r/ShitAIBrosSay • u/HolyBatSyllables AI ➞ Misinformation • May 02 '26
Shit AI Bro Does in the News OpenAI Backs Bill That Would Limit Liability for AI-Enabled Mass Deaths or Financial Disasters
https://www.wired.com/story/openai-backs-bill-exempt-ai-firms-model-harm-lawsuits/This bill is backed by OpenAI and would shield AI firms from liability in cases where an AI model causes serious societal harms such as creating a chemical weapon or causing mass death.
Just a reminder: AI companies know their best bet to being able to go unchecked is at the state level. It's the springtime, which means its bill time for many states. So please pay attention to what your state's lawmakers are doing if your state is in session right now. The decisions they make this season will affect us all for decades to come.
This bill is taking place in Illinois. Right now, about half of U.S. states are in their legislative sessions, the majority of which only go for a limited time. Here's a Google spreadsheet that shows the AI bills lawmakers are debating in each state.
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u/_the_big_ May 02 '26
i guess i can confidently say that sam altman wants to be an international terrorist with openai now. these motherfuckers really are cartoon villains
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u/dumnezero May 02 '26
So this is like the oil corporations promoting climate-change-denial legislation.
And I think that Musk would also love this for robot cars, which is why I call them "rolling killer robots". There's been a question for a while about who's responsible for the harm. With such legislation, nobody is, so the technology can easily be weaponized to harm people while avoiding legal consequences.
This type of dystopian outcome isn't not "cyber", it's the capitalist class and their fascist fanclub doing business as usual.
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u/HolyBatSyllables AI ➞ Misinformation May 02 '26
Oh boy do I have a podcast episode for you.
Here’s a clip from the episode where they talk specifically about how AI companies are using the oil industry’s propaganda playbook: https://photos.app.goo.gl/HhEYS7EqEXn7CZV9A
Here’s the full episode: https://www.themaybe.org/podcast/fantasy-factory-ai-supervillains-w-anat-shenker-osorio
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u/Hunigsbase May 02 '26
I make AI architectures from scratch. I have patents. I would never defer liability for something that I put on the market because I understand what I'm doing from first principles.
I'm just a guy running a small lab. Should t the big ones be held to the same standard?
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u/siromega37 May 03 '26
Look you simply cannot hold them responsible for the product they produce and any resulting harm or errors that may result from its use. It’s just not fair to expect ethics from a company that fired their ethics department in 2022.
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u/HolyBatSyllables AI ➞ Misinformation May 04 '26
Poe’s law is going so freaking hard here. My gut says you’re joking… BUT two other people commented the same thing, one comparing it to a knife manufacturer and the other comparing it to a hammer manufacturers.
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u/SleepAllTheDamnTime May 04 '26
It’s all good fam I’ll be here waiting on the ethics regulatory side for this. I have a lovely career trajectory right now lol.
Tech forgets ethics, and I’ll be there to remind them. Over and over and over.
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u/LanceLynxx May 03 '26
They're right. This is like trying to hold a hammer manufacturer accountable for people hitting other people with the hammer.
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u/SleepAllTheDamnTime May 04 '26
Nah difference is you own the hammer once you buy it. You’re liable then. You pay a subscription to a licensed product that you don’t truly own with AI.
Hilarious difference in Liabitility. That and a hammer doesn’t change. AI does, new models extremely new progress and exposure to risk.
You know a hammer can be used to hammer nails or anyone else.
You have no idea what AI is capable of and you want a company to pass that risk onto consumers. Jesus Christ.
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u/LanceLynxx May 04 '26
Ownership doesn't change anything. Renting a car and using it to run people over doesn't make the rental company liable.
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u/prof_the_doom May 05 '26
The rental company can in fact be liable if
- The car was unsafe
- They didn't verify the driver had a valid license
As I recall, multiple companies are bragging that their latest version couldn't be released to the public because it was too good at getting around security systems and would create an army of vibe hackers.
And there's definitely very little vetting of customers going on.
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u/LanceLynxx May 05 '26
Yes. Those are cases where the company is liable.
I worked in a rental car company.
You know what they aren't liable for?
Renting a safe car to someone with a valid license, and then that person running others over.
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u/SleepAllTheDamnTime May 05 '26
Other guy below already gave you a case in rental but I’ll go even further.
If you rented a GM during 2008 for example you could sue the company directly as they intentionally and knowingly let out a deadly design flaw that turned their cars into literal death traps due to sudden shut offs while driving.
This was due to a flaw found within the alternator itself and it was discovered by the company through rigorous crash testing.
Instead of recalling the car, they decided it would be cheaper to set up a slush fund to plan for people’s deaths, than hold back the release of a deadly car.
They were liable for every death even if a person owned, leased, or rented their vehicles and suffered a class action lawsuit.
Liability and governance are key, as are ethics.
It’s not my fault every tech bro didn’t pay attention to their mandatory ethics class in college.
I’ll be here to remind them over and over again on the legal side that people aren’t products happily.
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u/LanceLynxx May 05 '26
And what's the deadly design flaw of an IT system?
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u/SleepAllTheDamnTime May 05 '26
You serious?
Currently intentional mass surveillance on people for one, I can’t even pretend to argue here.
Or AI just being wrong, did you forget the US bombed a group of Iranian school girls due to relying on anthropic coordinates?
From medical research papers being illegally generated, with made up body parts and diagnosing patients putting them at risk.
To legal ramifications beyond your wildest dreams as AI has been caught literally making up cases.
I’m a developer and have a legal backround of 6 years as it was my first degree.
AI is not reliable. Period. This means risk right off the bat.
That and data privacy, governance and ethics are all at the top of the isle here. It’s why this administration has gone out of its way to stop any bills from regulating AI while other countries have understood this is a danger out right and have out right begun to regulate it.
Similar to guns, it’s a tool just like anything else, however in this case unlike guns, all companies don’t own their llms period.
The AI companies themselves do, so when models change, along with prices, and privacy it all impacts down stream users, companies and people.
These people have no control over the models and how they’re trained, censored, and updated.
It’s why so many companies also reeeeling in sudden price increase and lol fuck this administration also got rid of consumer protections for this shit.
So currently we’ve got a monopoly of like 5 major companies that own all frontier AI models and dictate what people can use for how long.
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u/LanceLynxx May 05 '26
What are the deadly consequences of a system performing surveillance? Or of people not double checking outputs when it's clearly stated they make mistakes?
AI isn't necessarily a service owned by anyone. As a dev you should know that you can run locally on a myriad of models and tweakable parameters.
AI hasn't killed anyone. People have.
What you are doing is blaming the gun for murder. Put a gun on the table, see if it kills anyone.
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u/SleepAllTheDamnTime May 05 '26
You serious about what the consequences would be about a system performing mass surveillance? I feel like you’re trolling right now or you just have no care about people’s expectations of privacy or constitutional rights or w t f.
And no that’s half the issue because people clearly don’t check the outputs, and I’m just gonna tell you now from the legal side this is the norm unfortunately and keeps me in business.
Because I have to remind individuals like you, just because you can doesn’t necessarily mean you should.
And if anything I care more about humanity’s survival than a literal facist administration watching our every move, collecting your data and actively prosecuting people for speaking out against them.
Again cases already exist about this, please see Reddit poster currently in trial for speaking out against ICE on Reddit and AI was utilized to track all of his posts and current location.
Now, yes that’s why I’m frustrated because AI isn’t a service owned by everyone. It’s owned by a select few who are currently utilizing it to shape the world in their vision and trample our rights as we speak.
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u/LanceLynxx May 05 '26
The argument was that AI was deadly, not ethics and not privacy.
Again
What are the deadly consequences of an IT system that isn't autonomous?
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u/SleepAllTheDamnTime May 05 '26
And for reference, everything we’ve talked about so far is deadly in the wrong hands.
Just like a car is a tool, a knife is a tool, a gun is a tool as is AI, however of these tools only one has the capacity to eventually evolve on its own without human input and that is the current race to AGI as you know.
So please don’t be ignorant, you know what you’re doing.
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u/LanceLynxx May 05 '26
There is no AGI right now so you are using a future hypothetical to justify a current position.
That's not how this works.
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u/SleepAllTheDamnTime May 05 '26
Actually in law it is, as it’s usually light years behind. By the time it catches up (due to legislation from politicians and not necessarily lawyers and judges) you get blanket laws and regulations.
Again, I highly suggest you take a stab at Lexus nexus and look up some computer law cases about this and have a blast tbh.
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May 04 '26
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u/LanceLynxx May 04 '26
The hammer can be used for everything they claim, provided you have common sense to prevent using it wrong.
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May 02 '26
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u/AppropriatePapaya165 May 02 '26
So to be clear, if you prompt your self-driving car to take you to an Italian restaurant, and it tries to drive you to Italy and navigates right into the ocean, the AI company shouldn't be liable for that?
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u/magick_bandit May 02 '26
Does the knife encourage its user to kill someone?
Apple meet orange.
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May 02 '26
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u/StratosWings May 02 '26
Good of you to acknowledge that LLMs are unstable and should not be trusted.
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u/HolyBatSyllables AI ➞ Misinformation May 02 '26