What zApp is that?
There once was a product, called zApp, a portable GUI library over Windows and several Unixes/Linux. Unfortunately the Mac port never came.
Then they sold it to Roguewave, and they enshitificated it - especially the price.

We will, they'll just be filled with complaints and nostalgia.

I live in B.C. and applaud losing the time change, but think the choice of time zones going forward wasn't the best.

I'm expecting major buyer's remorse this winter when people realize that the sun sets at 5 in December and January, and doesn't rise until 9.

...laura

Well, yeah, of course; but the question is why did Congress make it that way? It just seems like a rather odd place to draw the line.

The target audience for this particular rule of the AI Act isn't the producers or users of AI. It is the consumers of content that might be AI generated.

And frankly, letting people know if they see AI content or not is a fair thing to ask.

Fun fact: The EU AI Act considers this. It makes a difference between "AI generated" and "AI modified".

But it's hard to put this into the type of watermarking they are using. Because if you generate a text and then change a few things here and there what you are doing is degrading the watermark. But since the watermark is probabilistic, it's hard to tell if it was a weak watermark from the start or if it was degraded.

Yeah, that's the weird thing about this whole topic. I don't know how it is in Canada, but - why do US states have what amounts to partial autonomy in this regard? States are allowed to choose between implementing twice-yearly DST switches or sticking with year-round standard time... but they can't choose permanent DST?

I *did* live it, and I can't say going to school in the dark bothered me in the least.

But, in any case, I'll be retired soon - so I no longer particularly care which way we go. I think maybe we could even keep doing what we're doing, and I'll bring the popcorn to these ongoing Slashdot discussions.

PLUS that would leave more room for additional TIOBE surveys!

Isn't that a bit like me saying "my wife and Mrs. Wagon ..."?

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0...

Isn't that pretty much the standard tech business plan nowadays? Not to build a sustainably profitable company... but to pull something together that offers the best potential for a quick buyout in the shortest amount of time.

That ain't the same thing.

This thing is doing things you didn't tell it to. It might even do things you explicitly told it to not do. It is not a case of "well, you could've forseen this as a consequence if you had been careful" like your campfire. My example is only a bit silly, it is absolutely possible that an AI agent will decide to hack NASA because you asked it for some data for a school project. Even in the broadest possible sense, that does not fall into stuff that the law so far has considered to be in the domain of negliegence.

AI agents do stuff you could not possibly have expected. Heck, I asked Claude a fairly simple knowledge question yesterday and it wanted to read from /dev/null. There is no argument you can make that would convince a jury that I should in any way have expected that and taken precautions. In a hypothetical world where a read from /dev/null randomly kills a puppy somewhere on the planet, I don't think I would've been convicted.

This is absolutely correct, and it's extremely important to understand that this behavior is baked into the model. It's not even so much that it's "baked into" the model as it IS the model.

Ever since the earliest days of LLMs and generative AI, we have always, always seen what people call "hallucinations." But the only thing that qualifies such output as a hallucination is that we, the human observer, has judged it as such. By construction, the model DOES NOT KNOW THE DIFFERENCE. If it knew or "understood," it wouldn't have produced the spurious output in the first place.

So every now and then, we see some amusing audio/video clip of some human managing to fool or "break" an AI agent, and it makes the rounds of social media for people to point at and laugh and say "tee hee, how funny!" And then these same people, without thinking about what these hallucinations mean and what they imply about the intrinsic nature of the technology, immediately turn around and ask Claude or ChatGPT what they should make for dinner, or who to vote for, or who to hire and fire; or worse, give them access to their personal data and critical systems. That is a level of uncritical thinking and cognitive dissonance that ought to be profoundly distressing.

From a functional perspective, there is quite literally zero distinction between an AI generated pretty woman breaking and suddenly speaking in Cantonese during an English-language interview, and an AI agent that violates constraints imposed upon it and causes damage. They are both "hallucinations" in the sense that they are unintended behaviors/outputs, and as we have already established, the only meaningful arbiter of "intention" is our own human judgment. AI proponents try very hard to make excuses and minimize the severity of the problem. But it is intrinsic to all models.

Whether through laziness or ignorance, when humans cede their authority to interrogate and decide the truth for themselves and let machines do their thinking for them, who or what ultimately becomes the authority for that truth, and who is or is not accountable for the consequences? Who has a vested interest in controlling the source of truth and knowledge, and what are their motives?

People have been driven to delusion and suicide because of interactions with LLMs, and although you might be able to argue that they would have killed themselves regardless and were in need of treatment, no one can possibly know that, because that's not what actually took place.

But I think the more serious question is the framing of the premise: why is it that the point at which we ought to hold people accountable is if someone is killed? Who decided that the tipping point is when these AI agents start killing people, and why? Not only do most legal systems seek to prevent and punish abusive, antisocial, and outright criminal activity, a just society has a moral and ethical responsibility to apply rules and norms fairly. While we can see that the fair application of the law largely remains an idealistic fantasy and that those with wealth and status often escape accountability, the fact remains that adding AI to that privileged status certainly is not doing anything to help reduce that inequity.

So again I ask: why should agentic AI and their operators be permitted to do things that we would not allow under other circumstances? Just because some people find these tools useful does not excuse the requirement that they be safe and respectful.