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this post was submitted on 07 Mar 2026
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I mean.
Is the wikipedia responsible for you reading an article about a law and then taking that as legal advice?
[Edit: if you are downvoting this, downvote away, but you owe an argument below as to why. I promise this exact argument will come up in the courts over this issue]
Is the U.S. House of Representatives [or any equivalent publisher of the law] responsible for you reading the text of a law itself and then taking that as legal advice?
Wikipedia doesn't give "legal advice", it has information about these laws, with the sources cited.
That is very different than asking LLM anything and it throws you random bullshit from unknown sources, with no easy way to verify where it is from or if it is at all accurate.
It seems like your argument is that because Wikipedia "gets it right" and has cited sources, it isn't liable? Which I promise, is not how liability works.
What if it was Wikipedia versus "Some random sovcit facebook post" then? Is the Sovcit post liable because its sources are bullshit? Since there sources are random bullshit and or unknown, do they absorb liability? Again, its the same case, that is not how liability works.
People are going to have to acknowledge you can't have it both ways.
Also..
C'mon. Plenty of LLM's can also hallucinate sources which are easily verified. And like with Wikipedia, one could go check them.
Wikipedia isn't giving you advice, it's giving you information. There is a big difference between me taking information and forming an opinion, versus being given an opinion by a system that is responding to a specific situation explained to it.
Also, people get in trouble for giving legal advice, artificial unintelligence('s companies) should as well.
Okay lets try this then:
Show me the difference.
No, they don't, unless they are genuinely misrepresenting their positions. Sovcit influencers are well within their rights to make up all kinds of gobbly-gookey-garbage pseudo-legal advice.
People who get in trouble are those that follow the gobbly-gookey-garbage pseudo-legal advice.
the difference between giving information and giving advice is context. if i know your situation, i am giving advice. if i am just talking about the law in general, i am giving information. the former, i know context. the latter, i don't.
I could see the argument for things that aren't particularly important, but to continue with the legal example, it seems akin to asking a practicing lawyer a question and asking someone that watched Boston Legal when it aired and can quote James Spader.
Unfortunately, with the potential for a hallucinatory response, anything beyond quite simplistic queries shouldn't be relied on with more weight than a crutch of toothpicks.
I don't think you are wrong, but again, thats not the case.
You're making an argument about speech here.
Lets say you make a fan website based entirely on fine tuned LLM which acts and responds as James Spader from Boston legal. Are you liable if a user of that website construes that speech as legal advice?
If you are willing to give up access to speech so easily, I have almost no hope for Americans in the near future.
What laws like this do is create an incredibly high pass filter to in positions of established power. Its literally suicidal in regards to freedom of speech on the internet.
The right answer is that if you are dumb enough to have gotten your legal advice from an AI hallucination of James Spader, you get to absorb those consequences. The wrong answer is to tell people they aren't allowed to build fan websites of James Spader giving questionable legal advice.
I'm your example, say you go to a lawyer and ask legal questions. If the lawyer is not providing legal advise (I. e. taking on the role of being your lawyer and representing you in that matter), they are required by law to express that at the begining so that they will not be held liable because they are a legal professional.
Wikipedia, Google, chatgpt etc are not legal authorities or legal professionals.
There is also no human entity to hold legally responsible if the LLM hallucinates or sites a source that is not factual (satire for instance).
We also know that the vast majority of people who use chatbots do not get the sources they come from.
So. When Wikipedia presents information it is not giving legal advice. That is born out in case law.
The reason it's dangerous to get legal or health information from a chatbot is the same reason you wouldn't want to randomly trust reddit.
No lawyers are going to reddit to get help writing legal briefs. We have seen lawyers using LLM'S for that though.
Presumably such a site would be visually obvious as parody. Having it give jokey answers in as a caricature would be one thing. If you dressed it up as a professional legal advice service for opinions on criminal law from Alan Shore, that could be problematic.
At a certain point of information sharing, we should want a high bar for the ones providing the answers. When asking nuanced questions, we should want for the answer to come from knowledge, not memory. I made an example in this other comment.
I'm not sure I agree with your 'right answer' bit. Personally, I'd prefer dumb people to be protected in a similar way that I want the elderly protected from losing their savings from an email scam.
I promise you, the result of this will be unlimited free speech for corporations and their LLMs, with limited and regulated free speech for you. Save or favorite the comment.
It's the same "protect the children" anti free speech advocacy in a different wrapper, but more appealing to this audience because "llm bad".
They're using your emotional response to not liking LLMs as a tool to trick you into giving away your rights.