Let’s fucking go
I remember many years ago, long before “AI” as it now exists… someone with no real motives except “this seems fun” went and wrote some simple little bot that replied to Twitter posts with more-or-less randomly generated mashups of text.
And there was a legal case because it accidentally said something that was interpreted as a threat. And I remember that the court, in that case, ruled that the person who programmed the bot is liable for whatever the bot says.
Now i very much doubt I could ever find whatever record exists of this case, because of what search engines have become.
But I am fairly bitter about the fact that this precedent has pretty much never been used, since “programming bots that say nonsense” has become the purview of rich corporations whose goal is “get as much money as possible” and whose customers are being taught to expect the nonsense to be reliable truth.
Here’s hoping they get more and more wedged into the inescapable crevice between “this is not your copyrightable property” and “you ARE responsible for what it says though.” Until it crushes them flat.