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throwa356262 • today at 9:22 PM • 9 replies • view on HN

Part of the evidence was his wife's chatgpt logs.

Remember kids, uncle Sam can see anything you tell your AI and will use that against you.


Replies

netsharc • today at 9:47 PM

A service you delegate your thinking to (Brain-aaS?), which the provider can also instruct to report anything suspicious... What a world we have now.

I wonder if the BaaS-providers monitor the accounts of decision makers. They could profit if they figure out what e.g. a central banker is going to decide. Or... if they're the ones deciding for him.

Hah, you can even streamline that by having an AI agent that autonomously makes decisions based on insider info...

godwinson__4-8 • today at 10:05 PM

> Remember kids, uncle Sam can see anything you tell your AI and will use that against you.

Not just your AI.

You could have stopped the sentence at "uncle Sam can see anything" and these days it's pretty much true. They will use all of it against you if they can. Unless you truly want to live off the grid, if the state takes a sufficient interest in you, expect everything you do to be seen.

Uncle Sam tried to get MLK to kill himself by sending him letters alleging knowledge of an affair [1]. Getting some idiot's wife's chatgpt logs represents a fairly routine law enforcement action these days, and as such is really rather unremarkable. The State is always something of a terror. Really under most (if not all) conceptions, it necessarily has to be. The monopoly of force is a comfort until the Leviathan knocks on your door.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FBI-King_letter

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binlog • today at 9:30 PM

Man really switched to his wife’s account and thought no one would be able to track him there. Calling this amateur would be an insult to amateurs.

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tcdent • today at 9:32 PM

> ... a chatbot account associated with Alfozan’s spouse (which shared multiple identifiers and attributes with Alfozan’s own chatbot account) submitted prompts between Sept. 24 and Sept. 30 related to building, customizing, installing, audio recording, testing, obfuscating, and remote accessing a device, including inquiries about “build[ing] a continuous audio recorder,” “customiz[ing] Wi-Fi . . . connectivity,” “improv[ing] audio and live listening,” and “encrypt[ing] the SD card,” among other things. The same chatbot account also submitted prompts specifically related to Recording Device 1, including its custom header and unique MAC address, between Sept. 27 and Sept. 28.

The justice.gov article doesn't specifically say it was an OpenAI account, but I think, based on the fact that they have logs including MAC address of the device, that we could probably assume that. The alternative is that other chatbot account providers are collaborating.

Regardless, doing a string search on a MAC address for a device you find inside your property doesn't strike me as an abuse of the data that is also your property.

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Aurornis • today at 9:36 PM

True of any cloud service. If you are involved in a criminal investigation, they can get access to your data.

They can confiscate your computers, too.

This person, of all people, would know this. He really thought he’d never get caught.

ReptileMan • today at 10:07 PM

I doubt it. Storage is expensive and costs add up. There are with great certainty many accounts that are marked as non-schmuck and have retain forever policy, but for the schmuck - I think that after year or two your Griffit/Fulgrim slash fiction will go down the drain. I am not sure how many petabytes per minute in logs openai and anthropic generate, but I would guess more than 1.

TZubiri • today at 9:54 PM

Uncle Sam? It's the same company, the 'spy' asked an OpenAI controlled product how to spy OpenAI, no state espionage or search warrants needed.

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IncreasePosts • today at 9:52 PM

Presumably they already knew who it was, if they were able to look at his wife's chat logs

catchnear4321 • today at 9:35 PM

Uno reverse card - you can send Uncle Sam whatever you care to. No need to specify an address.

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