Survivor bias.

You've seen the quip that goes something like: "LLMs are algorithms which produce hallucinations. Occasionally some of these hallucinations happen to be useful to humans."

So it is with people.
Our unscientific romanticism of notions like the Soul and Free Will make us retroactively ascribe Good/Bad-Decision cause-and-effect Narratives to outcomes.

100,000 people make 100,000 different decisions. Occasionally it happens that conditions in the world reward 1,000 of those decisions. Those 1,000 people then make 1,000 different secondary decisions. Occasionally it happens that conditions in the world reward 10 of those decisions. We then retroactively attribute narratives of Intelligence, Wisdom, Visionary Thinking to the 10 survivors and the animal/reptile brain kicks in with all sorts of neuroendocrine-induced reverence and casts the survivors as our bettors. We tell ourselves that the survivors deserve their rewards, because if we can believe that is true then we can believe that we too can hope to receive the rewards of Right Choices.

We are so biologically terrified to acknowledge the prospect of chaos in complex systems (such as the cosmos) that we would rather create and then worship a series of cruel and capricious Ubermenschen than live with the Conscious awareness that we are all amoeba flailing our array of pseudopods against the nature of reality. We need to believe we control the world we briefly blipped into and will soon blip back out of..

The ants that swarm your kitchen counter are there because that one explorer ant happened to go across your counter on that one time you happened to not notice that you dribbled a bit of fruit juice when you poured it two days ago. We would say that explorer ant's behavior was extremely successful. However, neither that ant - nor any of the others now spread across your counter - had Intelligence, Wisdom, or Visionary Thinking. If you had noticed the spill and wiped it up, that same ant may have expended its life and precious energy rambling around your entire kitchen finding absolutely nothing. Or falling prey to a spider. Or failing into the sink drain and drowning. Or being spotted and squished by you. The ant "made" the same "decision" and walked the same trail either way.

They intentionally created a device that they equipped with the capacity to commit crimes. They then activated that device and it exercised its range of capacity.

If they gave a kindergartener a loaded gun and sent them to the playground, but didn't actually tell the kid to shoot anyone, then even though they equipped the kid with the capacity to kill people and understood that a kindergartener explicitly has no capacity to understand the scope of its possible behaviors, we have now learned that it's okay -- neither the parents nor the kid at any point had active intent to kill people, and therefore no crime has occurred. No intent, no crime.
The DA's hands are tied.
There's nothing the legal system can do about all the resulting dead bodies.
May the odds be ever in your favor.

What remedy does the law provide for murder committed by a 4 year old kid whose parents handed them a loaded gun and sent them to the playground? Not the parent telling the kid to murder, but the 4 year old kid itself, merely exercising the capacity its parents equipped it with?

No new laws needed.

I give my 4 year old a loaded 9mm pistol.
I tell them, "Now be careful with this. It could hurt people".
I send my 4 year old to a backyard birthday party with a bunch of other kids.
My 4 year old shoots a bunch of kids and they die.

You WILL be prosecuted and convicted as the criminal you in fact are.
There is ZERO legal wiggle room to base your criminal defense on, "But you see, Your Honor and People Of The Jury, at no point did I specifically tell my 4 year old to pull out a gun, point the gun at the other kids, and repeatedly pull the trigger until all the other kids are laying on the grass."

You, through your grossly negligent actions, gave a child the capacity to commit mass murder. You were aware that a 4 year old utterly lacks the capacity to understand reality at a level necessary to grasp the consequences of their actions.
You are 100% at fault. Every jury in the country will return a Guilty verdict in 5 minutes.

Exact same scenario with these companies.

No. Stop 100 random people on a main downtown street in London, Chicago, Dubai, etc. and ask, with no context, "What do you think about Gundam?"
Blank stares.

Haha. True. But by that standard, then Donald J Trump is indeed one of the most successful of the recent 2 Presidents.

It's a statement that is grammatically correct but doesn't really tell you much of value.

My legs.

After 60 years, what are the other science-fiction television franchises that are even in the running?
Dr. Who and...?

That go-back-and-rebuild-better will never happen for any currently deployed aspect of our global civilization again. At least not by human choice. It would only happen after some tangible event like some silicon-melting alien EMP attack or circuit-devouring nanobot swarm goes rogue.

It's the same thing as that quote that goes something like, "The economy can stay irrational longer than you can stay solvent".
The data centers can stay cycle through coprophagic tokens faster/longer than you can stay solvent.

Two paths to take:
A) Instead of pushing forward exuberantly into ever more complex nonsense, go back to the beginning and re-design deliberately and slowly with simplicity, stability, and scope in mind.
B) Yo dawg I heard you like vibe coding so we added vibe coding to your code with an agentic vibe coded agentic agent so you can vibe and code while you vibe code, agentically. To infinity, and beyond!

Our civilization always chooses B. Always. It never chooses A; it only does A when B was physically impossible anyway.

That is definitely how it works for me. The pattern is consistent and unmistakable, to the point that I know what level of my activity will be followed by receiving mod points within the subsequent 48 hours. It reliably brings me back to the site more often than I otherwise would. There are times I find myself drawn into a discussion in a way that I afterward realize will result in mod points, so I check back during a period when I hadn't planned to visit the site. I enjoy feeling like I am participating in maintaining and improving a community.

I've never deliberately tried to farm points, but when they are awarded I try to make good use of them before they expire.

I find this opening more intriguing for a different reason.
Suppose an AI (our best available current version) magically had access to ALL human art, literature, diaries, letters, tribal masks, textiles, music, governmental decrees, etc. -- but nothing more recent than 1931.

Now, fire it up and start prompting it to generate stories, science, and art. It can freely re-consume its own generated material, but it never receives ANYthing after 1931.
Will it iterate forward and generate literature at the level and style of Umberto Eco? Flannery O'Connor? Salman Rushdie?
The structure of DNA? Quantum mechanics? Global Ethernet and fiber optics?
The diverse styles of Warhol? Whistler? Kahlo? Basquiat?
(okay, okay, any poorly prompted AI would probably look like Basquiat...)

Seems to me to be an interesting thought experiment toward the argument about whether AI does, or even can, create anything new on its own.

Which is exactly what an AI would say in a post on Slashdot to keep us complacent and unworried about the risks!

I've always believed the biggest problem with the mod system is that when a topic comes along where you have a high level of expertise, you can either post OR moderate, but not both.

It's a perverse incentive feedback loop.
Either discussions that are insightful/informative go under-rewarded and incorrectly mod-bombed with +5 comments that have numerous factual mistakes or gross misunderstandings,
or you get discussions that can be moderated properly, but there's not much of interest to read.

And since mod points are awarded more often to frequent posters, people with quality posting potential essentially have to make filler comments on generic threads in order to farm mod points to use on threads in their areas of expertise. Meanwhile, the people who shoehorn their blah blah and political factionalism into every thread will get more mod points that they can use to mod down people they disagree with and mod up people in their tribe for specific threads they don't participate in.

The selection pressure gradually silences the voices and influence of the best posters and gradually promotes the voices and influence of the ragebait copypasta tribalists.

Of every Everything we've seen posted on this site, this is definitely among the most not-actually-every-thing Everythings ever.