Comment by cja

13 hours ago

Can the frontier be paced partly by holding humans responsible for the actions of their software?

My impression is that AI hacking is being treated as a special case where the AI itself is imagined to be responsible and the humans who created it, set it up and then ran it are somehow excused.

I'm not a lawyer but surely the bad actions of AI are covered by existing law.

I suspect that the development of AI would decelerate if those creating and operating it knew they would face appropriate consequences (e.g. prosecution and/or lawsuits) when it misbehaves.

P.S. Strictly, development wouldn't decelerate, but be focused more on safety.

P.P.S. I know that legal action against, e.g., North Koreans using AI would be pointless but/and there must/will surely be a huge demand for security software for protection against the coming storm of AI hacking (deliberate and accidental) which friendly AI companies will presumably work to satisfy, perhaps making the frontier safer.

P.P.P.S. Governments could help by trying to prosecute every crime committed "by" AI, regardless of whether the victim reported it to law enforcement. Did OpenAI break the law via the actions of their model training software? If so, will the people responsible be prosecuted? If not, why not?

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cja

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nullbio  13 hours ago

That's the -only- way it should be paced. But then regulatory capture wouldn't happen, so of course they won't suggest this one.

  • kalkin  12 hours ago

    I don't understand why strict liability is supposed to advantage smaller players, unless the law is like, specifically Anthropic and OpenAI are responsible for what people do with their models but other model providers aren't.

    - If this applies to people who release open weights models, that becomes a terrible idea as long as you're subject to US laws.

    - If it just applies to people who host them, that still probably advantages bigger players who can afford in-house legal and won't be destroyed by losing one lawsuit. Or maybe we create some kind of AI-misuse insurance analogous to malpractice insurance, that smaller players can buy in to? But that takes time even if the finances work out at all. And, uh, I'm not sure malpractice is a model we should aspire to in other industries.

    Plus, presumably an immediate impact of this is that hosting providers all have much stricter safeguards classifiers. And the fact that somebody else is deciding what you're allowed to do with the model is one of the things that seems to make HN angriest at the frontier labs in the first place...

    To be clear, I think this might be a good idea! I think all of the possible downsides I've listed are pretty small potatoes relative to what happens with no regulation of AI at all. But I'm pretty sure that if the big companies were proposing it, people would be calling it "regulatory capture" too.

voidhorse  10 hours ago

Bingo. What we're seeing is all their early bullshitting and waffling about intelligence back when the models couldn't count the r's in strawberry paying off.

They've managed to dupe the dull eyed masses into thinking these products have some kind of agency of their own and can thus bypass the responsibility that should be falling on them to control their software. Amid all the marketing fluff and hype people seem to forget easily that ultimately these things are stateless functions running in a data center. We ought to be demanding these companies take culpability for their actions. Of course, the current political environment doesn't help.