What just happened? Another incident has taken place that illustrates the need to be careful what you tell AI. A Florida woman is facing felony charges after she used Claude as a diary and allegedly wrote that she planned to “shoot up” the Sheriff’s office. After a human reviewer examined the statements, they were reported to police.
According to the arrest report, Carli Michelle Heller, of Bonita Springs, Florida, wrote on September 26 that she would attack the Sheriff’s office. She later said that she uses Anthropic’s chatbot like a “diary.”
Claude’s safety systems flagged the entry and it was escalated to a human reviewer. After deciding it was a credible threat, the reviewer reported it to law enforcement.
The company says it may share user information in limited emergencies if it believes disclosure is necessary to prevent death or serious physical injury.
Deputies identified Heller and visited her home. She was detained without incident before an LCSO intelligence detective took over the investigation.
Heller faces a charge of making a written threat of violence under Florida law. Florida Statute 836.10 makes it a second-degree felony to send, post, or transmit a written or electronic record threatening to kill or injure someone, carry out a mass shooting, or commit an act of terrorism. The communication must be made in a manner in which another person may view it.
Anthropic isn’t going to be taking any chances when it comes to anything it deems a potential threat. Last month, it was reported that OpenAI and Sam Altman are being sued by British Columbia over claims that the company could have prevented a mass shooting in the Canadian province.
The shooter, eighteen-year-old former pupil Jesse Van Rootselaar, had previously been flagged by OpenAI’s safety team for her conversations about gun violence, but OpenAI never alerted police because the conversations did not meet the threshold for legal referral.
In June, Florida also sued OpenAI and Altman, alleging that ChatGPT had contributed to real-world harms, including the 2025 Florida State University shooting.
The latest incident is another reminder to think before you enter something into a chatbot that could get you into trouble. It’s certainly not a private diary whose contents are for your eyes only.
Reports last month revealed that human contractors reviewing Microsoft Copilot’s image editor can see users’ prompts, uploaded photos and AI-generated edits. Documents show that some of those assignments contain sexual, disturbing or potentially illegal material, though the reviewers are not there to flag the content – only to assess whether the output is accurate.
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While a chatbot has been demonstrated not to be a private diary, it will be interesting to see if the courts agree that she intentionally use her diary to communicate or thought that someone else would read it. Like most users of dear diary she probably thought her secrets were safe and her diary would never tell.
Florida Statute 836.10 makes it a second-degree felony to send, post, or transmit a written or electronic record threatening to kill or injure someone
This means a significant portion of Lemmy (and the rest of the internet) are criminals evading justice
great law top shelf
If you think Lemmy is bad, check out 4chan/b and /pol. We’ve had a few active shooters forecast there first, but it’s ignored in a sea of statements of intent and calls to violence.
An awful lot of people have suicidal or homicidal thoughts cross their mind. Doubly so in an era in which entire demographics have no plausible hope for their future. I, for one, want to see the lifetime appointments of Federalist Society jurists become a liability. Especially, Justice Kavanaugh.
So this incident raises a question of what specific clause of text convinced a human agent to escalate the matter to escalate to authorities who are very fond of using deadly force. Or if this is just a matter of a corporate CYA response.
I love that Florida Man is a meme for being completely wild, dangerous, and generally criminal, but Florida Woman writes a diary.
No problems here.
She clearly didn’t intent to act on it and didn’t intend for it to be read by anyone else than her AI boyfriend. So it’s not matching the criteria of the law. Legally, she did nothing wrong.
How FUCKING hard is it to use like, notepad?
Notepad doesn’t answer and doesn’t agree as eagerly.
I was about to say “I know! That’s the beauty of it!” but didn’t they integrate Copilot into Notepad?
use Vim.
Hell yeah. Thought crime. Time to get Tom Cruise in here to Minority Report all of us.
It’s always interesting to see how much people trust sending such personal information to some service on the Internet, expecting privacy.
I’m not sure I’d even want my own self-hosted LLMs to have something like a personal diary. Sending all that to an AI company would never even cross my mind.
I understand that most people aren’t the tech-oriented types who get into self-hosting and running their own LLMs, but people have had diaries for centuries before LLMs existed.
Dear Claude, I’m aware of a dangerous pedophile’s location, can you report him to the police?
“Pennsylvania Avenue? We’ve been getting a lot of reports about that address but I’m afraid my programming does not permit me to proceed with that request. Do you have anything else to report?”
Does this work?
After a human reviewer examined the statements, they were reported to police.
The guardrails are working as intended. ONLY persecute the public with them. Government skynet, and bond villains will have access to non guardrailed models, or any “flagged for review” markers will be ignored to bomb more elementary schools. A sheriff’s office is government power related. School shootings is just a thoughts and prayers issue, if you’re confused about the line between this and other incidents/attitudes we are being spied on for.
all my sarcasm So you’re telling me that you can’t say anything to a bot… ON THE INTERNET!!! WOW FUCK ME HUH!!!
that’s not how privacy works.
“The company says it may share user information in limited emergencies if it believes disclosure is necessary to prevent death or serious physical injury.”
Also keep in mind: Your chat logs are company assets. Even if today’s decision makers believe maintaining user trust is net profitable, that will not always be true. Some day, maybe when the pullback comes and the wolves are at the gates, or when they sell the company, or when a shareholder action asserts fiduciary duty to maximize shareholder value, your chat logs will be sold and mined in the most lucrative way possible. The way that extracts the most value from you, the product.
when a shareholder action asserts fiduciary duty to maximize shareholder value
People really should stop spreading this fiction that there is some legal requirement to maximize shareholder profits embedded in the concept of fiduciary duty.
There’s no law but there is precedent isn’t there?
No good or regularly cited precedent, no, but sadly yes you can point to some cases. It’s worth noting that that even the courts look at those cases like “ew”, or they are only viewed as valid precedent to lay people, with the courts view them completely differently. Dodge v Ford is a common example.
Care to elaborate? (Or point to where one can learn more about this?)
There isn’t too much more to elaborate on, it simply isn’t the case, but it is such a common thing to say that it is worth researching. You’ll hear the 1919 case “Dodge v Ford” brought up as proof, one good place to start reading is the Wikipedia “Significance” section and the associated citations, as they go deeper into the subject than just that single case.
There simply is no interpretation of “fiduciary duty” that requires “maximization of shareholder value” outside of the misinformed lay person discussion of the subject.
You can even just logically see why such an interpretation would be impossible: given N shareholders all with different interests and different financial situations, how do you even define “maximizing their value” and what time duration are you basing that off? Imagine how absurd the courts would be if such a statute did exist: you’d have people owning 1 share in a company suing the company because it did something that wasn’t maximizing “value” as they define it.
The reality is that the business judgement rule is case law and is often cited and is often used as defenses against such assertions.
…it is important to note that shareholder primacy theory was first advanced by economists, not lawyers. This may explain why the idea that corporations should be managed to maximize shareholder value is based on factually mistaken claims about the law.
– The Dumbest Business Idea Ever. The Myth of Maximizing Shareholder Value, By Lynn Stout
The communication must be made in a manner in which another person may view it.
So she shouldn’t even get charged.
Yeah, I’d wager that is what the case will hinge on. She wasn’t aware anyone could view it. Otherwise it’s incredibly unlikely that she would have made such a statement to Claude at all.
On the other hand though, I’m sure Claude’s parent company and the prosecution will argue that she didn’t have an expectation of privacy where this statement is concerned (given TOS/EULA, in combination with the number of news articles/reports on the subject).
i think anthopic was right to report it, but the cops likely overstepped. if she had “threatened” the president she would have been assesed by ss but likely not arrested. i wonder if the same cops she was “threatening” were the ones she was reported to and arrested by.
This is just ass coverage for the company. They’re not going to pursue it. They just didn’t want to get sued for not reporting it if she did commit a mass shooting. The prosecution though might.
I’d argue this is positive coverage for Anthropic. They rightfully reported the incident. End of story. That’s where Anthropic’s influence on the situation started and ended.
It’s a criminal case, not civil. The state of Flordia is pursuing the case with absolutely zero decision making from Anthropic. It’s important to understand how the justice system works, and Anthropic has no more right or ability to influence this case than Moleskine would if she had written the threat in one of their notebooks instead.
Another human viewed it it though.
And people were not-so-long-ago concerned that phones are spying after them. Now they just send all the info themselves.
I’m building a fully private assistant with local Home Assistant, local model, and a local Wikipedia database for lookups. Will probably make a post/release of it soon once I finish replacing all my Google Nest displays.
I’d like to subscribe to your newsletter.
I want to do this, but only got as far as setting up a minimal Home Assistant. Only put a few hours into it, though, then got sidetracked by trying to turn an esp32 into a speaker/microphone puck.
Up until the 80s, there was still some debate over whether wiretaps should be legal. It’s sad that we have come to accept them as normal.
It was less worrisome back then. The cost to have someone listen to and transcribe your conversations was quite high. They’d really have to want to go after someone to do it.
Now, turning voice conversations into searchable text is nearly free.
Not only that - wiretaps have Judicial Oversight in that they require a Court Order (well, in most of the World, not sure if that’s the case in present day America) which a Judge supposedly only issues if there’s reason to suspect the person whose lines are tapped of committing or preparing to commit a crime, whilst Antrophic’s surveillance of people’s conversations with their chatbot has no Judicial Oversight at all and has no minimum legal threshold that must be reached before it is allowed to happen.
I think this is one of the greatest dangers AI presents. Sure it makes some of us stupider, sure it drinks our water and eats our GPUs and raises power prices… but once upon a time, it took actual human effort to run a dragnet, even with judicial approval.
Now, you plug in an LLM to the giant pile of corporate surveillance data and ask it to find troublemakers. Anonymity is dead and its death made retroactive and since there’s no government oversight, the government can just lease access to the tools they used to need approval to use.
Where does this apply?
To the English-speaking world and probably beyond.
People will fight you tooth and nail to prevent something they view as immediately threatening to them. On the other hand, they’ll pay you to implement something they view as immediately useful to them. In either case, they don’t care at all about any non-immediate repercussions for anything.
i know very few people who wereor are concerned about being spied on regardless of how much they should be.
I get called a downer for mentioning how this all works. You shouldn’t connect your smart tv to the network, you shouldn’t use Alexa, anything you do online is public, and it always gets recorded poorly.
Maybe my partner is the only person who listens, and she has all her stuff disabled, there are no network attached smart things in it house, but she still uses windows and she’s not yet receptive to moving to Linux (which is a hard sell).
Smart TVs just find those “open” hotspots that cable providers leave on everyone’s modem now; you don’t even need to agree to TOS before it starts locating and spying.
Every device is a wiretap. Every device is a wiretap. We live in a panopticon. The purpose of AI is to price us out of the component market. You can’t escape if you can’t afford your own hardware.
I haven’t seen any proof of this, so I’m still skeptical.
I didn’t approve any TOS setting up my tv, so this would be legally a nightmare for them.
Gamers Nexus recently released a 2-hour video on LG smart TVs and how they spy on you. I haven’t watched the entire video yet, but it seems that the damn things start recording data as soon as they receive power.
so this would be legally a nightmare for them
To many corporations such as LG, laws are just the cost of doing business. Assuming they even receive a fine it will be so small that it won’t matter.
I just mean there’s enough tech illiterate people out there that they don’t need that liability.
95% of people will just turn on the tracking and not know or think about it. Connecting to nearby wifi is more of a risk.
Oh, true. I don’t think I’ve seen even a single person in real life deny cookies on a website. That does make it weird that they start tracking even before interacting with the TOS.
I suppose it should be pretty easily verifiable. Just set up a new SSID without protection and see what connects.
Might as well try it with my own TV. IIRC I never accepted any TOS either.
At least your partner it the one you most need to have and benefit from listening. Your privacy can easily be compromised by close associates. Best of luck to you; you’re not doing anything wrong. Its not you that’s the downer, it’s the circumstances you’re describing.
a lot of thise things are great though. everyone draws the line differently. im well aware of the surveillance. to live significantly under the radar you’d need to cut out tso much more to make it meaningful. do you really just watch antenna tv and dvds? no ordering online? always use fake membership cards at the grocery? pay cash? i mean fuck. i get ya though. im just playing devils advocate for the people that may not know and are calling you a downer. EDIT: there are so many nice linux dustros now and windows is so bad, that should be one of the easiest sells imo.
No I bought an AppkeTV, which while it isn’t perfect is not doing what smart tvs do.
I’m not living as a hermit or completely off grid. I just stick to stuff that tracks me as little as reasonably possible and am mindful of what information could leak.
Like, I still have to go to hotels when travelling and they have zero data security with your ID photo and cards. I can’t fix that or avoid it. That’s life. But disabling the always on microphones in my home I can manage.
What is a smart tv doing that an AppleTV isn’t?
Automatic content recognition and selling it like LG and Samsung, inserting ads like Roku, installing residential proxies like 80% of smart tv apps.
If I’m running Netflix and they’re selling the analytics data, it doesn’t matter what platform I use. But everything around that can be avoided.
I would like to use a Linux box but haven’t found a good HDMICEC plus low power plus good app support combination (happy to take suggestions though)
Worse, if you tell them how big of a problem it is, they’ll assume you have something to hide
AI or not, I hope anyone recognizes “I want to shoot up X” as a problem and seeks to identify and resolve whatever conflict their having to not feel this way.
Nope. In sane countries where guns are not freely available it’s a figure of speech that forever remains just that. It’s definitely something I might say. Same for me saying that I will put either of my sons in the basement when they drive me crazy. And yet they never saw said basement.
Going through with it will likely resolve the conflict. Food for thought
I guess that’s also true lol
Exactly. Those thoughts and language are not for discussion, even in a diary. Speak to no one about urges of violence. Figure it out on your own and definitely not in writing format. Involve no one else. Keep it to yourself. Do not seek a therapist for this.
cool pfp
Oh so what, now I’m not allowed even my God damn fantasies anymore? Fucking ThoughtPolice!
/s
But also, a person’s imagination is their last vestige of freedom that so far, cannot be taken away.
