Louis Ingenthron @LouisIngenthron@social.cleverlibre.org

@interfluidity @emilymbender I disagree. The courts recently ruled that a monkey that stole a photographer's camera and took a selfie couldn't own the copyright to that picture because it wasn't a human.

The same concept applies here. So, at most, the content LLMs produce could be considered the speech of the authors of the LLM algorithm, not of the algorithm itself.

But another example to look at might be WordPress. Websites built with WordPress will be comprised of 90+% content written by WordPress. Yet, if that last 10% of user content is defamatory, WordPress isn't liable.

I think it comes down to who's in control of the tool when it generates the speech. It might even come down to who owns/rents the server that hosts the program when it generates the speech.

@interfluidity @emilymbender Yes, correct. Think of ChatGPT as a big and very-freeform mad-libs generator. It may provide the framework, but you're still filling in the context to produce the end result. If you then choose to publish that, you do so under your name.

And, while that solution may not be 100% perfect, it's definitely leagues better than the inverse, where OpenAI's authors would be responsible for me asking their product to defame someone.

@interfluidity @emilymbender It works the exact same offline.

If I write you a letter defaming someone, and you show it to the newspaper, who runs the story about my defamation, I'm still the only one at fault for what I wrote.

We're all responsible for what we say, regardless of who we're saying it to.

@interfluidity Weird. It was your post above that ended in /3

@interfluidity @emilymbender Correct.

You had that backwards here: https://fosstodon.org/@interfluidity/109718208972908024

And yes, I don't think forwarding an email counts as "republishing" so that seems legitimate.

@interfluidity @emilymbender Yeah, that says that the forwarder would be protected, while the person who actually wrote the speech would remain liable, which is the way it should work, and the opposite of what you said above.

@interfluidity @emilymbender The Stratton Oakmont v Prodigy case quotes the board manager, Charles Epstein, as listing "solicitation" as one of the major categories of pre-written reasons for the deletion of content.

Spam long predates the internet. I have no doubt that Wyden and Cox were including unsolicited advertisements in their definition of "objectionable content".

@interfluidity @emilymbender Can you cite a specific source on that? I think you may be getting the details wrong.

@interfluidity @emilymbender It's more like paraphrasing than retconning. Here are some direct quotes from Chris Cox:
"Ron and I were determined that good faith content moderation should not be punished"
"[One of S230's two key purposes is] incentivizing blocking and filtering technologies that individuals could use to become their own censors in their own households."

Those are close enough to describing spam filters to me.

Source:
https://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2020/06/25/policing_the_internet_a_bad_idea_in_1996_--_and_today.html

@interfluidity @emilymbender Yes, which was an impetus for the creation of 230 in the first place.

@yarrriv Which sucks, because judges are arguably worse than legislators about technology.

Determining intent from code is difficult in the best of circumstances. When talking about neural net algorithms, it becomes essentially impossible.

It's also a fledgling technology with few standards or rules to measure against. Who would even have the knowledge and capability to write such standards without risking serious chilling of innovative potential?

Without being able to determine intent, nor having a standard to measure up to, how can we even think about being able to determine negligence?

@interfluidity @emilymbender However, had you not published it and the email you received from your friend became public by other means (let's say a hack, for example), then your friend remain liable for the speech, since they would be both the prompter and the publisher of the speech.

@interfluidity @emilymbender It's the prompter's speech.

And orgs are collectives of natural persons, so they can be treated as people under the law. Non-humans cannot be.

@interfluidity @emilymbender Organizations of people are treated as people under the law, yes.