Yes, but I dont think that’s relevant. Whether gross or net, they are still ruining lives to achieve a pointless profit motive.

Edit: relevant, not irrelevant

You don’t need $10 billion in revenue. You could just coast along and only hit, what, $9.8 billion? And then you wouldn’t have to ruin 500 people’s lives. I’m betting the CEO has a bonus scheduled if he hits this goal.

If they used illegal means to find him, Im pretty sure that taints any evidence found on him.

Possibly. It’s called The Fruit of the Poisonous Tree doctrine. If the police obtained evidence illegally, or derived evidence from other evidence that was illegally obtained, it can be ruled inadmissible by the judge. There are exceptions shown in the link. One of the big exceptions is the first listed. If it was discovered from a source independent of the illegal activity it can be allowed.

Police are aware of the risks of tainted evidence so they will sometimes cover for it with a parallel construction investigation.

Parallel construction occurs when the federal government learns of criminal activity through one source but then gives the information to federal law enforcement agencies to “reconstruct” the criminal investigation so that the source of that second investigation differs from the original source.

So, let’s say the police arrest a suspect and find compelling evidence against the suspect at the location. That evidence might be suppressed if it turns out that, for example, the police found out where the suspect was going to be via an illegal wire tap. If it weren’t for the illegally obtained location information, the police would not have obtained that other evidence. Rather than admitting in court that this is how they found the suspect, one of the investigators might call in, or arrange for someone else to call in an anonymous tip about the suspect’s location to other investigators that don’t know about the illegal wire tap. The police then exclude the real origin of the knowledge of the suspects location from court filings.

Illegal, very possibly. Likely, also very possible.

This is more of an indictment about people not being safe while preparing food. Wash the eggs before you crack them into the pan, or whatever. Wash your hands properly any time you touch the shells, yolks or whites. Wash all surfaces that come in contact with the shells, yolks or whites. Cook thoroughly. Do the same when cooking or handling meats or even vegetables that could be contaminated.

Typical Republican: either scared of their own shadow or indifferent to the grievous damage they inflict on others.

I think scared and indifferent to the damage they do is more accurate. Though I’m not even sure it’s indifference. I think they actually delight in causing harm to people they believe deserve that harm.

Yikes!

In that sense, Westgate explains, the bot dialogues are not unlike talk therapy, “which we know to be quite effective at helping people reframe their stories.” Critically, though, AI, “unlike a therapist, does not have the person’s best interests in mind, or a moral grounding or compass in what a ‘good story’ looks like,” she says. “A good therapist would not encourage a client to make sense of difficulties in their life by encouraging them to believe they have supernatural powers. Instead, they try to steer clients away from unhealthy narratives, and toward healthier ones. ChatGPT has no such constraints or concerns.”

This is a rather terrifying take. Particularly when combined with the earlier passage about the man who claimed that “AI helped him recover a repressed memory of a babysitter trying to drown him as a toddler.” Therapists have to be very careful because human memory is very plastic. It’s very easy to alter a memory, in fact, every time you remember something, you alter it just a little bit. Under questioning by an authority figure, such as a therapist or a policeman if you were a witness to a crime, these alterations can be dramatic. This was a really big problem in the '80s and '90s.

Kaitlin Luna: Can you take us back to the early 1990s and you talk about the memory wars, so what was that time like and what was happening?

Elizabeth Loftus: Oh gee, well in the 1990s and even in maybe the late 80s we began to see an altogether more extreme kind of memory problem. Some patients were going into therapy maybe they had anxiety, or maybe they had an eating disorder, maybe they were depressed, and they would end up with a therapist who said something like well many people I’ve seen with your symptoms were sexually abused as a child. And they would begin these activities that would lead these patients to start to think they remembered years of brutalization that they had allegedly banished into the unconscious until this therapy made them aware of it. And in many instances these people sued their parents or got their former neighbors or doctors or teachers whatever prosecuted based on these claims of repressed memory. So the wars were really about whether people can take years of brutalization, banish it into the unconscious, be completely unaware that these things happen and then reliably recover all this information later, and that was what was so controversial and disputed.

Kaitlin Luna: And your work essentially refuted that, that it’s not necessarily possible or maybe brought up to light that this isn’t so.

Elizabeth Loftus: My work actually provided an alternative explanation. Where could these merit reports be coming from if this didn’t happen? So my work showed that you could plant very rich, detailed false memories in the minds of people. It didn’t mean that repressed memories did not exist, and repressed memories could still exist and false memories could still exist. But there really wasn’t any strong credible scientific support for this idea of massive repression, and yet so many families were destroyed by this, what I would say unsupported, claim.

The idea that ChatBots are not only capable of this, but that they are currently manipulating people into believing they have recovered repressed memories of brutalization is actually at least as terrifying to me as it convincing people that they are holy prophets.

Edited for clarity

Meanwhile, Reddit’s chief legal officer, Ben Lee, wrote that the company intends to “ensure that the researchers are held accountable for their misdeeds.”

“How dare they perform such dangerous and unethical experiments on our users without paying us an appropriate access fee?” He probably went on to say.

We are so fucked…

It’d nice but we have a dearth of violent lunatics on the left who would take such steps while the right has a vast overabundance.

Why not just say, nearly all Trump voters think Chinese Americans are a threat. We all know who that 25% is.

Punching someone in the face does tend to make them hostile.

Don’t worry. Someone will need you to to pick produce in a field somewhere soon.

That would be a very elegant solution.

Yes, but he has been accused of child sexual assault. As you say, anyone can make an accusation and he has been accused.

I’m guessing what’s printed are the crimes they’re accused of rather than anything they’ve been convicted of.

So Trump’s picture should be up there.

Good luck proving intent. The judge was, I’m sure, just following policy when someone tries to invade her courtroom.

Or Bill Clinton 2028 hats. They’re the same age, after all and the jokes write themselves.

Bill Clinton - At least he was able to balance the budget.

Bill Clinton - He’ll just fuck the interns instead of the rest of us.

That’s probably because I’m essentially talking about MAGAts fantasizing about getting to use their 2nd Amendment rights.

…i wonder about the use scenario for all these weapons you guys own and i do not understand why besides having a fetish for weapons.

The vast majority of guns are owned by people who lean far, far right. The use scenario for most of them is a fantastical case where strangers with dark complexions threaten their homes and families and they suddenly turn into Rambo or the Punisher and then shoot all the bad guys.

Of course this never happens because these very people are honestly cowards who are too scared to go to the grocery store with their weapon. If something really dangerous happens you’d better not be between them and the nearest exit because they will shoot you if you block them while they’re running away. Well, unless you’re armed. In that case, they’ll run from you too.