Florida woman used Claude as a diary, then Anthropic reported an entry to police
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.
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.
Gamers Nexus recently released a 2-hour video on LG smart TVs and how they spy on you. I haven’t watched the entire video yet, but it seems that the damn things start recording data as soon as they receive power.
so this would be legally a nightmare for them
To many corporations such as LG, laws are just the cost of doing business. Assuming they even receive a fine it will be so small that it won’t matter.
Oh, true. I don’t think I’ve seen even a single person in real life deny cookies on a website. That does make it weird that they start tracking even before interacting with the TOS.
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.
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.
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.
I think this is one of the greatest dangers AI presents. Sure it makes some of us stupider, sure it drinks our water and eats our GPUs and raises power prices… but once upon a time, it took actual human effort to run a dragnet, even with judicial approval.
Now, you plug in an LLM to the giant pile of corporate surveillance data and ask it to find troublemakers. Anonymity is dead and its death made retroactive and since there’s no government oversight, the government can just lease access to the tools they used to need approval to use.
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 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: 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 ;)
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.
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 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.
The difference is that you can adjust your involvement to your liking. The role of an LLM in your writing process is what you want it to be. It could be as large or small as you consider appropriate.
Think of it like writing by hand vs. using a computer with good writing software. You can’t really reorganise your manuscript if it’s written on paper, now can you? That would require rewriting the whole thing. Also, spell checking takes a lot of time, and you probably won’t even notice your grammar quirks. Computers make writing easier and faster. An LLM is another tool, just like the simple editing features we’ve taken for granted for the past 30 years. Ask again in 20 years and people won’t even think of writing without an LLM, just like writing a report by hand is completely absurd today.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Yes but not in a way she would think another person may view it, most likely. Obviously IANAL but surely intent matters here?
If people actively realised someone can read all their chats, I’m sure these services would be far less popular.
And here’s the autistic rant because I can’t think of the proper term for “actively realising":
What I mean is, I’m sure plenty of people know in the back of their mind that their data is not protected there, but it’s not the first, or second, or probably even tenth thing they think about when starting a chat.
This is a link to my original comment on the subject. I did not say what you think I said in the comment you replied to or the original comment I linked. Her ignorance doesn’t absolve her of her actions or the consequences. Intent does matter to some extent but there have also been a lot of news reports about how data you share with corporate LLM’S isn’t private and so then the question becomes should she have known and not just if she did or didn’t know.
If someone else steals something and sells it to you or gifts it to you and you had no knowledge that it was stolen you can still be prosecuted under the law for receiving stolen goods. Your intent in the matter should be considered because there is a difference between knowingly receiving something you know is stolen and not reporting it, and just getting something without knowing it’s legal provenance and not reporting it. But you can still be charged either way.
In this case though an attempt was made to notify the user that her chats were not private in a EULA or TOS. They changed that TOS relatively recently (something like a year ago I think). At that time it looks like users would have been required to agree to an updated TOS with specific verbage about the sharing of chats that doesn’t look like it would have required users to read the entire TOS, just the agree popup. I linked the article for that below because while that was for allowing AI to train on user data, it should have been a clue that the chats were not private.
I appreciate the links! I still don’t think it’s a slam dunk either way, because even in Anthropic’s release, it never actually says that a human will be involved. “Training” could be anything, and while intent does not always matter, a threat is one of the few crimes where it really does.
Someone else (another user) has made a claim that she told Claude she had bought a weapon and that [police department] were on their “last chance”. It was this particular set of statements that caused Anthropic to call the police.
I don’t know if that was meant to reply to me, but I meant whether another human was involved in the training, not the threat. It’s definitely an imprudent thing to write, but I don’t know if a reasonable person would assume that another person would be able to read it. “Training” is a pretty nebulous concept, and the anthropic release doesn’t mention that humans are involved.
I’m not trying to say that this lady is making good decisions, but I probably wouldn’t vote that this was written so that another human might read it, if I were on the jury. Maybe my gut feeling’s off and everyone knows that training involves people (which I’m sure would come up during the trial), in which case I’d probably consider it a clear threat.
Look at this another way. People intend to do one thing and do something else entirely all the time. They’re fallible. They make mistakes. The fact that it is a mistake doesn’t mean there aren’t consequences. The law is poorly written (the transmission part in particular should involve knowingly transmitting that threat where a human could be expected to read it) but she did pretty much exactly what the law says is illegal (assuming that the evidence against her is credible which would need to be investigated and proven).
If you have a written diary and you happen to have the cleaner find it and read it and they report you to the proper authorities for it, your intent wasn’t to have it read, but the actuality is that it happened.
A threat you mumble to yourself out loud under your breath is heard without your knowledge? It’s still a threat and can be reported as such. You can still be prosecuted for it.
Legal Compliance. We may comply with governmental, court, and law enforcement requests or requirements relating to provision or use of the Services, or to information provided to or collected under our Terms. We reserve the right, at our sole discretion, to report information from or about you, including but not limited to Inputs, Outputs, or Actions to law enforcement.
Anthropic’s Safeguards Team will implement detection and monitoring to enforce our Usage Policy, so please review this policy carefully before using our products or services. If we learn that you have violated our Usage Policy, we may throttle, suspend, or terminate your access to our products and services. We may also block or modify model outputs when inputs violate our Usage Policy.
In addition to training our language models to refuse harmful requests, we also use dedicated Trust and Safety enforcement systems to detect, block, and take action on activity that might violate our Usage Policy. Clio supplements this work to help us understand where there might be opportunities to improve and strengthen these systems.
We implement strict privacy access controls when it comes to who can use Clio to further enforce our policies because it may require review of individual accounts. Our Trust and Safety team is able to review topic clusters for areas that indicate likely violations of our Usage Policy.
Well yeah, but there are lots of situations where your intent with a threat matters. Saying “I’m gonna kill you!” to your brother when he throws a water balloon at you is rightfully not considered a legal threat. Saying “I finally bought a gun and I’m gonna kill you!” might fall into either category for me personally, depending on whether they had actually recently bought a gun.
I’m really not trying to be difficult here and I do absolutely see how this could be ruled a legitimate threat, I just don’t think it’s 100%. I’m leaning towards 80% (assuming she didn’t actually recently get a gun), given that this is Florida.
Regarding the diary, I was actually thinking of that exact scenario, with the stipulation that the diary is locked. I would be interested in whether that aspect of the law has been tested yet, but it’s probably not that common.
Can I just ask, if you were trying to defend her in court (I am assuming you aren’t a lawyer, but that you have an argument for why what she did shouldn’t be considered a criminal offense under this law) what defense would you mount for her?
People can be really ignorant about technology. I’ve met people who were surprised that you could log into your email on another continent. She might have thought it was locked behind her password and as long as she didn’t submit error reports, the company couldn’t access it. I don’t know where the idea comes from, but I’ve met a concerning number of people who don’t know that most platforms can read direct messages sent between users on their platforms.
I think the “using it as a diary” claim is just an excuse/her attempt to get out of it. MORE than likely it was a prompt asking Claude the best way to shoot up a sheriffs office.
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).
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.
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.
“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.
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 ruleis 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
AI or not, I hope anyone recognizes “I want to shoot up X” as a problem and seeks to identify and resolve whatever conflict their having to not feel this way.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Yeah I remember this happening with Snapchat, people were being arrested for those kinds of posts made in private messages to their friends, because they still get scanned and flagged.
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.
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.
How many people do you think have their diaries in the cloud as Word documents on Google Drive, OneDrive, etc.
That’s actually not that different even if it may feel like it.
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.
“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?”
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.
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.
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.
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
Because the context is likey to be “… to a third party” of a presumably human kind. Human to clanker (which then gets eavesdropped) ought not to qualify.
Ofc letter of law vs spirit of law, variation in jurisdictions, legal interpretation, YMMV etc etc
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.
She clearly didn’t intent to act on it and didn’t intend for it to be read by anyone else than her AI boyfriend. So it’s not matching the criteria of the law. Legally, she did nothing wrong.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.”
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.
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.
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.
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: 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.
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 :/
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.)
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.
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.
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
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…
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.
Kinda unrelated. But what happens when OpenAI or Anthropic’s loans come due and they have no legal way to turn a profit, but are sitting on a treasure trove of corporate secrets?
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.”
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
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)
