We might also ask if the best venue to decide national AI regulation is a single judge sitting in a criminal case involving a fraudster. If Judge Rakoff is correct, then a trade secret shared with AI is no longer a trade secret. This affects not just a single NY criminal defendant, but anyone that runs a company and wants to keep business practices secret. I would submit that this is no way to regulate a field such as AI.
But that's not what happened here.
This seems to be a pretty narrow ruling but maybe I'm missing something not being a lawyer and all.
Idk how that works with journals today, but anything like this which helps me organize my thoughts should be off limits to discovery.
That said, I note that the court's opinion specifically calls out Anthropic's practice of *training models on user data* as a reason why the defendant could not have expected confidentiality. I do not use these cloud models for anything important precisely because they are operated by companies, like Anthropic, that are completely untrustworthy.
IMO if the "for my lawyer" purpose/intent is not in dispute, then it shouldn't matter whether the service is a search-engine, an LLM, a browser-based word processor, or the drafts/sent folders of a webmail client.
The reverse direction is much clearer: Imagine a client receives an obviously-privileged email from their lawyer, and uses a cloud text-to-speech service to listen to it. Should that audio/text be admissible as evidence? Hell no.
I use an online LLM to field better questions to my lawyer — he is aware, as I send him these AI conversations. His only warning to me is don't say anything that you wouldn't want the judge to read, which is the same warning given about email. Lot's of "devil's advocating" phrasing...
During our current lawsuit (my first, as plaintiff) — years brewing — I have built myself a local Ollama computer, which can answer offline questions better. But for something quick or simpler, I still use online services often.
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Local LLMs are the future. This massive datacenter overinvestment is going to become obvious (similar to how ProTools destroyed recording studios).
