Comment by apparent
16 hours ago
I don't understand how she violated this law:
> 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.
She didn't threaten anything, she wrote down that she was going to do it. A "threat" is more than a mere statement, especially when written in what is described as a "diary".
> 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.
Obviously I don't want anyone to shoot up anything, but this seems like a weak case legally speaking.
I think it's fair to say this is a gray area. Clearly it was transmitted.
I can certainly threaten you harm and send it to not-you and you're still clearly in danger even if it wasnt transmitted to you. So the question becomes did she transmit it to someone? Clearly yes she transmitted it to Anthropic. But she clearly intended to send it to Claude, an inanimate object.
Claude's terms of service makes it very clear that their employees will read messages[0] to determine that they don't contain the things that these messages contained[1].
> Review is needed to enforce our Usage Policy... designated members of our Trust & Safety team may access this data on a need-to-know basis as a part of their evaluation process.
[0]: https://privacy.claude.com/en/articles/10458704-how-does-ant...
[1]: https://www.anthropic.com/legal/aup
I highly doubt she read the terms.
The critical part of a "threat" is that the perpetrator takes some intentional method to deliver it.
I don't think it qualifies for this part:
> The communication must be made in a manner in which another person may view it.
Even 'transmitted' is too broad if you also consider iCloud backup to be a means.
A reasonable person would not expect humans to review the millions of messages passing through the LLMs, or their own threats to ever be transmitted to a human without their authorization.
Reporting the danger is by itself a good deed. But there should be a better way of restricting firearms from the probably irresponsible lady than using inappropriate charges to punish the thoughtcrime, OR waiting for them to commit violence.
Too broad. Unless you're transferring ink from a typewriter ribbon onto paper in a hut with no electricity, your words, or my words as I type this, are being grammar checked by something partly in the cloud. If I delete my words, are you saying I've transmitted them nevertheless?
She may have assumed that the chat conversation was private, but it wasn't. She sent a message of intent to harm and a human received the message.
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A sibling comment includes an important rider to the provision: "...in any manner in which it may be viewed by another person." If you wrote this in a google doc, it almost certainly would not qualify as a threat under this statute. Even though google docs, like LLM chats, have administrative override and you could look at their contents - you would not expect either to be "viewed by another person."
IMO I do not think this is a grey area and it's legal to tell a LLM you want to kill someone. It's certainly not a "threat" like you might send to another person, though it may end up being evidence of conspiracy or premeditation. I suspect we would be well served to, after a few years of experience, put together some laws governing when LLM chats must be made available to authorities.
It is very interesting that the LLM responses to these lines - the context around what she is saying - is not in the article. I suspect, as is the case in many instances where LLMs are involved in violent planning, that the LLM was urging this behavior on. Basically entrapment - you are encouraged by a robot to become more violent and vindictive and then when you do you are handed over to police.
Yeah.. if you write a personal note and it's backed up by the operating system, it appears to be in violation of this law as well (since the company could theoretically read it)
This almost smells like thought crime... Minority Report when?
People assume there won't be another human in the mix, but there is. She was judged for what she probably assumed was a private thought when it was actually not private.
Are thoughts illegal?
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