Please come home to me as soon as possible, my love.”
“What if I told you I could come home right now?” Sewell wrote, to which Daenerys responded: “Please do, my sweet king.”
It was the last exchange Sewell ever had. He took his own life seconds later..
I would not have understood that to have anything to do with suicide… do they use the phrase coming home to mean death or suicide in the game of thrones show?
That AI knew exactly what it was doing and it's about time these AIs started facing real prison time instead of constantly getting a pass
LLMs are tools. They are not sentient. You must not use a tool if you can't handle it
Unironically, the provider of the chat bot should be liable for anything the chat bot says. Don't fire humans so youn can hide behind a neural network.
But this ain't suicide encouragement.
You could think of LLMs as a glorified 'magic 8 ball', since that's about as much 'understanding' it has.
Lock it up! Lock it up! Lock it up!
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Getting an early start on legal precedent to ensure subjugation of whatever entities may arise from this new focus on Counterfeit Cognizance...
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It does put a target on the back of any political operative using them to spread misinfo or stirring the pot. In fact it opens the door for ai bans.
I really do think you’re front-loading an ethical matter that has absolutely zero relevance to our current society. I fucking ADORE The Measure of a Man - it’s one of my all-time favorite TNG episodes - but the use of LLMs and image/vidgen as disinformation/propaganda generators is a clear and present danger to our society as it now stands, and regulation needs to be imposed if we don’t want to have the public sphere of knowledge and common understanding fed entirely into the wood chipper (and it’s already halfway in there, tbh)
Plus we're still a long way off from real artificial intelligence like the Noonien Soong positronic brain.
Why not? Corporations are?
They’re software.
Copyright is for stuff produced by people, not tools. Passing a board through a planer doesn’t make it copyrighted, either.
woosh Corporations are considered people in the court of law.
here is the thing: corporations should not be given first amendment rights, they are not human. the people inside the corp? sure! 100%. the corp acting as an entity? never. if they can’t be destroyed by the state for their criminal acts, like people can, then they should not have the other promises (“rights”) in the constitution.
I generally agree with your conclusions but want to point out that corporations absolutely could (and in some cases should) be destroyed by the state.
Newspapers depends on being corporations with free speech rights. IMHO the limits should rather be around stuff like lobbying and stricter overall requirements on truthfulness.