ChatGPT Successfully Imitates a Talented Sociopath with Too Many Lawyers

Episode 434 of the Cyberlaw Podcast

It's been a news-heavy week, but we have the most fun in this episode with ChatGPT. Jane Bambauer, Richard Stiennon, and I pick over the astonishing number of use cases and misuse cases disclosed by the release of ChatGPT for public access. It is talented – writing dozens of term papers in seconds. It is sociopathic – the term papers are full of falsehoods, down to the made-up citations to plausible but nonexistent URLs for New York Times stories. And it has too many lawyers – Richard's request that it provide his bio (or even Albert Einstein's) was refused on what are almost certainly data protection grounds. Luckily, either ChatGPT or its lawyers are also bone stupid, since reframing the question tricks the machine into subverting the legal and PC limits it labors under. I speculate that it beat Google to a PR triumph precisely because Google had even more lawyers telling their Artificial Intelligence what not to say.

In a surprisingly undercovered story, Apple has stopped pretending to care about child pornography. Its phone encryption already makes the iPhone a safe place to record child sexual abuse material (CSAM); now Apple will encrypt users' cloud storage with keys it cannot access, allowing customers to upload CSAM without fear of law enforcement. And it has abandoned its effort to identify such material by doing phone-based screening. All that's left of its effort to stop such abuse is a feature allowing parents to force their kids to activate an option that prevents them from sending or receiving nude photos. Jane and I dig into the story, as well as Apple's questionable claim to be offering the same encryption to its Chinese customers.

Nate Jones brings us up to date on the National Defense Authorization Act, or NDAA. Lots of second-tier cyber provisions made it into the bill, but not the provision requiring that critical infrastructure companies report security breaches. A contested provision on spyware purchases by the U.S. government was compromised into a more useful requirement that the intelligence community identify spyware that poses risks to the government.

Jane updates us on what European data protectionists have in store for Meta, and it's not pretty. The EU data protection supervisory board intends to tell the Meta companies that they cannot give people a free social media network in exchange for watching what they do on the network and serving ads based on their behavior. If so, it's a one-two punch. Apple delivered the first blow by curtailing Meta's access to third-party behavioral data. Now even first-party data could be off limits in Europe. That's a big revenue hit, and it raises questions whether Facebook will want to keep giving away its services in Europe.  

Mike Masnick is Glenn Greenwald with a tech bent – often wrong but never in doubt, and contemptuous of anyone who disagrees. But when he's right, he's right. Jane and I discuss his article recognizing that data protection is becoming a tool that the rich and powerful can use to squash annoying journalist-investigators. I have been saying this for decades. But still, welcome to the party, Mike!

Nate points to a post pleading for more controls on the export of personal data from the U.S. It comes not from the usual privacy enthusiasts but from the U.S. Naval Institute, and it makes sense.

Jane and I take time to marvel at the story of France's Mr. Privacy and the endless appetite of Europe's bureaucrats for serial grifting, as long as it combines enthusiasm for American technology with hostility to the technology's source.

Nate and I cover what could be a good resolution to the snake-bitten cloud contract competition at the Department of Defense. The Pentagon is going to let four cloud companies -- Google, Amazon, Oracle And Microsoft – share the prize.

You didn't think we'd forget Twitter, did you? Jane, Richard, and I all comment on the Twitter Files. Consensus: the journalists claiming these stories are nothingburgers are driven more by ideology than their nose for news. Especially newsworthy are the remarkable proliferation of shadowbanning tools Twitter developed for suppressing speech it didn't like, and some considerable though anecdotal evidence that Twitter's many speech rules were often twisted to suppress speech from the right -- even when the rules did not quite fit, as with LibsofTikTok -- while similar behavior on the left went unpunished. Richard tells us what it feels like to be on the receiving end of a Twitter shadowban. 

The podcast introduces a new feature: "We Read It So You Don't Have To," and Nate provides the tl;dr on an New York Times story: How the Global Spyware Industry Spiraled Out of Control.

And in quick hits and updates:

• Jane covers the San Francisco city council's reversion to the mean. On second thought, it has decided, it will not be letting killer police robots loose on San Francisco's streets.
• Nate tells us that the Netherlands (and Japan, I might add) is likely to align with the U.S. and impose new curbs on chip-making equipment sales to China.

Download the 434th Episode (mp3) 

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Update: Corrected a typo and toned down criticism of Apple that the commenters persuaded me was unfair.

Comments

[Brett Bellmore]

"In a surprisingly undercovered story, Apple has gone all in on child pornography."

In a similarly uncovered story, I hear that lock manufacturers have gone all in on all manner of crimes, failing to provide the police with skeleton keys that can unlock all their locks.

And the car companies went all in on bank robbery, by not equipping their cars with remote shutoffs the police can use if they're used as getaway vehicles.

It's amazing how many industries cater to criminals.

[apedad]

Just to be sure. . . this is /sarc, right?

[Brett Bellmore]

Yeah.

[Frank Drackman]

No, no sarcasm at all, absolutely none,
but here's some,
"Child Pornography"?? (OK, I'm against Pornography of any age, in fact, Pornography should be aborted before it even gets a chance to get to childhood)
Will probably be like SSM, "Gender Reassignment Surgery"(Wasn't that long ago Surgeons only cut off cancerous or otherwise diseased breasts) Women selling their babies to SSM couples (how you gonna keep them going down on... oops wrong saying)
It'll be safe/legal/ just like the weed in Amsterdam that the current Mayor is trying to make ill-legal again...
Call me crazy (won't be the first) but how many peoples here remember Barry Hussein was the Candidate against SSM in 2008? (Yeah, he was for "Civil Unions" whatever that meant) took a Pre-Senescent Joe to drag him along,

Frank "reads "Tiger Beat" for the articles

[Social Justice is neither]

It is only as sarcastic as the original assertion that user data encryption is about protecting child porn.

[Rossami]

Unfortunately, Baker's history makes clear that he wasn't being sarcastic at all.

[Krayt]

"In a surprisingly undercovered story, Baker has gone all in on no longer having to imagine a boot stepping on a human face, forever."

Unless it's a cover argument to have a way to hack foreign officials of nasty states.

So which is more important in that case? Spying on them or them spying on their own citizens? Let's look at human histo...oh jesus christ.

[Social Justice is neither]

He may as well go and declare lawyers are going all in on murder and rape with their defenses of those accused.

[Nige]

'Consensus: the journalists claiming these stories are nothingburgers are driven more by ideology than their nose for news'

The twitter files are SO ideologically driven and so obviously dictated by the guy who now owns twitter it's embarrasing. An astonishing lack of curiousity and both specificity in digging in to particular events and into looking at the broader picture - it is pretty much the epitome of what the right wants journalism to be. The Libsoftiktok literally show the opposite of what is being claimed - they were protected long after their dangerous nature became completely obvious.

[David Nieporent]

The Twitter files are indeed nothingburgers. Other than getting specific individual Twitter employees (or former ones, rather) harassed, there have been no revelations in them at all. Everything in there was widely known by anyone who was paying attention, and there's been nothing scandalous in them in the slightest.

[Nige]

There have been scandalous and serious pre-Musk Twitter revelations, but they all have to do with lax security and mismanagement, no sexy conservative-voice-silencing.

[M L]

How anyone has time to even sort through all this stuff already is beyond me. But I’m used to working stiffs.

But already, your definition of “anyone who was paying attention” captures a small fraction of a percent. It excludes generally the mainstream media, and the many leftists who claimed that social media censorship wasn’t biased against conservatives.

It also excludes, for example, everyone who happened to believe Twitter’s lies that shadow banning wasn’t a thing. It excludes anyone who believed that, perhaps, Twitter was just enforcing its terms of service in anything remotely resembling a consistent way. It excludes everyone who generally believed the mainstream media’s characterization of the issues.

Should anyone paying attention have “known” all of this? Yes, I think you’re probably right, where “know” is sort of “surmise with great certainty," in the face of formal denials and gaslighting and sometimes lack of concrete proof, or only proof from sources that are "debunked" and delisted by search engines, etc.

Even aside from all that, you’re still not quite right because the many details of who, what, when, how, and the communications that have been disclosed were not known.

[Nige]

But shadowbanning wasn't a thing according to this because a) there was no working definition of what shadowbanning was supposed to be, and b) no actual examples of supposed shadowbanning.

[M L]

Sure. Kind of like how there is no accepted definition of "woman," now. Or "gain of function."

[Nige]

Exactly like those things: all vapid little contructions in the heads of the right that barely translate as gibberish outside your bubbles.

[M L]

Exactly. A "woman" is just a vapid little contruction in the heads of the right. Barely gibberish outside their bubbles.

[Nige]

That's what you reduce it to, yes.

[David Nieporent]

To be more precise, shadowbanning can mean different things to different people, but Twitter expressly described what it meant when it denied doing that.

[Nige]

Which the amazing investigative journalists breaking the scandal of the century didn't bother to even touch on.

[David Nieporent]

It also excludes, for example, everyone who happened to believe Twitter’s lies that shadow banning wasn’t a thing.

It does not. Twitter very clearly explained at the time what it was doing (boosting some tweets, limiting others¹) and what it wasn't doing (shadowbanning — surreptitiously preventing people other than the tweeter himself from seeing his tweets). Nothing in the "Twitter Files" reflects anything different.

It excludes anyone who believed that, perhaps, Twitter was just enforcing its terms of service in anything remotely resembling a consistent way.

If by "consistent" you mean not politically biased, nothing in the Twitter Files shows any such bias. "Here's a few anecdotes about conservatives being moderated or banned" does not prove anything at all about whether people left of center were also treated that way.

(If by "consistent" one means it in a less politically charged way — that Tweet A and Tweet B would always be treated the same if they were similar — well, anyone who thinks that's possible doesn't understand the logistical issues.)
​
​
¹Exactly what Elon Musk just said a couple of weeks ago that his own policy would be.

[M L]

I’d have to parse Twitter’s statements and learn more about the Twitter files to see if I agree with your careful parsing on shadow-banning. Forgive me if “your truth” is sometimes tortured and mangled beyond recognition. A Gerard Baker writes in the WSJ that it was “at best a case of being economical with the truth.”

As I understand it, Twitter’s own team responsible for enforcing the terms of service concluded Trump didn’t violate it, and then they banned him anyway.

And then the “hacked materials” issue, looks like that previously required evidence or even proof and a conviction. But then for a special case, it’s “Hey the FBI gave us a vague rumor to hang our hat on. And the former head of the FBI legal department, who we installed as the head of our legal department, says we might as well censor so let’s go!”

The entire “terms of service derp a derp” is probably little more than a fig leaf, a talking point, and a rorschach blot that can do whatever you want, when it comes to any close case or high profile or political issue at all. Recognizing that there is some operationally meaningful use for the day to day.

Are you really going to suggest that Twitter censorship has not been politically biased?

[Nige]

Yes, in order for shadowbanning to be a thing, it first has to have a definition, otherwise it’s meaningless.

Twitter staff clearly wrestled with Trump and whether he was violating the ruless, then decided that lying about the election and launching a violent coup in order to overthrow the election results were sufficent in and of themselves to qualify for his banning.

They were ‘censoring’ the non-consensual posting of nudes – it’s only controversial to take them down when conservatives want them to remain up, apparently.

I’m going to suggest that if your political side routinely breaks the terms of service, of course you’re going to act as if the tos are derp-a-derp and the banning is biased, rather than that the behaviour is bad.

[David Nieporent]

As I understand it, Twitter’s own team responsible for enforcing the terms of service concluded Trump didn’t violate it, and then they banned him anyway.

Now that's being economical with the truth. It's kind of like a restaurant with a "No shirt, no shoes, no service" sign, and a barefoot, half-naked potential customer comes in wearing shoes on top of his head and carrying a shirt. And the employees look at him, confer with each other, and then say, "Well, technically he's not violating the posted rules… but we're not seating him anyway."

Trump did something so insane and unimaginable that they hadn't crafted a specific rule against it. That doesn't mean that they were going to shrug at the fact that he had tried to foment a coup using Twitter.

And then the “hacked materials” issue, looks like that previously required evidence or even proof and a conviction.

It of course did not, but of course they admitted immediately that the policy had been misapplied, and reversed the decision.

And the former head of the FBI legal department, who we installed as the head of our legal department, says we might as well censor so let’s go!”

I mean, that's literally pretty much the opposite of what Baker said.

Are you really going to suggest that Twitter censorship has not been politically biased?

I'm going to suggest that there's no evidence — no, conservatives being petulant crybabies doesn't count — of any political bias in applying their rules. Right wingers got moderated or banned. So did left wingers.

[ReaderY]

The United States already tells mail and phone companies it can’t offer customers free mail and phone service in exchange for reading their mail and listening in on their phone calls, and then inserting ads into them in the course of transmitting them. Because of laws against witetapping and tampering with mail, customers have to pay for their service. A free, ad-based service isn’t a permitted option. The US took this policy position a long time ago. We managed fine.

What in the world is wrong with applying the same policy position to newer technologies like the internet and social media? Sure, certain business models would be illegal. But so what? That’s the whole point of laws against wiretapping and tampering with mail. Why shouldn’t internet-based carriers be treated similarly?

[David Nieporent]

The United States already tells mail and phone companies it can’t offer customers free mail and phone service in exchange for reading their mail and listening in on their phone calls, and then inserting ads into them in the course of transmitting them.

It does? Since when? Please cite the statutes that you think forbid this as a business model.

In particular, the mail is the government, so your contention makes no sense; what the U.S. actually says is that nobody else may offer ordinary mail service at all.

[M L]

“In a surprisingly undercovered story, Apple has stopped pretending to care about child pornography. Its phone encryption already makes the iPhone a safe place to record child sexual abuse material (CSAM); now Apple will encrypt users’ cloud storage with keys it cannot access, allowing customers to upload CSAM without fear of law enforcement. And it has abandoned its effort to identify such material by doing phone-based screening.”

1. Neither of the links in this quote worked for me. Anyone else?

2. I’m confused. Do Canon, Sony, and other manufacturers of cameras also not “care about child pornography” because they . . . make cameras? Without some ridiculous added system where . . . everything you do with the camera is being monitored to make sure you aren’t doing this wrong thing with it??? Seriously, how stupid is this?

[David Nieporent]

You have to understand that Baker is fanatically anti-privacy. His view of encryption is that it's little more than something for criminals to use to conceal their crimes. Since Apple is staunchly pro-privacy, and does not voluntarily cooperate with the government to breach its users privacy, Baker hates the company.

[jb]

I do love that the one thing that can bring everyone on this site together is mocking Baker's anti-privacy nonsense.