The headline and article try to bias and frame the story to make people question: "Is OpenAI snitching on me?"
In reality, Uber records and conflicting statements incriminated him. He seems to be the one who provided the ChatGPT record to try to prove that the fire was unintentional.[1]
> He was visibly anxious during that interview, according to the complaint. His efforts to call 911 and his question to ChatGPT about a cigarette lighting a fire indicated that he wanted to create a more innocent explanation for the fire's start and to show he tried to assist with suppression, the complaint said.
[1] https://apnews.com/article/california-wildfires-palisades-lo...
Also why the sudden interest? Amazon Alexa snips have been used before in court/investigation and this is not new. But makes me wonder about what happens when you are dealing with summaries of summaries of long gone tokens. Is that evidence?
Hmm. The Rolling Stone article (and linked press conference) has the police giving a vastly different account of the ChatGPT logs they're complaining about:
> Investigators, he noted, allege that some months prior to the burning of the Pacific Palisades, Rinderknecht had prompted ChatGPT to generate “a dystopian painting showing, in part, a burning forest and a crowd fleeing from it.” A screen at the press conference showed several iterations on such a concept...
Video here, including the ChatGPT "painting" images circa 1m45s: https://xcancel.com/acyn/status/1975956240489652227
(Although, to be clear, it's not like the logs are the only evidence against him; it doesn't even look like parallel construction. So if one assumes "as evidence" usually implies "as sole evidence," I can see how the headline could be seen as sensationalizing/misleading.)
Why are the comments under that video claiming he was MAGA? He was a registered democrat who donated to Joe Biden.
You literally cant trust anything people say these days its insane.
I wonder why he contributed $2 ($1 on two separate occasions). Did $1 get you access to a political blog or something back in 2020?
He donated to Biden, but had no registered party. Congrats, you're part of the insanity.
I'm sort of grossed out by people trying to blame a party for this in general, though. It's weird.
A large number of California wildfires have been set by arsonists and arson is a key tactic used by ecoterrorist groups like ELF, so people pattern match. Most arsonists aren’t caught and those that are claim they were trying to boil water or that they dropped a cigarette. Since far left groups and lone actors have a motive and history of such acts, given no better explanation as to the motives, people pattern match. It’s not insanity, just people connecting the dots in absence of a better explanation for widespread arson that is often cited, innocently I suppose, as being the result of climate change.
> A large number of California wildfires have been set by arsonists and arson is a key tactic used by ecoterrorist groups like ELF
This is misleading. Ecoterrorist groups do use arson, but they target cars and buildings, like car dealerships or chain stores, not forests.
If you're engaged in a fight against logging, burning down forests is likely not the first thing on your mind.
Immediately jumping to conclusions and then using that conclusion as a political weapon is part of the insanity. Everything that happens has to be qualified as either beneficial to your political position or detrimental to it, dictating how you respond to it. Everything has to be framed as the fault of your "evil" opponents or as a lie and fake news.
This is extremely detrimental to societal cohesion and to democratic political processes, and I wish people would stop before it's too late.
ELF bombed buildings, they didn't set wildfires.
I see it as simple tribalism
this is an incredible leap in imagination. I'm constantly impressed by that kind of diversity in thought towards a common goal.
normally it's the other way round - diverse thought leads to many places, but in hating the big bad leftie boogeyman, certain people seem really great at joining the dots.
here's a hint: it's actually written in the stars! don't believe me? take a map of a deep sky survey, and draw dots! you'll find the message you're looking for.
Ok. But this serves as a reminder not to expect privacy when sending messages back and forth to some software company.
Nothing new here. Somehow people are surprised evidence against them includes - "my google search" or "my chatgpt logs" or ...
OpenAI also literally announced that they send data to law enforcement after a judge told them they had to do so.
they HAD to? didnt Apple refuse to do this exact thing?
Apple refused to create new software to allow the FBI to brute force an encrypted device. OpenAI just had this info floating around on hard drives.
And then 3 or 4 allies of the US passed laws enabling the government to require companies to develop tools or face prison time.
So they probably have developed the tool, and once developed been secretly compelled to use it.
> And then 3 or 4 allies of the US passed laws enabling the government to require companies to develop tools or face prison time
My understanding is that Apple’s executives were surprised at the forcefulness of the opposition to their stand together with the meekness of public support.
(Having worked on private legislation, I get it. You work on privacy and like two people call their electeds because most people don’t care about privacy, while those who do are predominantly civically nihilists or lazy.)
If you are referring to the incident below, it is different because the government asked Apple to write software to allow access to the device:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple%E2%80%93FBI_encryption_d...
If Apple had simply had the text records, they would have had to comply with the government order to provide them.
And Apple did provide all iCloud data they had available.
Every company must comply with lawful warrants and subpoenas.
EDIT: Original parent was "Every company does this."
Not Mullvad. Swedish police showed up looking for some dat, Mullvad didn't even collect what they wanted, police left empty handed.
Yes -- even Mullvad -- which is precisely why they do not collect the data. Because if they did have the data, they would have to give it over, or they could go to prison.
who goes to prison, the whole company? What does Swedish law have of sending corporate employees to prison? Is it something we can import?
Typically, courts will summon a specific person to comply with their request, often a corporate officer or director with a role or authority relevant to what is being requested. If they don't comply with their request, they can be held in contempt.
The specifics vary by country, but basically all legal systems require you to comply with what they say and impose penalties if you don't. I don't know if there are any countries where it's legal to ignore the courts, but I would imagine that their court systems don't work too well.
> But more curious than the allegation that a Florida man was responsible for setting a small brush fire on the other side of the country
As far as I’ve heard from other articles, he lived in the Palisades at the time and worked as an Uber driver there. He moved to Florida after the fire. This is not very well researched.
Rolling Stone has not been a serious publication for quite some time
This title is misleading. The article doesn't say that the chat history will be used as evidence, only that it exists. Whether it can be used in court is an unsettled question, as explained in the last few paragraphs.
How is it unsettled? If they got a warrant for it, what would prevent them from using it as evidence?
Another thread says they tried to use his past "drawing a fire related photo" to try and paint him as some kind of pyromaniac. These clods just cant help themselves but to prove AT THE FIRST CHANCE that they will twist and abuse anything they can get their hands on to paint some kind of picture. Its hilarious that they cant even keep this in their back pockets to wait for a real real bad hard to persecute criminal to use it on either
it's like not speaking to the police - but it's everything you have ever said/asked for in your life outside of talking to yourself in the shower. or at least it's getting there.
a lot of people, especially younger ones, seem to use chatgpt as a neutral third party in every important decision. so it probably has more extensive records on their thoughts than social media ever did. in fact, people often curate their Instagram feeds - but chatgpt has their unfiltered thoughts.
Not surprising. Search and browsing history has been used as evidence for some time.
Nearly anything that isn't end-to-end encrypted is fair game, assuming there is probable cause. Access to your physical location history (even if you weren't suspected of a crime) wasn't off limits until 2024 [1]. (It still isn't off limits if you are suspected of a crime, but is no longer collected at the scale of "most Android users" [2].)
[1] https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2024/08/federal-appeals-court-...
[2] https://techcrunch.com/2023/12/16/google-geofence-warrants-l...
Chats with chatgpt are end to end encrypted (it's https), but one of the ends is OpenAI.
End-to-end encrypted data is also fair game -- the only difference is that there are simply fewer parties that have the data to give.
Coming into the thread(and general discussion about chatgpt being used as evidence) with this context, I’m confused about the reactions to this. Online activity has been used as evidence as far as I remember. OpenAI also has a couple high profile cases against them with chatgpt history used as the primary evidence
"This felony charge, he added, carried a mandatory minimum prison sentence of five years in federal prison but is punishable by up to 20 years in prison."
Are the 12 deaths separate charges? A sentence of 5-20 years seems very light for 12 deaths. This article is clearly focused on the AI aspect of it, so it doesn't cover the charges at all really.
Please correct me if I’m wrong but it’s my understanding he didn’t start the fire that burned much of the Palisades; he started a fire that was put out (or at least was claimed to be so) which rekindled later and the rest is history.
Did he start the fire knowing it could kill people? Did his actions lead to the death of people?
That seems clear cut first degree murder to me, as I understand it (I'm not sure if it requires a specific person to be murdered but a pre-meditated act that kills people seems like it'd qualify to me).
They are not (yet) charging him with the deaths, only the fire damage.
Can't wait for the "Did ChatGPT Burn Down Palisades?" headline.
Hmmm.
I have a "saved" history in Google Gemini. The reason I put "saved" in scare quotes is that Google feels free to change the parts of that history that were supplied by Gemini. They no longer match my external records of what was said.
Does ChatGPT do the same thing? I'd be queasy about relying on this as evidence.
Could you post some details about this or make a write-up? I'd be interested in reading more about this.
I'm not sure what details would add. What happened:
1. I engaged with Gemini.
2. I found the results wanting, and pasted them into comment threads elsewhere on the internet, observing that they tended to support the common criticism of LLMs as being "meaning-blind".
3. Later, I went back and viewed the "history" of my "saved" session.
4. My prompts were not changed, but the responses from Gemini were different. Because of the comment threads, it was easy for me to verify that I was remembering the original exchange correctly and Google was indulging in some revision of history.
I could see responses being backfilled if there was a perceived issue with them.
Like a misspelling was noticed, and responses containing those misspellings were regenerated. But for something less benign than a misspelling.
... Or, thinking about my time there, perhaps for something as benign as a misspelling. :)
I sure hope that cats in military uniforms don't invade NYC because they're going to find the evidence on my ChatGPT account.
Are we talking house cats here, or full grown lions, or gozilla-cats?
Godzilla cats really seems like it needs a movie.
ChatGPT and Google are different types of engines. I wonder if they will make ChatGPT submit flagged questions to authorities automatically. Since the questions are more like conversations with clear intentions, they can get very clear signals.
They can do whatever they want. It's a dead end.
End of the day, a chimp with a 3 inch brain has to digest the info tsunami of flagged content. That's why even the Israelis didn't see Oct 7th coming.
Once upon a time I worked on a project for banks to flag complaints about Fraud in customer calls. Guess what happened? The system registered a zillion calls where people talked about fraud world wide, the manager in charge was assigned 20 people to deal with it, and after naturally getting overwhelmed and scapegoated for all kinds of shit, he puts in a request for few hundred more, saying he really needed thousands of people. Corporate wonderland gives him another 20 and writes a para in their annual report about how they are at the forefront of combatting fraud etc etc.
This is how the world works. The chimp troupe hallucinates across the board, at the top and at the bottom about what is really going on. Why?
Because that 3 inch chimp brain has hard limits to how much info, complexity and unpredictability it can handle.
Anything beyond that, the reaction is similar to ants running around pretending they are doing something useful anytime the universe pokes the ant hill.
Herbert Simon won a nobel prize for telling us we don't have to run around like ants and bite everything anytime we are faced with things we can't control.
> they can get very clear signals.
No they can't. People write fiction, a lot of it. I'm willing to bet that the number of fiction related "incriminating" questions to chatgpt greatly numbers the number of "I'm actually a criminal" questions.
Also wonder about hypotheticals, make dumb bets, etc.
You don't even need to make bets. Encoded within the answer of "what is the best way to prevent fires" is the obvious data on the best way to start them.
To be clear there is exactly nothing you're required to submit to the government as a US service provider, if that's what you mean by authorities.
If you see CSAM posted on the service then you're required to report it to NCMEC, which is intentionally designed as a private entity so that it has 4th amendment protections. But you're not required to proactively go looking for even that.
pretty interesting that cloud data is not covered by the 4th amendment. I wonder if we’ll push for on-prem storage of context and memories as our relationship with AI gets more personal and intertwined.
The article states that OpenAI only discloses user content with a search warrant. How did that lead you to believe that it's not subject to the fourth amendment?
I don't have a personal relationship with AI, and strongly suggest that people stay away from AI for personal matters.
I still haven't once talked to an LLM for personal reasons. It's always been to get information.
Talking to an LLM like a human is like talking to a mirror. You're just shaping their responses based on what you say. Quite sad to see stuff like the "myboyfriendisai" reddit
So perfect if ppl want their partner to be molded a certain way
Third-party doctrine pretty much excludes anything in the cloud from the 4th amendment.
Hasn't happened yet. Why would it change now?
Who reads Rolling Stone? It's totally biased.