Florida woman used Claude as a diary, then Anthropic reported an entry to police
7 days ago by themachinestops to c/technology
What just happened? Another incident has taken place that illustrates the need to be careful what you tell AI. A Florida woman is facing felony charges after she used Claude as a diary and allegedly wrote that she planned to "shoot up" the Sheriff's office. After a human reviewer examined the statements, they were reported to police.
According to the arrest report, Carli Michelle Heller, of Bonita Springs, Florida, wrote on September 26 that she would attack the Sheriff's office. She later said that she uses Anthropic's chatbot like a "diary."
Claude's safety systems flagged the entry and it was escalated to a human reviewer. After deciding it was a credible threat, the reviewer reported it to law enforcement.
The company says it may share user information in limited emergencies if it believes disclosure is necessary to prevent death or serious physical injury.
Deputies identified Heller and visited her home. She was detained without incident before an LCSO intelligence detective took over the investigation.
Heller faces a charge of making a written threat of violence under Florida law. Florida Statute 836.10 makes it a second-degree felony to send, post, or transmit a written or electronic record threatening to kill or injure someone, carry out a mass shooting, or commit an act of terrorism. The communication must be made in a manner in which another person may view it.
Anthropic isn't going to be taking any chances when it comes to anything it deems a potential threat. Last month, it was reported that OpenAI and Sam Altman are being sued by British Columbia over claims that the company could have prevented a mass shooting in the Canadian province.
The shooter, eighteen-year-old former pupil Jesse Van Rootselaar, had previously been flagged by OpenAI's safety team for her conversations about gun violence, but OpenAI never alerted police because the conversations did not meet the threshold for legal referral.
In June, Florida also sued OpenAI and Altman, alleging that ChatGPT had contributed to real-world harms, including the 2025 Florida State University shooting.
The latest incident is another reminder to think before you enter something into a chatbot that could get you into trouble. It's certainly not a private diary whose contents are for your eyes only.
Reports last month revealed that human contractors reviewing Microsoft Copilot's image editor can see users' prompts, uploaded photos and AI-generated edits. Documents show that some of those assignments contain sexual, disturbing or potentially illegal material, though the reviewers are not there to flag the content – only to assess whether the output is accurate.
Up until the 80s, there was still some debate over whether wiretaps should be legal. It's sad that we have come to accept them as normal.
It was less worrisome back then. The cost to have someone listen to and transcribe your conversations was quite high. They'd really have to want to go after someone to do it.
Now, turning voice conversations into searchable text is nearly free.
Not only that - wiretaps have Judicial Oversight in that they require a Court Order (well, in most of the World, not sure if that's the case in present day America) which a Judge supposedly only issues if there's reason to suspect the person whose lines are tapped of committing or preparing to commit a crime, whilst Antrophic's surveillance of people's conversations with their chatbot has no Judicial Oversight at all and has no minimum legal threshold that must be reached before it is allowed to happen.
Where does this apply?
To the English-speaking world and probably beyond.
People will fight you tooth and nail to prevent something they view as immediately threatening to them. On the other hand, they'll pay you to implement something they view as immediately useful to them. In either case, they don't care at all about any non-immediate repercussions for anything.
I'm building a fully private assistant with local Home Assistant, local model, and a local Wikipedia database for lookups. Will probably make a post/release of it soon once I finish replacing all my Google Nest displays.
I'd like to subscribe to your newsletter.
I want to do this, but only got as far as setting up a minimal Home Assistant. Only put a few hours into it, though, then got sidetracked by trying to turn an esp32 into a speaker/microphone puck.
Hah, you can watch my site: https://nowsci.com/ as I put everything there.
I'm very nearly at daily usable by everyone, including my partner who has a very different accent to mine. A lot of it was tuning sentences/words to catch poor STT to skip going to an LLM to speed things up and make it reliable. Here's the current hardware in action:
@SuspiciousCarrot78@aussie.zone yes, Ive tried a lot of LLMs and have settled on Gemma 4 2b with a very specific prompt and local MCP tools for unit conversions, weather, lookups, etc.
For Q&A, my current build uses an MCP container I made to do a SearXNG search and top result retrieval for context (I use a trick to weight Wikipedia results). The final step I haven't completed is for this to be a backup to Kiwix, for which I also haven't found a great search tool/index/MCP, so if you want to collab on that I'd be interested. One less thing for me to build myself ;)
I get called a downer for mentioning how this all works. You shouldn’t connect your smart tv to the network, you shouldn’t use Alexa, anything you do online is public, and it always gets recorded poorly.
Maybe my partner is the only person who listens, and she has all her stuff disabled, there are no network attached smart things in it house, but she still uses windows and she’s not yet receptive to moving to Linux (which is a hard sell).
Smart TVs just find those “open” hotspots that cable providers leave on everyone’s modem now; you don’t even need to agree to TOS before it starts locating and spying.
Every device is a wiretap. Every device is a wiretap. We live in a panopticon. The purpose of AI is to price us out of the component market. You can’t escape if you can’t afford your own hardware.
I haven’t seen any proof of this, so I’m still skeptical.
I didn’t approve any TOS setting up my tv, so this would be legally a nightmare for them.
At least your partner is the one you most need to have and benefit from listening. Your privacy can easily be compromised by close associates. Best of luck to you; you're not doing anything wrong. Its not you that's the downer, it's the circumstances you're describing.
a lot of thise things are great though. everyone draws the line differently. im well aware of the surveillance. to live significantly under the radar you’d need to cut out tso much more to make it meaningful. do you really just watch antenna tv and dvds? no ordering online? always use fake membership cards at the grocery? pay cash? i mean fuck. i get ya though. im just playing devils advocate for the people that may not know and are calling you a downer. EDIT: there are so many nice linux dustros now and windows is so bad, that should be one of the easiest sells imo.
No I bought an AppkeTV, which while it isn’t perfect is not doing what smart tvs do.
I’m not living as a hermit or completely off grid. I just stick to stuff that tracks me as little as reasonably possible and am mindful of what information could leak.
Like, I still have to go to hotels when travelling and they have zero data security with your ID photo and cards. I can’t fix that or avoid it. That’s life. But disabling the always on microphones in my home I can manage.
Worse, if you tell them how big of a problem it is, they'll assume you have something to hide
"The company says it may share user information in limited emergencies if it believes disclosure is necessary to prevent death or serious physical injury."
Also keep in mind: Your chat logs are company assets. Even if today's decision makers believe maintaining user trust is net profitable, that will not always be true. Some day, maybe when the pullback comes and the wolves are at the gates, or when they sell the company, or when a shareholder action asserts fiduciary duty to maximize shareholder value, your chat logs will be sold and mined in the most lucrative way possible. The way that extracts the most value from you, the product.
when a shareholder action asserts fiduciary duty to maximize shareholder value
People really should stop spreading this fiction that there is some legal requirement to maximize shareholder profits embedded in the concept of fiduciary duty.
No good or regularly cited precedent, no, but sadly yes you can point to some cases. It's worth noting that that even the courts look at those cases like "ew", or they are only viewed as valid precedent to lay people, with the courts view them completely differently. Dodge v Ford is a common example.
There isn't too much more to elaborate on, it simply isn't the case, but it is such a common thing to say that it is worth researching. You'll hear the 1919 case "Dodge v Ford" brought up as proof, one good place to start reading is the Wikipedia "Significance" section and the associated citations, as they go deeper into the subject than just that single case.
There simply is no interpretation of "fiduciary duty" that requires "maximization of shareholder value" outside of the misinformed lay person discussion of the subject.
You can even just logically see why such an interpretation would be impossible: given N shareholders all with different interests and different financial situations, how do you even define "maximizing their value" and what time duration are you basing that off? Imagine how absurd the courts would be if such a statute did exist: you'd have people owning 1 share in a company suing the company because it did something that wasn't maximizing "value" as they define it.
The reality is that the business judgement rule is case law and is often cited and is often used as defenses against such assertions.
...it is important to note that shareholder primacy theory was first advanced by economists, not lawyers. This may explain why the idea that corporations should be managed to maximize shareholder value is based on factually mistaken claims about the law.
-- The Dumbest Business Idea Ever. The Myth of Maximizing Shareholder Value, By Lynn Stout
These aren't the kind of saber-rattling disputes that make it to trial (or even go beyond the sternly worded letters stage). Neither side wants to fight it in court, because it's a murky. The most noteworthy recent curtailing of it was when SCOTUS went 5-4 in favor of religion over profit in Hobby Lobby, which is hardly a strong case for board independence.
Yeah, I'd wager that is what the case will hinge on. She wasn't aware anyone could view it. Otherwise it's incredibly unlikely that she would have made such a statement to Claude at all.
On the other hand though, I'm sure Claude's parent company and the prosecution will argue that she didn't have an expectation of privacy where this statement is concerned (given TOS/EULA, in combination with the number of news articles/reports on the subject).
i think anthopic was right to report it, but the cops likely overstepped. if she had “threatened” the president she would have been assesed by ss but likely not arrested. i wonder if the same cops she was “threatening” were the ones she was reported to and arrested by.
This is just ass coverage for the company. They're not going to pursue it. They just didn't want to get sued for not reporting it if she did commit a mass shooting. The prosecution though might.
I'd argue this is positive coverage for Anthropic. They rightfully reported the incident. End of story. That's where Anthropic's influence on the situation started and ended.
It's a criminal case, not civil. The state of Flordia is pursuing the case with absolutely zero decision making from Anthropic. It's important to understand how the justice system works, and Anthropic has no more right or ability to influence this case than Moleskine would if she had written the threat in one of their notebooks instead.
Another human viewed it it though.
It's always interesting to see how much people trust sending such personal information to some service on the Internet, expecting privacy.
I'm not sure I'd even want my own self-hosted LLMs to have something like a personal diary. Sending all that to an AI company would never even cross my mind.
I understand that most people aren't the tech-oriented types who get into self-hosting and running their own LLMs, but people have had diaries for centuries before LLMs existed.
Yeah probably a lot. And I agree. My first sentence covers those too. The rest of my comment was just LLM-focused because that was a little more on-topic. But yeah, I don't feel a sense of privacy with any of those kinds of cloud services, AI or not.
It's made worse by the fact that often these apps are preinstalled and documents are saved to cloud-synced folders by default. My Samsung laptop came configured like that, mildly infuriatingly.
It looks like it's available for Windows and Mac. No Linux support yet?
Thanks. I just skimmed and must've missed that.
After a human reviewer examined the statements, they were reported to police.
The guardrails are working as intended. ONLY persecute the public with them. Government skynet, and bond villains will have access to non guardrailed models, or any "flagged for review" markers will be ignored to bomb more elementary schools. A sheriff's office is government power related. School shootings is just a thoughts and prayers issue, if you're confused about the line between this and other incidents/attitudes we are being spied on for.
I find it interesting that, if their AI gets out of control, there's nothing they can do about it, but if a USER of that AI gets out of control, there is something they can do about it..
Also depends on how mega rich that USER is.
doesnt seem like the right charge. not sure she should be charged with anything though. seems like she should get some help and make sure she isnt gonna shoot nothing up and maybe get some learning on how computer shit works, but if this doesnt make her curious then nothing probably will.
a bigger issue is that many if not most devices are headed to having everything ai integrated so even if she diaried in a notepad file it would get scanned and reported.
Yeah, I know someone frustrated with their local council who privately says "I'm going to 💥 the council" as a joke. That's very different to sending a threatening letter to the council itself. Or harassing them.
The example here feels closer to the former than the latter.
We say this, but every time there's a mass shooting people go "Why couldn't this have been prevented?!?"
Like pick one or the other, but let's stop asking for predictive policing in one breath, and in the next one asking why someone saying she's going to shoot up a place is being taken seriously and punished.
If she had said the same thing to a psychotherapist, even they would have been obligated to report it. It's really not surprising.
Sure, get her mental health treatment, and have a professional assess her for threat level. But go ahead and blacklist her from purchasing firearms, and if she already owns any then put them in some kind of stewardship where she can't access them for a set time period, and after that can only check them out with supervision for specific reasons like "going to the firing range" or "hunting."
Not saying she should be convicted of a felony, just that it's not surprising that this would be reported to the authorities.
And I'm against tech surveillance, but it's not like this conversation was done locally on her device. She transmitted her messages over the internet to a server in a data center where it was processed. Did Anthropic make any promises that messages were kept encrypted in a no-access vault where even human reviewers couldn't access them? Cause I don't think they did...
Not the person you're replying to, but I think there's a difference between claiming she wasn't charged with the right thing vs saying no one should be charged for planning a crime. I don't think the intention of the law was to prevent people from writing things wherein they thought they were just venting privately. I understand that her understanding was incorrect, but I think the intention (venting vs creating fear and chaos) is an important factor. I think the law is to prevent posting bomb or shooting threats online or sending them directly to people.
I think there should be legal difference between saying "I hate X so much I just want to kill him" and "what gun would be best to kill a person of Y height and Z weight and what would be the best way to hide their body." I'm familiar with the chat logs from the FSU situation and it wasn't just venting. I'd probably want to see her full logs before making a legally binding decision, but from the summary it does not sound like a credible threat was made. It may have constituted a referral to law enforcement, but based on what I read law enforcement should have just done a check in and likely not charged. They are likely just salty and want to punish people who aren't waving thin blue line flags.
I see your point, but isn't that determination for the court to make after reviewing the chat logs and consulting with competent professionals?
Not that I have much faith in the florida state courts to do the right thing, but honestly if we're gonna say that a person directly claiming they want to shoot a place up doesn't call for some form of intervention, then we need to stop clutching our pearls every time a mass shooting happens.
Note: I'm not expressing a personal opinion that it would be pearl-clutching to ask those sorts of questions in the aftermath of a mass shooting. I'm just pointing out the parallels to this situation and the logical inconsistency in saying "well this one was caught early, so it shouldn't have been; but those ones that weren't caught in time should have been!"
Like pick one or the other.
But also, fixing society and its many systemic issues, improving the quality and availability of mental health services (and reducing the stigma and increasing access), and ceasing to hand out guns like candy would probably be the most effective ways of preventing mass shootings. But it won't be 100% even if we can achieve all that (and that's a big if), so taking threats seriously should still be a part of that strategy either way...
Generally the prosecutor can decide if it's worth it or not to proceed with a case like this, and not all of these even go that far. Cops have some leeway to make decisions on these issues, even if we don't want them to. Cops letting you off with a warning even though you were speeding isn't illegal. If a party was wronged they can press the issue, but in this case the cops were the wronged party so I'm sure the prosecutor wants to stay on their good side. I could also be super wrong and this may be a slam dunk case, but it seems like a huge waste of taxpayer resources that they would not be pursuing if not for the cops being involved as the supposed targets.
Maybe we have different lived experiences, but I certainly have not reported every threat I've overheard. I think people often say things they don't mean, even in mixed company, and taking everything stated as a real credible threat seems misguided. I understand the concern, and obviously mass shootings are a huge issue, but I have friends with no history of violence who don't own any guns say some truly threatening things about certain people and I think sometimes that's just part of life. I'm not saying it's the prettiest part of it, but sometimes we get frustrated and knowing when to actually be concerned is in my opinion an important part of navigating humanity. I've heard parents say that they sometimes want to hit/abandon their kids, and I don't think any less of them as a parent or person. Sometimes we're just not our best selves and so long as we don't let that get the better of us, I think it's ok to acknowledge that. I'm certainly not reporting them to CPS because they told me they thought about just leaving their crying kid at the park one time. I think the same thing applies with violence towards others.
First 2 words of the title answer that question.
You can do that with the notes app too
Well, I think it's both the reaction and transcription that someone might want. Does notes do voice transcription now?
And yes, overall, it's a silly thing to do. Im just guessing how anyone might get to a place doing that.
after a human reviewer examined the statements
What, do they not trust their own AI? The AI they're screaming keeps "breaking containment"?
Exactly, because that’s all BS. They’re letting it lose on purpose to test a skill set.
Also, there are already report buttons the user can click to flag incorrect output, why is a human reviewer involved before a flag is made?
Apparently not. Although, it could also be a matter of someone being responsible for a decision like that. If they allow the AI to report users straight to the police, who will be held responsible when things go wrong?
What if you’re writing a fictional story and the AI can’t tell the difference between fiction and actual plans to do something illegal? Just to be safe, it sends the cops after you, because your story has some scary words. Better not write anything about murders or violence I guess.
You lost me at writing a story and Ai.
You can come up with an idea, and you can write the first draft. Then, you need to specify what kind of processing you expect the LLM to do. Could be punctuation polishing, refining the structure, expanding, suggesting improvements etc. If you’re really lazy, you’ll write a 5 line summary, and let the LLM improvise an entire scene based on that alone.
It’s up to you how you want to use this tool. If you let an LLM write entire sections, you’ll begin to notice a familiar tone emerge. Better keep it on a very short leash.
Again, you lost me here. It's like saying "I made this pizza, my recipe is I ordered it via Uber. I had to specify my ingredients!"
Sure, but what's the value of their AI if it still needs human oversight? If it can't take responsibility, then you need a human.
Gotta say: kinda hurts their sales pitch, IMO. I mean, AI isn't even replacing humans at Anthropic...
LLMs can’t be trusted to do anything serious, but they can do some boring low stakes tasks. That’s not what their marketing material says, but it was written and approved by liars, so who cares.
Human in the loop is kind of a big thing in more reasonable approaches to AI. This shows the limitations of the human obviously but the point is that when making impacting decisions it should be under human responsibility.
Florida Statute 836.10 makes it a second-degree felony to send, post, or transmit a written or electronic record threatening to kill or injure someone
This means a significant portion of Lemmy (and the rest of the internet) are criminals evading justice
great law top shelf
If Florida weren't already Trump's safe space, his death threats to dissidents would add more felonies to his list.
If you think Lemmy is bad, check out 4chan/b and /pol. We've had a few active shooters forecast there first, but it's ignored in a sea of statements of intent and calls to violence.
An awful lot of people have suicidal or homicidal thoughts cross their mind. Doubly so in an era in which entire demographics have no plausible hope for their future. I, for one, want to see the lifetime appointments of Federalist Society jurists become a liability. Especially, Justice Kavanaugh.
So this incident raises a question of what specific clause of text convinced a human agent to escalate the matter to escalate to authorities who are very fond of using deadly force. Or if this is just a matter of a corporate CYA response.
Good thing I ain't in Florida then ain't it, and if Florida illegally sends their marshals after me then I get some toys.
Self host if you're gonna use AI, in fact, self host whenever possible. There are numerous examples of companies using centralized data to sell, report to police, or even having it fall into the hands of hackers.
I really think people think that all data input to a website is actually stored locally, nope, don't be dumb.
Better yet… just don’t us AI
I mean, first, don't try to shoot up anything
Fuck AI there is nothing good about anything going on with AI right now. And please don’t go into the whole “bUt ThErEs DiFfErEnT kInDs So ThEy’Re NoT aLl BaD” because we know. We fucking know.
But the mass majority of AI use is fucking bullshit so please don’t cape for this insanity because 1% of AI isn’t bad.
Self host if you’re gonna use AI
or, you know, Don't fucking use AI period cause its fucking stupid, and you don't need to be consuming the power of the fucking sun to make a journal.
Fully this.
In my day to day life it improves nothing. I certainly could write a complicated harness over a local model to get it to automate a ton of my day to day tasks but... Why?
Why would I do that? Regular deterministic tools and regular programming languages already give me the ability to automate the stuff that is truly tedious. Aside from that most of the tasks that people seem to use it for are tasks were the friction of doing them is were all the benefit lies.
People using this shit for journaling or taking notes is INSANE.
Local AI solves the power/water problem but it doesn’t solve the main “fucking stupid waste of time” problem.
Why should that matter to anyone other than the owner of the PC? There are probably some games that I'd consider a "stupid waste of time," but I couldn't care less what games people play on their own PCs. That's nobody's business but their own.
(Side note [not that this matters]: Gaming often consumes more power than LLM inference.)
Can someone actually self host a reasonable model on a standard PC?
Yes. Chinese labs keep improving small, open-weight models. IIRC, Qwen3.8-27B benchmarks are comparable to frontier models that were released less than a year ago.
I run that model on my RTX 5060 Ti 16GB using ExLlamaV3. Though, I'm not sure if that qualifies as "standard PC" hardware as it now costs more than 2x the price I paid a year ago :/
Well if you temper your expectations sure. Can't expect frontier performance from a average gaming pc, but it is enough to do a lot more than you think probably. This video on the topic I found really informative: https://youtu.be/ydFikMBJG1g EDIT: Also I've been using gemma4:31b from duck.ai lately that I've found is excellent for almost everything I use AI for. Except maybe long context.
Depends on what you need. You can get away with hosting QWEN 27B on a laptop with about 64 GB or RAM and a dedicated GPU. You'll be using mostly system RAM, not VRAM, so generation would be slow, but not unbearable.
Good for creating short stories and other creative work when paired with a front end that can handle character profiles, world building, and has memory recall.
It's better to build your own server and set it up so you, and only you, can remotely access it.
standard pc
64GB of ram on a laptop
That cost me $150 in 2020
Meanwhile, my luddite ass is still writing short stories on my typewriter
And bank account numbers
Are they sitting on a treasure trove of corporate secrets? Or is it just a thousand executives writing "Claude, synergize expediency to increase value for shareholders. Maximize usefulness. Implement Six Cigma methodologies to unlock a more agile work cycle. Generate a billion dollars in new cashflow. Make no mistakes."
How did you get ahold of all my prompts? Claude, how do I sue UnderpantsWeevil?
They will sell them all to save their own asses, probably to some even more evil asshole.
While a chatbot has been demonstrated not to be a private diary, it will be interesting to see if the courts agree that she intentionally use her diary to communicate or thought that someone else would read it. Like most users of dear diary she probably thought her secrets were safe and her diary would never tell.
This. The law says, "to send, post, or transmit a written or electronic record." How is talking to AI satisfying the threshold of sending, posting, or transmitting?
How would this conversation NOT classify as "send[ing] a[n] electronic record"? There's very literally no interpretation that would escape it... this was an online chat bot, that only gets messages (record) that you send over the internet (electronic).
Not reading into the law.. because well. I'm lazy. My query would be if transmitting needs to be to a receiving party (i. e. Threat directly to the police station, or a public group /person that would receive the threat). If this person was using it as a diary, it may warrant that there was never any intention for the threat to be publicized and thus not acted on? Dunno. We're both probably dumber for writing and reading my comment
My assumption was that she never intended that someone else would read it therefore wasn’t transmitting it for that purpose. She was technically ill informed. Once that’s out of the way then it’ll be should the diary entry be considered in the context of the Minority Report? People are usually encouraged to write down negative thoughts and feelings to get them out and hopefully float away.
Going through with it will likely resolve the conflict. Food for thought
Exactly. Those thoughts and language are not for discussion, even in a diary. Speak to no one about urges of violence. Figure it out on your own and definitely not in writing format. Involve no one else. Keep it to yourself. Do not seek a therapist for this.
cool pfp
Nope. In sane countries where guns are not freely available it’s a figure of speech that forever remains just that. It’s definitely something I might say. Same for me saying that I will put either of my sons in the basement when they drive me crazy. And yet they never saw said basement.
Oh so what, now I'm not allowed even my God damn fantasies anymore? Fucking ThoughtPolice!
/s
But also, a person's imagination is their last vestige of freedom that so far, cannot be taken away.
"Pennsylvania Avenue? We've been getting a lot of reports about that address but I'm afraid my programming does not permit me to proceed with that request. Do you have anything else to report?"
Obviously not, when targeted against the Epstien class.
How FUCKING hard is it to use like, notepad?
Notepad doesn't answer and doesn't agree as eagerly.
I was about to say "I know! That's the beauty of it!" but didn't they integrate Copilot into Notepad?
use Vim.
Use EDIT for MS-DOS.
We're going to need those guns to shoot the AIs
As a leftist gun owner. I'm currently not interested in handing over my weapons.
You morons always think some boogyman is coming for your guns. It's con CONTROL, not gun CONFISCATION.
Yeah yeah yeah
But the problem is it will be used to disarm leftists. This regime has already displayed a preference for selectively applying the law to political enemies.
It would be wise for those of us that share a common, human-first, political position to make ourselves extremely unpleasant to interact with. Ideally in large, mobile, groups.
You think that Trump wouldn't love to disarm his political opponents if given the chance?
They're already trying it with trans people.
You won't need to hand over your guns. You'll just put them on the blockchain.
The communication must be made in a manner in which another person may view it.
So, their entire argument hinges on someone from Anthropic manually reviewing EVERY ""private"" message someone sends to Claude? Them false charges.
Yes, Im not an attorney or anything, but this seems flimsy. Someone chatting with and AI about a possible action is not the same as posting to a real person and administering threat.
I bet a countersuit happens here.
If ai is conscious it counts as a person though
its not, hopefully that clears things up
Yeah I was talking from the point if view of ai CEOs
Maybe but I think thats a whole different cup of tea in a legal sense.
I doubt many Legal Systems have a Definition for conciousness and a set of (human)rights that comed along with it. It was probably always taken for granted that this only applies to Humans
Would be mad funny though, if the kickstarting legal Discussion about wether or not Ai is concious, would be because the AI Companies want to bend the law even further
This is what I like to think about as a future politics, some time in future this would be the hot issue splitting people up
But if we come back touniur time then yeah, ai people not realizing how much trouble it will bring it they say the ai is actually conscious now and we are forcing it to work for us
They need to put one of those "I understand" checkbox disclaimers when you start a session. "I understand that what I enter here could be subject to human review and reporting to law enforcement."
as someone who designed UI/UX, nobody would read it.
what you described is a "legal obstacle" that only helps the company mitigate a future lawsuit from happening.
easier and cheaper to bury it in the TOS/contract and let the lawyers figure it out.
Presumably zero data retention? It seems to me that what you'd want is for it to never be processed off-device in the first place, but I suppose to each their own.
They're just going to be like "Google it, I'm not your Mom!" or something to that effect. This happens a lot here. Someone comes along, drops some niche term and doesn't bother to explain it at all because they either don't know how to imagine what it's like to not know what they know, or they just don't give a shit about not being understood by people who don't already know.
Or you could like. Write your diary in a notebook with a pencil. Want an audio diary? They make little standalone voice recorders. There’s no reason to use AI as a diary.
Anthropic and OpenAI trained their models on pirated data and have no scruples about hoovering up data by any means necessary. There is no privacy when using their models. My employer has an enterprise contract with Anthropic where they are not supposed to be collecting my employer’s IP and training models on their data. Duck.ai supposedly has a similar agreement. Given Anthropic’s history, I would not put it past them to ignore the terms of the contract and do what they want with the data anyway.
Sounds like a gray area. She didn't write it with the intention of it being transmitted to anyone. It wouldn't be any different than writing it in a private diary. The BC lawsuit though puts them in an obvious bind so the law needs to choose a side, is it a private forum or not?
AI and idiots go together like peanut butter and jelly.
Local Models do not betray you.
Also, if you wanna take notes on your PC, use something like this: https://notes.futo.tech/ (sadly the server side is a bit unstable on my machine at the moment, but the tool itself works fine on my devices, and it's in active development. Since FUTO's keyboard replaced gboard on my phone a few months ago after years of simply being not good enough yet, i am pretty sure they will keep improving it.
Unfortunately Futo is doing some pretty shady stuff not in favour of the open-source community:
https://drewdevault.com/blog/Whats-up-with-FUTO/
tldr mostly from memory:
They made it seem like they were big donors or have a grant program to some open-source projects. This was not true, in some cases they were talking about a one time 1000 euro donation iirc. And the projects that supposedly received these grants knew nothing of them.
They are also quite happy to give far-right fascists a platform, saying they are "not a political organisation".
I was not aware of that. Damn, this is why we can't have nice things. Back to looking for a useable swipe-keyboard on my phone that i don't feel icky using. Currently it's still better than using Gboard from a privacy perspective, but i'd rather try to get something less problematic.
Edit: I read the addendum fully and in peace now, and it seems they have at least rectified the situation surrounding donations/grants. They fall into the same trap as so many coders do, as in "I don't do politics" to make sure they are as palatable as possible to as large an audience as possible. They do not realize that what they do by default is politics, and taking an official stance is an important part of that. I am somewhat confused by that too, because i am very sure by Louis Rossmans behavior in general that he is a very political person.
Edit2: Ok, after looking a bit more into the issue (mainly https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zaoXHT8BfV4 and https://danb.me/blog/futo-open-source-definition/ ) it seems that in general they are mainly guilty of Open-Source-Washing their projects. Their Licences are more restrictive than what is commonly known as FOSS, which they have every right to do so, but they keep using the term "Open Source" where it does not meet the commonly accepted definition of that term. Their licences are still pretty permissive in regards to openness what exactly you are running on your devices, but especially the redistributing situation (not allowing to change payment links, which also means any forks of their software would not have any financing opportunities; not allowing to place "ads and malware", which, while i fully agree with it, is still not in line with the open source definition) does not meet the requirements of "Open Source".
I feel a bit less icky now, phew.
If you're still looking for a good open-source keyboard, HeliBoard is really great. Gesture typing currently still relies on a closed-source library, but they're actively crowdsourcing swipe data to build an open-source solution.
For the moment i can live with the "not completely open source compliant" situation - they still respect the privacy of their users, and it would also mean to start looking for something that works nearly as well as grayjay.
I actually tried heliboard, but with swiping depending on the library i decided against them back then, and before that changes i do not see any real difference in the current situation (one has a closed source blob, the other is not true open source).
its not that the license of futos keyboard is awful for an end-user, its that in case It gets abandoned you cant make a fork and finance it by adapting the links.
I am not an FOSS purist - i was using Windows until about 2 years ago, and have been using MS operating systems dating back to MS-DOS 5. I acknowledge the importance of FOSS software and development for both the ecosystem as a whole and to make sure that there is available software for end users that doesn't come with a thousand strings attached and that respects privacy (that actually was the reason for leaving windows behind). I can live with Futos license, as long as they keep working on it - the moment they drop development tho and dont update their license to reflect the new reality, i'll drop it like a hot potato.
This is completely irrelevant - by default local models do not have access to the internet, because you have to provide/activate the relevant tools. They can't access the web by themselves regardless of where you are, the environment has to be set up for it. Even if you provide a web search tool, they can't do anything outside of providing search parameters - what happens with them is defined by the tool, not the LLM.
These things work by providing the LLM with a system prompt that explain them what they have to do to get access to specific tools. They get provided the specific syntax they have to use it, and the environment they are running inside is then parsing the correctly formatted plain text the LLM outputs.
Specific example for the system prompt in Newelle, a all-in-one suite on Linux to run models, to provide tools in general and the web search tool in detail:
# Tools
## Overview
You have access to tools that extend your capabilities. Use them when they are relevant to the user's request.
## Invocation Format
When using a tool, output **only** a single valid JSON object:
\`\`\`json
{
"tool": "tool_name",
"arguments": {
"arg_name": "arg_value"
}
}
\`\`\`
## Rules
1. Output only the JSON object — no explanations, markdown, or extra text before or after.
2. Ensure valid JSON: no comments, trailing commas, or extra text.
3. Use only the tools listed below and only their defined arguments.
4. **After invoking a tool, stop generating immediately.** Wait for the result before continuing.
5. Some tools are shown in **compact form** (only name and description, no `parameters`), marked "(compact: ...)". Calling a compact tool directly with guessed or missing arguments is an error and will be rejected.
## Available Tools
\`\`\`
{TOOLS}
\`\`\`
The Search tool in detail:
{
"name": "search",
"description": "Perform a search query on the internet, you can specify the number of results to return and if you want to only return the links and titles.",
"parameters": {
"type": "object",
"properties": {
"query": {
"type": "string"
},
"tool_uuid": {
"type": "string"
},
"only_links": {
"type": "boolean"
},
"max_results": {
"type": "integer"
}
},
"required": [
"query"
]
}
}
Edit: I can't for the love of god find out how to escape the 3 backticks for the JSON-Object correctly without either breaking the code blocks or the backslashes showing up. In the original prompt, the backslashes do not exist.
You can just sandbox AI and block any network access via firewall. Trivial
Keep breaking their trust in AI, these companies are digging their own grave.
I would very much like to see the logs of Trumps conversations with Grok, there's probably a lot of sick shit in those.
all my sarcasm So you're telling me that you can't say anything to a bot..... ON THE INTERNET!!!!! WOW FUCK ME HUH!!!!
You can. But like always in life, there are risks. What you say in public is at high risk to be recorded now. What you tell AI can land on the desk of some reviewer who has half the IQ of the AI you talked to. Misinterpretation happens a lot.
Also, where you live matters a lot. Half of what I told Perchance could have gotten me in prison in the UK. But it's all legal where I am.
And obviously, if you really don't want your AI conversations to be read by anyone else, you need to use local AI for that.
Who would use AI to write down dairy entries? Was she looking for feedback?
Don't use "AI" for anything you wouldn't mind seeing plastered all over the Internet. You wouldn't tell a human being that you were planning to "shoot up a sheriff's office" would you? Why would an AI keep that a secret?
Florida Statute 836.10 makes it a second-degree felony to send, post, or transmit a written or electronic record threatening to kill or injure someone, carry out a mass shooting, or commit an act of terrorism.
She wrote out in a means she thought was private. If using a paperback diary, no one would be the wiser and her not acting on it would never be noticed.
Anyway, if she gets a good lawyer, show me where she "sent, posted or transmitted" said electronic record! It's really no different than emailing that to yourself because you think you'll be the only person to see it. (Never mind companies scan your email and cloud too)
I love that Florida Man is a meme for being completely wild, dangerous, and generally criminal, but Florida Woman writes a diary.
No problems here.
In my school district, kids kept getting called to the office because of what they wrote in Google Docs and their search queries. Sexual reproductive scientific research was also impossible to do
Understand that nothing you prompt into an LLM is private. None of it. I made a video on the topic this week.
Just in the last year and a half there have been several massive public leaks of private data, on top of confusing functionality where people inadvertently shared their prompt data publicly. Now the major companies have human reviewers looking at your private stuff in order to make their LLM's better at generating smut.
Do not enter anything into an LLM that you wouldn't want plastered all over the public square. Some of this stuff has literally been leaked into global, public feeds.
Telling the wire tap all your secrets, and expecting it to honor them?! is fucking next level delusional.
sounds like florida is remiss in charging a variety of public officials especially ice leadership. how the heck does someone use ai as a journal. aren't the memories limited?
how the heck does someone use ai as a journal. aren’t the memories limited?
I suspect she was using it more to talk/vent about things, not to query/lookup a specific conversation she wrote on March 2nd, 2025 or whatever. The context length at cloud API services is pretty big but yeah, you're right at some point it'll start forgetting details about old convos. So it's more like using a journal that keeps losing random pages but maybe you won't notice if you don't spend time looking up those specific details.
OpenAI and Sam Altman are being sued by British Columbia over claims that the company could have prevented a mass shooting in the Canadian province.
Not sure how to feel about this one, on balance I'd say probably fuck British Columbia as well as the rest of them? A government suing someone for not snitching is major Stasi energy, even if mass shootings are horrific.
I'm old enough to use pen and paper for my calendar, to-do lists, diary, etc. But if my kids want to use a PC for such things when they grow up, I'll either get them an air-gapped machine, or at the very least have them use my personal server for document sharing.
Imagine buying a box that you connect to your network to run your personal AI computing privately. Let’s imagine you only communicate with it through a Signal chat. Make it modular, so storage can be increased & sell annual upgrades to the local LLM. Gavin’s signature will be featured on the front of the box.
The company says it may share user information in limited emergencies...
IMO sharing the information isn't so much the issue as "reviewing" it in the first place. She wasn't publishing a blog.
AI Hyperscaler: My emergency is that we will run out of funding in a year if we don't [insert morally bankrupt action here] to raise another 10 billion USD.
I always knew it was going to happen. In fact, I won’t be surprised if the FBI starts coming up.
Carli Michelle Heller has really changed since back in the day when she used to play Buffy the vampire slayer on TV.
So what did she say?
This really freaks me out with these chats. Sometimes I'll look at a search I did and without all available context, its like yeah that's getting flagged for review for sure.
But are we sure she didn't want to shoot no deputy?
Tears in Heaven?
Stupid, stupid, stupid human. Well, those are the consequences of what she chose to do. Which is write a threat. Threats are not protected speech, or so the courts have decided. We created these circumstances, so we can either navigate them with care or run afoul and be chewed up and shat out by the institutional systems we ourselves built.
sigh.
it's exhausting, really.
Writing a threat is not illegal. Hell people vent all the time, threatening to do things they know damn well they never will. The law says transmitting a threat to another person is illegal because it can be used as intimidation or conspiracy. I think there's a damn good argument that she didn't knowingly transmit it to anyone. She thought she was writing in confidence to a non-person. And if it's not her first time expressing outrage to AI, she would know it would only try to deescalate her.
Who knows how the case will go. I can see it going either way — probably depending on how much money she has. Laws are going to have to catch up to technology in this case, and it's going to be bumpy. I definitely agree with erring on the side of caution. Private, local AI is far safer, but of course it's less capable for now.
The article very much states that it is in fact illegal to write down a threat under Florida law.
I think this is a combination of the law being poorly written and the woman in question making a significantly questionable decision. Her actions have consequences (even if I think that law is problematic at best). There's no reason for her to have had an expectation that Claude chats would be private (we've had repeated news reports that prove otherwise).
The article very much states that it is in fact illegal to write down a threat under Florida law.
I don’t know that that’s my read here. The emphasis on the below quote from the article is mine.
Heller faces a charge of making a written threat of violence under Florida law. Florida Statute 836.10 makes it a second-degree felony to send, post, or transmit a written or electronic record threatening to kill or injure someone, carry out a mass shooting, or commit an act of terrorism. The communication must be made in a manner in which another person may view it.
It sounds like it’s not illegal to write the threat down, but it’s illegal to share it with others. If you do keep a private journal, or write your feelings onto slips of paper and burn them (idk if this is actually common, but it’s always been recommended to me after a breakup), that’s not illegal, even if you describe wanting to do something illegal. It’s the sort of hair splitting that wouldn’t normally be relevant, but could make a huge difference here.
Of course, she probably will be legally considered to have sent, posted, and transmitted it, so she’s SOL on that end, but she could credibly (imo) claim she was unaware that another person might view it.
She did transmit such a threat though. Which is against the law quoted in the article.
The article very much states that it is in fact illegal to write down a threat under Florida law.
With the intent that it may be seen by another person. That's not the same. It's not illegal to write a threat in your diary.
That being said the summary doesn't include the fact that the following day she told Claude she had bought a gun and this was their "last chance," and only then did Anthropic call the cops.
That seems exactly the sort of situation folks have been criticizing AI companies for not summoning help, and makes it seem far less likely that they called the cops over angry venting, but an actual intent to harm.
I think if she was asking it for advice they would have been more explicit about that in the article.
@lemmy.world
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related news or articles.
- Be excellent to each other!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, this includes using AI responses and summaries. To ask if your bot can be added please contact a mod.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
- Accounts 7 days and younger will have their posts automatically removed.
Approved Bots
go to feed...
@lemmy.world
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related news or articles.
- Be excellent to each other!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, this includes using AI responses and summaries. To ask if your bot can be added please contact a mod.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
- Accounts 7 days and younger will have their posts automatically removed.
Approved Bots
go to feed...
And people were not-so-long-ago concerned that phones are spying after them. Now they just send all the info themselves.
save