tangeli

Lawyers getting caught using AI and submitting errors to the court has been a big problem for years

It wouldn’t be a big problem if the unreliability of LLMs were part of ongoing professional development, use of LLMs without thorough fact checking was clearly barred by professional ethics, and lawyers were immediately disbarred for presenting false evidence if it came from an LLM.

It remains a “big” problem because it isn’t big enough for anyone to do anything about it, beyond criticizing and ridiculing lawyers who do it.

I agree as far as responding to questions and issues that arise from the contribution but my understanding is that from a legal, copyright perspective, if AI generated the code then the contributor can’t own the copyright, nor assign it. So my preference would be: no AI generated code. Other use of AI tools (e.g. finding vulnerabilities) might be OK but there are still the environmental and ethical issues to be concerned with, so I remain ambivalent. It will be interesting to see the decision of the Debian community.

Even if AI generated code can’t be detected reliably, it is good to have a clear policy to guide projects and contributors. At least those contributors acting in good faith and honestly will do the right thing, and projects will have a basis for rejecting contributions from people that are found to willfully or negligently violate the policy. Blocking all malicious actors will be an ongoing effort, whatever the policy.

Maybe shares should be ‘sold’ on subscription, like so many other things these days. You ‘buy’ them but you don’t ‘own’ them - you just get the benefits of having them temporarily. That should reduce the incentive to ‘own’ shares in companies that are not profitable.

The biggest threats I am concerned with are:

• my liability and harm to my reputation resulting from unauthorized abuse of my systems
• consumption of my limited Internet access bandwidth and capacity
• corruption or loss of my systems and data
• theft and sale or other abuse of my private data

The first results mostly from the risk of my systems being incorporated into bot nets.

The second from bot nets and abusive crawlers.

The latter results mostly from ransom ware or open ended theft and exploitation of my data.

The threats are not all from the Internet. I saw an article recently about ‘smart’ TVs that are configured to be part of a web scraping infrastructure that the vendors sell as a service, in some cases configured to use up to 200GB per month of bandwidth.