Not just bad headlines; OpenAI is actively being sued [1] for this:

    OpenAI’s stated rationale was a concern for the shooter’s privacy, but its own interests
    better explain its silence. Upon information and belief, OpenAI was seeking to avoid implementation of a
    hard line rule to refer planning of real-world violence to authorities, perhaps due to how frequently its
    product is implicated in threats to human life. Requiring such disclosures would be incompatible with the
    company’s public position that ChatGPT is safe. It could also threaten the valuation underlying OpenAI’s
    anticipated initial public offering. Rather than expose those risks, OpenAI accepted the consequences of
    its silence. A mass murder in the only secondary school in Tumbler Ridge followed.

    Accordingly, the Crown, led by Attorney General Sharma, and SD59 jointly bring this
    action to hold OpenAI and Sam Altman accountable for designing a dangerous product, distributing it to
    every home with internet access, ignoring the warnings of their own safety team,
    refusing to notify authorities when they knew the shooter was planning gun violence, inviting the shooter back onto the
    platform after deactivating the shooter’s account, and choosing corporate self-interest over the lives of
    children. They seek compensation for the not just foreseeable but known harm OpenAI inflicted, the
    damages that they incurred and are incurring, and injunctive relief to ensure that this tragedy does not
    happen again.

I'm still puzzled that people's default assumption isn't that somebody is reading all of their internet communications. Ever since the Snowden revelations of 2013 I've more or less assumed that everything I type into a computer is stored in a government database somewhere. Not that I actually believe it is 100% of the time; there's a spectrum of trust, so I'm more confident that local apps on my Linux desktop are secure, somewhat confident in the end-to-end encryption of certain apps on my iPhone, but all bets are off for non-E2E encrypted data going across the internet.

This is one of the reasons why AI companies are looking for explicit regulations, it can help to reduce the risk of possible liability and maybe make the legal way forward more tractable. With a regulatory framework in place much of the burden of identifying risks falls on the regulatory authority.

Then the AI companies have more confidence that they can move forward in a certain way, and issue investor guidance that is maybe closer to reality.

> people need to get it in their heads that they're not chatting with their secret BFF, they're chatting with Big Tech

Yup. And with zero privacy protections in statute for AI chat, there is nothing to prevent an AI CEO looking to curry political favour from e.g. handing over the private correspondence of an opponent or an entire district’s residents.

> people need to get it in their heads that they're not chatting with their secret BFF

I see constant ads on video platform (particularly youtube/tiktok) about llm chat apps, from friends, dating, romance and everythkng inbetween; that's personal.

People need to be reminded constantly if they use such apps that they are participating in easier mass surveillance, profiling and AI training.

And such was the case for a man who snapped a photo of his own child to send to the doctor which got uploaded to his Google photos resulting in his Google account of over a decade getting shutdown for CSAM.

As another commenter said, you're not chatting with a friend; you're chatting with Big Tech.

How much do you love Big Brother?

A disclaimer on the top of page every time would have been a better approach helping Anthropic and the end user.

A bot talking to you directly as if its some one real caters to your thoughts and can take you in a certain direction without you realizing it. I have heard first hand experience from people that they feel more comfortable talking to chatgpt or claude cause it gives a feeling of being on their side and listening to them.

I suspect it will go further: imagine giving an mp3 to LLM to clean up some noise. It detects it was illegally downloaded from youtube, deletes it and automatically fines you via attached credit card.

You should probably get a head start on waiting a couple years to bite your tongue and assume everything you type into a computer is summarized and sent to your boss, government, advertisers, political actors, insurance companies, worst enemy, etc. With phones, Alexas, and little AI tamagotchis, you probably shouldn't say much in person either.

They're actively rummaging through your inputs so the damned-if-you-don't case doesn't really exist; no one expects Anthropic to not notify law enforcement once they learn of something like this. What you might have expected was some privacy in the first place though, where Anthropic would never have learned of this in the first place and where the damned-if-you-do case wasn't a thing.

> people need to get it in their heads that they're not chatting with their secret BFF, they're chatting with Big Tech

It's the other way around, big techs need to properly disclose in their platform, during interaction that they aren't in a private and safe environment

Right, the difficulty is partly that they can get a negative headline from any choice of behavior.

"Anthropic failed to report murderer's threats to authorities"

(or "Chatbot knew man was planning murder, yet company did nothing")

"Anthropic reported private chats to authorities"

(or "Arrested for chatbot fantasy")

To be fair to the journalists in these cases, there's also no society-wide agreed Schelling point about the correct outcome or correct rules. I have strong beliefs and intuitions about what should happen, but other people also have strong beliefs and intuitions, and many of those are probably opposite of mine. Even if my intuitions are the best and most justified, a journalist is unlikely to think "I'm just not going to mention that some people are mad at this company over this outcome, because a hypothetically better norm or principle would support the company's actions here". Hopefully the journalism can at least contextualize the lack of legal or social consensus and the difficult incentive problems, rather than jumping to "obviously companies are sociopaths staffed by supervillains".

> in private chats.

Including any chats anywhere where someone might have a phone in their pocket, or if there's a "camera" attached to a utility pole or a nearby tree. The only real private chats might be whispered lying down in the bathtub together, with a mattress covering it like you're both hiding from a hurricane.

> they're chatting with Big Tech

They're chatting with any powerful person who wants to hear it. She thought she was chatting with Anthropic, who doesn't give a shit about her. But after being threatened (and immediately backing down because, of course, they don't give a shit about her) Anthropic has become an arm of the government. So she was chatting with the Bonita Springs, FL Sheriff's office, or anybody else. If I paid enough, Anthropic would tell me about what she was doing so I could sell her laundry detergent.

It's a byproduct of the nannyism safety marketing from the AI companies. I'm glad these cases were caught, but disagree with how they were disposed of. If the automated flagging is good, enforce it by default. If it's noisy, refine the tech then enforce it by default. This middleground where everything going through the platforms is subject to training and arbitrary human inspection in the midst of an acrid cloud of marketing-driven fearmongering is unacceptable, and it reinforces the idea the fearmongering is legitimate.

Somehow humanity survived the past 40 years without Microsoft Word and Excel phoning home and shopping users to the feds at random, I don't see why the standard should be any different for this new class of tooling.

it was in the article

Absolutely no sympathy. Anthropic is every bit as slimy as any other big corp. And like other big corps, they must open the vault to whatever governments they intent to do biz with.

> I have some sympathy for Anthropic here [...] So from their perspective, it's damned-if-you-don't, damned-if-you-do.

On the other hand, they did put themselves into this position deliberately.

We really need a class, probably in high school, that works through how LLMs work at the high level (don't need to get too far into the deep math, but give people a taste) and then how they're trained, used, and deployed.

I feel like if people understood what these things actually are there'd be way less of this AI psychosis and similar stuff.

There'd also be fewer people falling for apocalyptic Rationalist delusions.

Also: people need to understand "not your computer, not your data." (Unless it's stored in the cloud but encrypted locally with keys only you possess.) Same goes for storing things unencrypted in OneDrive, Google Drive, etc. There is nothing to stop these companies from bulk scanning, data mining, or reporting people based on whatever request a government gives them. Don't count on them to resist, because they often can't, especially if the request is from a sovereign state where they do business.