a contract killer who kills contracts
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this actually arose because a washington post tech reporter whose story is paywalled found that the openai tos claims to prohibit use for suicide or self-harm and that this indemnifies them from having killed that kid https://bsky.app/profile/gerritd.bsky.social/post/3m6ijlszels27 + https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2025/09/02/chatgpt-parental-controls-suicide-openai/
@hipsterelectron that is so skeevy wth
and by that logic you could commit murder by getting someone to click ok to access your website
"they're calling him the contract killer"
i think this is like the final boss of clickthrough contracts and corporate deregulation
the terms of service are a contract and contracts can do a lot but there are provisions that are not enforceable (the law limiting its ability for misuse). i still don't really know how this will turn out because corps can do an incredible amount of harm and balancing tests have been eroded in many ways and now often require some form of intent and knowledge of the harm, which of course LLMs were very specifically created to circumvent
there are other facts of the case but i'm choosing to fixate on this one as one of the most thoroughly evil things i've seen from corporate lawyers in my life. i have no doubt it will be surpassed
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i think the radium girls lawsuits also demonstrated some truly deeply evil rationalizations. like this one, it leveraged a purported unknowability of known-harmful substances, from corporations who did not do science, but leveraged the veneer of scientific discovery for marketing purposes
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radium_Girls
After being told that the paint was harmless, the women in each facility ingested deadly amounts of radium after being instructed to "point" their brushes on their lips in order to give them a fine tip.[1] The women were instructed to point their brushes in this way because using rags or a water rinse caused them to use more time and material, as the paint was made from powdered radium, zinc sulfide (a phosphor), gum arabic, and water.
using more time and material. directed to ingest radium
The Radium Girls had lasting effects on the labor laws in the United States and Europe following numerous lawsuits following deaths and illness from ingestion of radium.
we can only hope
i forgot how much this makes me want to cry i'll cw that
the mad scientist exists as an anti-intellectual appeal, and as a hidden dilemma: what if discovery and innovation occurs through harm? the nazi medical experiments and unit 531 were not science. they were an excuse to use the tools scientists developed to enable unimaginable degrees of sadistic thrill seeking from the organizations we now agree are unilaterally evil. another example? the tuskegee syphilis experiments.
@hipsterelectron ffs that's even more direct than the disney thing a while back