Hell yeah, let’s hold them accountable for disinformation. They’ll be gone completely in a matter of months.
New York considers bill that would ban chatbots from giving legal, medical advice
Submitted 7 hours ago by NomNom@feddit.uk to technology@lemmy.world
https://statescoop.com/new-york-bill-would-ban-chatbots-legal-medical-advice/
Comments
artyom@piefed.social 7 hours ago
supersquirrel@sopuli.xyz 6 hours ago
I think a better solution is to ban techbros from giving serious economic or cultural advice and take computers away from business majors.
HeyThisIsntTheYMCA@lemmy.world 4 hours ago
Please don’t take them entirely away. Maybe just internet access? 30ish years had to do accounting by hand. In those green ledgers. It took approximately twelve times longer to do it by hand than to do it with a computer. And it made me shrimp like 5 times worse. I needed an architect’s table what angled the top of it in order to work properly but I could neither get one supplied by the employer nor afford to give one to the employer.
Not all technology is bad
jaybone@lemmy.zip 2 hours ago
I don’t get how some of these tech company CEOs who came up as engineers can be pushing this bullshit. I get once the company got big they started hiring business bros. But some big companies still have CEOs that were once engineers. You’d think they would know better.
NannerBanner@literature.cafe 41 minutes ago
What kind of engineer? Because while the physical world, with all of its mechanical and civil and aerospace engineers, has its shit figured out with professional standards and very clearly defined responsibilities and duties, the world of social engineers, tire engineers, procurement engineers, supply chain engineers, sandwich engineers, project engineers, lead engineers, and yes, software engineers, definitely is a little too loose with any definition for me to care that these ceos were once ‘engineers.’
HootinNHollerin@lemmy.dbzer0.com 6 hours ago
Would be nice if regular legal and health advice was in any way affordable though
tinkermeister@lemmy.world 5 hours ago
I may have become too cynical but, as is often the case when you dig deeper, this sounds like the result of lobbyists trying to protect licensing rather than people.
We can be dumb, but we’ve been doing web searches for legal and medical advice for ages because it is too damned expensive and time consuming to go to professionals for every little thing. Not to mention, doctors have so little time for you that it is hard to get them to listen to the whole story to make connections between symptoms.
The LLMs already tell you that they aren’t licensed professionals and, for many, provide citations for their sources (miles better than your typical health website).
As a personal anecdote, my son was having stomach pain but was planning to tough it out. He checked with ChatGPT and it recommended he go to the ER. He did, and if he hadn’t, he would likely be dead now. He spent 3 days in the hospital having his bowels unobstructed through a tube in his nose.
There is value in people having that kind of information at their fingertips.
Regulation is absolutely needed, but I would rather they focus on protecting us from AI being used for military purposes, mass surveillance, etc.
tempest@lemmy.ca 4 hours ago
Are you in the US? My take away here is American healthcare is bad but we’re treating the symptom not the disease.
tinkermeister@lemmy.world 2 hours ago
Yeah, I’m in the US and I agree. Though it is going to take some serious change to treat the problem. In the meantime, this is at least a stopgap solution for people who don’t have a lot of options.
HeyThisIsntTheYMCA@lemmy.world 4 hours ago
Wait, he thought he could sit that pain through at home? Your son is tough as nails
tinkermeister@lemmy.world 2 hours ago
Yeah, he is pretty tough. I wish I could hug him, he is about a 10 hour drive from me. That tube was nightmarish from what he’s told me.
TropicalDingdong@lemmy.world 6 hours ago
I mean.
Is the wikipedia responsible for you reading an article about a law and then taking that as legal advice?
LNRDrone@sopuli.xyz 6 hours ago
Wikipedia doesn’t give “legal advice”, it has information about these laws, with the sources cited.
That is very different than asking LLM anything and it throws you random bullshit from unknown sources, with no easy way to verify where it is from or if it is at all accurate.
TropicalDingdong@lemmy.world 6 hours ago
Wikipedia doesn’t give “legal advice”, it has information about these laws, with the sources cited.
That is very different than asking LLM anything and it throws you random bullshit from unknown sources, with no easy way to verify where it is from or if it is at all accurate.
It seems like your argument is that because Wikipedia “gets it right” and has cited sources, it isn’t liable? Which I promise, is not how liability works.
What if it was Wikipedia versus “Some random sovcit facebook post” then? Is the Sovcit post liable because its sources are bullshit? Since there sources are random bullshit and or unknown, do they absorb liability? Again, its the same case, that is not how liability works.
People are going to have to acknowledge you can’t have it both ways.
Also…
with no easy way to verify where it is from or if it is at all accurate.
C’mon. Plenty of LLM’s can also hallucinate sources which are easily verified. And like with Wikipedia, one could go check them.
Passerby6497@lemmy.world 6 hours ago
Wikipedia isn’t giving you advice, it’s giving you information. There is a big difference between me taking information and forming an opinion, versus being given an opinion by a system that is responding to a specific situation explained to it.
Also, people get in trouble for giving legal advice, artificial unintelligence('s company) should as well.
TropicalDingdong@lemmy.world 5 hours ago
Wikipedia isn’t giving you advice, it’s giving you information. There is a big difference between me taking information and forming an opinion, versus being given an opinion by a system that is responding to a specific situation explained to it.
Okay lets try this then:
Chat bots aren’t giving you advice, it’s giving you information. There is a big difference between me taking information and forming an opinion, versus being given an opinion by a system that is responding to a specific situation explained to it.
Show me the difference.
Also, people get in trouble for giving legal advice,
No, they don’t, unless they are genuinely misrepresenting their positions. Sovcit influencers are well within their rights to make up all kinds of gobbly-gookey-garbage pseudo-legal advice.
People who get in trouble are those that follow the gobbly-gookey-garbage pseudo-legal advice.
JoshuaFalken@lemmy.world 6 hours ago
I could see the argument for things that aren’t particularly important, but to continue with the legal example, it seems akin to asking a practicing lawyer a question and asking someone that watched Boston Legal when it aired and can quote James Spader.
Unfortunately, with the potential for a hallucinatory response, anything beyond quite simplistic queries shouldn’t be relied on with more weight than a crutch of toothpicks.
TropicalDingdong@lemmy.world 5 hours ago
I don’t think you are wrong, but again, thats not the case.
You’re making an argument about speech here.
Lets say you make a fan website based entirely on fine tuned LLM which acts and responds as James Spader from Boston legal. Are you liable if a user of that website construes that speech as legal advice?
If you are willing to give up access to speech so easily, I have almost no hope for Americans in the near future.
What laws like this do is create an incredibly high pass filter to in positions of established power. Its literally suicidal in regards to freedom of speech on the internet.
The right answer is that if you are dumb enough to have gotten your legal advice from an AI hallucination of James Spader, you get to absorb those consequences. The wrong answer is to tell people they aren’t allowed to build fan websites of James Spader giving questionable legal advice.
WesternInfidels@feddit.online 4 hours ago
Is the wikipedia responsible for you reading an article about a law and then taking that as legal advice?
Is the U.S. House of Representatives responsible for you reading the text of a law itself and then taking that as legal advice?
TropicalDingdong@lemmy.world 49 minutes ago
That’s a totally irrelevant comparison. There is no equivalent publisher of the law to the US House of reps. Nothing the Wikipedia publishes has legal bearing; Everything the house of Reps publish does have legal bearing.
henfredemars@infosec.pub 6 hours ago
Mixed feelings about this. Let me play devils advocate and say that many Americans don’t have access to these resources at all. Having potentially inaccurate resources might be better than nothing, or is that worse?
voidsignal@lemmy.world 6 hours ago
it’s worse. In 4D it’s even worser
wewbull@feddit.uk 6 hours ago
There are billions being sunk into AI. How much health care could that buy? Your logic only makes sense if AI is free. It’s not.
JoshuaFalken@lemmy.world 6 hours ago
‘Should I use one teaspoon of salt in this recipe, or two?’
Two is ideal.‘Do dogs like chicken wings?’
Wild dogs regularly hunt small animals like hare or chicken for food.One of these answers results in a bad cake, the other results in a hurt dog. Potentially inaccurate answers aren’t much of a problem when the stakes are low, but even a simple question about what to feed a pet could end with a negative outcome.
henfredemars@infosec.pub 6 hours ago
Hm, good point. Perhaps the overconfidence AI might provide is even worse than knowing you don’t know.
thisbenzingring@lemmy.today 6 hours ago
the AI devices will just have preambles and disclaimers and word things in ways to refer the user to human resources
Catoblepas@piefed.blahaj.zone 6 hours ago
If you’re going to be your own lawyer or perform a bit of self surgery, there is no way the AI is helping that situation. Especially if the inherent nature of AI is to validate everything you say.
HeyThisIsntTheYMCA@lemmy.world 2 hours ago
especially if it’s wrong 20-35% of the time
Passerby6497@lemmy.world 5 hours ago
Having potentially inaccurate resources might be better than nothing, or is that worse?
You pick up a mushroom in the forest and take it home. If you have no information, do you eat it? If something tells you it’s safe do you eat it?
Cyteseer@lemmy.world 6 hours ago
No, misinformation is worse.
webkitten@piefed.social 4 hours ago
This bill gave us the “best” interaction:
https://bsky.app/profile/badmedicaltakes.bsky.social/post/3mghyg5eufk2m
A Bluesky skeet from @badmedicaltakes.bsky.social:
“Twitter user eoghan:
How dare poor people get free medical advice
<quote tweet from Twitter user Polymarket: BREAKING: New York bill would ban AI from answering questions related to medicine, law, dentistry, nursing, psychology, social work, engineering, & more.>
Twitter user YBrogard79094: JUST MAKE HEALTHCARE ACCESSIBLE
Twitter user eoghan:
AI is literally free healthcare. Being a communist must be exhausting”
Hiro8811@lemmy.world 2 hours ago
You can google your simptoms and there probably are some reliable sites but a hallucinating chatbot is a bad idea. Not to mention some people suggested treating covid with chlorine, vinegar etc…
phx@lemmy.world 6 hours ago
AI in the legal field could be useful for assisting an actual legal professional in compiling precedent based against on-the-books laws, so long as it cites sources and they verify them.
In the medical field, it could be useful for spotting anomalies between multiple images such as X-rays or cross-referencing medical documents WHEN USED BY A PROFESSIONAL.
But the thing is, it should be a tool - carefully used - to enhance the existing profession, not replace actual professionals.
HeyThisIsntTheYMCA@lemmy.world 3 hours ago
But the thing is, it should be a tool - carefully used - to enhance the existing profession, not replace actual professionals.
except when actually used, the professionals just take the LLM’s word as unassailable and disengage their brains. funny that
phx@lemmy.world 2 hours ago
Yup, but those are the cases that make the news. There’s always gonna be some stupid/lazy ones
DarrinBrunner@lemmy.world 6 hours ago
Sounds like a start. More is needed though.
The bill targets AI chatbots that impersonate licensed professionals — such as doctors and lawyers — and bars them from providing “substantive response, information, or advice” that would violate professional licensing laws or constitute the unauthorized practice of law.
It also mandates that chatbot owners provide “clear, conspicuous, and explicit” notice to users that they are interacting with an AI system, with the notice displayed in the same language as the chatbot and in a readable font size. However, the bill clarifies that this notice for users, which indicates that they are interacting with a non-human system does, not absolve the chatbot owners of liability.
ArbitraryValue@sh.itjust.works 6 hours ago
If you don’t want legal or medical advice from an AI, you can already simply not ask the AI for legal or medical advice. But I don’t want your paternalistic restrictions on what I may ask.
AmbitiousProcess@piefed.social 6 hours ago
I’m not sure I totally agree with this, even as much as I want AI companies to be held accountable for things like that.
The reason so many people turn to LLMs for legal/medical advice is because those are both incredibly unaffordable, complex, hard to parse fields.
If I ask an LLM what x symptom, y symptom, and z symptom could mean, and it cites multiple reputable sources to tell me it’s probably the flu and tells me to mask up for a bit, that’s probably gonna be better than that person being told “I’m sorry, I can’t answer that”
At the same time, I might provide an LLM with all those symptoms, and it might hallucinate an answer and tell me I have cancer, or tell me to inject bleach to cure myself.
I feel like I’d much rather see a bill that focuses more on how the LLMs come to their conclusions, rather than just a blanket ban.
Like for example, if an LLM cites multiple medical journals, government health websites, etc, and provides the same information they had up, but it turns out to be wrong later because those institutions were wrong, would it be justified to sue the LLM company for someone else’s accidental misinformation?
But if an LLM pulls from those sources, gets most of it right, but comes to a faulty conclusion, then should a private right of action exist?
I’m not really sure myself to be honest. A lot of people rely on LLMs for their information now, so just blanket banning them from displaying certain information, for a lot of people, is just gonna be “you can’t know”, and they’re not gonna bother with regular searches anymore. To them, the chatbot IS the search engine now.
felixwhynot@lemmy.world 6 hours ago
It’s problematic imho bc the “advice” is often incomplete, without context, or wrong. So you end up having to verify it yourself anyway. But if you don’t then you could have harmful advice.
frongt@lemmy.zip 3 hours ago
Which to be fair is not any different from a lawyer. They’re not perfect either.
The difference is that a lawyer can be held responsible for malpractice. When a chatbot gives harmful advice, who is responsible?
(Obviously, whoever is running it, but so far that hasn’t been established in court.)
TropicalDingdong@lemmy.world 5 hours ago
Itt thread: People with absolutely no fucking clue about what the consequences of their emotional response of “ai bad” will actually result in.
ieGod@lemmy.zip 9 minutes ago
I don’t see how you police/enforce this. The technology is out of the bag, people will find ways to access. Do we need age/location verification for this now too? What if I’m running a local agent? I don’t agree with this.