Comment by Traster
9 days ago
I said in earlier reports about this, it's difficult to draw statistical comparisons with humans because there's so little data. Having said that, it is clear that this system just isn't ready and it's kind of wild that a couple of those crashes would've been easily preventable with parking sensors that come equipped as standard on almost every other car.
In some spaces we still have rule of law - when xAI started doing the deepfake nude thing we kind of knew no one in the US would do anything but jurisdictions like the EU would. And they are now. It's happening slowly but it is happening. Here though, I just don't know if there's any institution in the US that is going to look at this for what it is - an unsafe system not ready for the road - and take action.
> the deepfake nude thing
the issue is that these tools are widely accessible, and at the federal level, the legal liability is on the person who posts it, not who hosts the tool. this was a mistake that will likely be corrected over the next six years
due to the current regulatory environment (trump admin), there is no political will to tackle new laws.
> I just don't know if there's any institution in the US that is going to look at this for what it is - an unsafe system not ready for the road - and take action.
unlike deepfakes, there are extensive road safety laws and civil liability precedent. texas may be pushing tesla forward (maybe partially for ideological reasons), but it will be an extremely hard sell to get any of the major US cities to get on board with this.
so, no, i don't think you will see robotaxis on the roads in blue states (or even most red states) any time soon.
> legal liability is on the person who posts it, not who hosts the tool.
In the specific case of grok posting deepfake nudes on X. Doesn't X both create and post the deepfake?
My understanding was, Bob replies in Alice's thread, "@grok make a nude photo of Alice" then grok replies in the thread with the fake photo.
That specific action is still instigated by Bob.
Where grok is at risk is not responding after they are notified of the issue. It’s trivial for grock to ban some keywords here and they aren’t, that’s a legal issue.
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Just because someone tells you to produce child pornography you don't have to do it just because you are able to. Other model providers don't have the problem...
that is an ethical and business problem, not entirely a legal problem (currently). hopefully, it will universally be a legal problem in the near future, though. and frankly, anyone paying grok (regardless of their use of it) is contributing to the problem
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> so, no, i don't think you will see robotaxis on the roads in blue states
Truly baffled by this genre of comment. "I don't think you will see <thing that is already verifiably happening> any time soon" is a pattern I'm seeing way more lately.
Is this just denying reality to shape perception or is there something else going on? Are the current driverless operations after your knowledge cutoff?
robotaxi is the name of the tesla unsupervised driving program (as stated in the title of this hn post) and if you live in a parallel reality where they're currently operating unsupervised in a blue state, or if texas finally flipped blue for you, let me know how's going for you out there!
for the rest of us aligned to a single reality, robotaxis are currently only operating as robotaxis (unsupervised) in texas (and even that's dubious, considering the chase car sleight of hand).
of course, if you want to continue to take a weasely and uncharitable interpretation of my post because i wasn't completely "on brand", you are free to. in which case, i will let you have the last word, because i have no interest in engaging in such by-omission dishonesty.
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>and at the federal level, the legal liability is on the person who posts it, not who hosts the tool. this was a mistake that will likely be corrected over the next six years
[citation needed]
Historically hosts have always absolutely been responsible for the materials they host, see DMCA law, CSAM case law...
no offense but you completely misinterpreted what i wrote. i didnt say who hosts the materials, i said who hosts the tool. i didnt mention anything about the platform, which is a very relevant but separate party.
if you think i said otherwise, please quote me, thank you.
> Historically hosts have always absolutely been responsible for the materials they host,
[citation needed] :) go read up on section 230.
for example with dmca, liability arises if the host acts in bad faith, generates the infringing content itself, or fails to act on a takedown notice
that is quite some distance from "always absolutely". in fact, it's the whole point of 230
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>it's difficult to draw statistical comparisons [...] because there's so little data
That ain't true [1].
1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fisher%27s_exact_test
> it's kind of wild that a couple of those crashes would've been easily preventable with parking sensors that come equipped as standard on almost every other car
Teslas are really cheaply made, inadequate cars by modern standards. The interiors are terrible and are barebones even compared to mainstream cars like a Toyota Corolla. And they lack parking sensors depending on the version you bought. I believe current models don’t come with a surround view camera either, which is almost standard on all cars at this point, and very useful in practice. I guess I am not surprised the Robotaxis are also barebones.
Its not ever going to get ready.
Getting this to a place where it is better than humans continuously is not equivalent to fixing bugs in the context of the production of software used on phones etc.
When you are dealing with a dynamic uncontained environment it is much more difficult.
Waymo is in a place where it's better than humans continuously. If Tesla is not, that's on them, either because their engineers are not as good or because they're forced to follow Elon's camera-only mandate.
It's the camera-only mandate, and it's not Elon's but Karpathy's.
Any engineering student can understand why LIDAR+Radar+RGB is better than just a single camera; and any person moderately aware of tech can realize that digital cameras are nowhere as good as the human eye.
But yeah, he's a genius or something.
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If you ride enough Waymo, you will realize it is a far more cautious driver than a human but not a better driver. If you need to get somewhere even at an average speed, you still take uber/lyft.
Waymo still takes many wrong turns and can easily get stuck in situations where a human would not.
citation needed. Waymo says they are better, but it is really hard to find someone without a conflict of interest who we can believe has and understands the data.
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It's clear that camera-only driving is getting better as we have better image understanding models every year. So there will be a point when camera based systems without lidars will get better than human drivers.
Technology is just not there yet, and Elon is impatient.
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