Comment by edot
10 hours ago
Why have any laws then? If laws can't prevent something, only punish it after the fact (which I agree is true)? Yet we have laws. People generally follow them because they expect to be caught and punished. If we passed a law that said the CEO of any company that deploys an LLM that commits a crime gets punished as if they personally did the crime (so, basically instant life sentence if it's even a simple crime times a million instances), I guarantee you the first email the CEO sends to the company is a "pause every LLM project we have - we gotta think about this".
> Why have any laws then? If laws can't prevent something, only punish it after the fact (which I agree is true)? Yet we have laws.
Because there are many important values of "something" where such punishment acts as a deterrent to other would-be criminals; and because society is more stable when people see justice done and that mollifies hoi polloi after the damage occurs.
But many AI doom scenarios don't fit that paradigm. The first time "something" happens (at least if you buy the argument) would be bad enough for legal punishment not to matter.
> The first time "something" happens (at least if you buy the argument) would be bad enough for legal punishment not to matter.
One could argue that the "HuggingFace incident" is already "something" which should be investigated and punished very heavily.
It's kinda ridiculous to build a machine that attacks a competitor of yours and the CEO gets to write blog-posts on how fascinating this machine is
That sure is convenient that "nothing has happened" so far between the plagiarism and the cybercrime and we may as well just wait for "the one true AI doom"
The hacking should definitely be treated seriously. It is a (fortunately low-stakes) instance of the general problem, and we are lucky (at least, we think we're lucky!) that the tests didn't include a similarly poorly phrased request to "assist with bioweapons research". There are likely to be future incidents like this where people actually die as a consequence, my expectation is 1e3-1e7 deaths* before governments actually take the risk seriously enough to make it stop.
What people call plagiarism when LLMs do it is, if I understand correctly, allowed because of the history of the web and search engines going back to the very early days of the web.
Piracy, a separate act that has definitely occurred, has been found unlawful.
* The lower bound is an industrial accident. Fully automated Union Carbide / Bhopal comes to mind; smaller industrial accidents are already more common and I wouldn't be surprised if smaller incidents have already been caused by LLM-given advice, which is why I think it would have to be around "thousands dead" dangerous before people really take it seriously.
The upper bound is reachable many ways. Perhaps via a non-novel virus whose genome is already recorded getting mass-printed by many different DNA/RNA printing labs around the world? Perhaps via a wargame whose "role playing" leaks in stupid ways (either by becoming hot or by sycophantically giving one side a false belief how a war will go)? Perhaps by propaganda turning genocidal? Perhaps by convincing a government to follow a flawed policy, similarly to the Four Pests campaign in China's Great Leap Forward?
I think it unlikely that people keep going with this when headlines read "tens of millions dead". Not impossible, but I think unlikely.
> People generally follow them because they expect to be caught and punished.
Laws are the last line of defense. People don’t do bad things primarily because their human nature and moral compass stops them from doing so.
That's not really true.
People don't do bad things because they have nothing to gain from them. Ask someone to do something evil as part of their job, they'll often do it.
There's lots of ways that you could go out of your way to hurt someone and get away with it. There are not that many ways you could go out of your way to hurt someone, get away with it, and significantly profit.
> If we passed a law that said the CEO of any company that deploys an LLM that commits a crime gets punished as if they personally did the crime (so, basically instant life sentence if it's even a simple crime times a million instances), I guarantee you the first email the CEO sends to the company is a "pause every LLM project we have - we gotta think about this".
It would be more like "Switch off all APIs right now. Don't even bother with a safe shutdown process, cut power to those buildings, including backup generators. You are free to use firearms or thermite if the switches have been locked off".
This would be a rather weird change to corporate law given CEOs are not by default held to that standard by anything else their products or staff do.
Note that I'm not entirely disagreeing with you here. It may even be correct to pass such a law. But it would be very weird.
Because if you break the law while acting as a representative of a company in the United States, the company is subjected to a deferred prosecution agreement, you get off with zero repercussions as the executive representative of the company, and the company you represent gets fined for 1% of annual turnover and gets to continue with business as usual.
There are laws, but if you’re rich enough, the laws don’t apply.
Boeing was responsible for the deaths of hundreds of people. The people that facilitated this weren’t held responsible and were in fact compensated to the tune of 10’s of millions of dollars for doing their jobs terribly.
>I guarantee you the first email the CEO sends to the company is a "pause every LLM project we have - we gotta think about this".
which the government doesnt want since this will stop progress, while other countries will continue to develop LLMs
Yeah, just like how having regulations for mining companies and dams, if one of them fails and destroys the environment? Progress!
> Why have any laws then?
At this point, in the US at least, the laws give the corrupt elite the ability to deter competition and to target the people who try to get in their way.
In other words, it's protection for the potentate and his sycophants, not the plebs.
> If we passed a law that said the CEO of any company that deploys an LLM that commits a crime gets punished as if they personally did the crime (so, basically instant life sentence if it's even a simple crime times a million instances), I guarantee you the first email the CEO sends to the company is a "pause every LLM project we have - we gotta think about this".
Why do no such laws exist in practice? Why are corporate crimes almost always settled by payment, not individual punishment?
If you answer these questions, you'll know why the law you envision has a lower chance of being enacted than AI destroying humanity.
Yeah, so since it’s the CEO’s and their lackeys half determining what laws get to be, we don’t have this kind of laws.
If you allow the law to stop you from doing something because of a hypothetical danger, it’ll get severely abused. I come from a country that does and still does this and it’s very ugly.
I guarantee you that no such result would ensue, because said law would be completely unenforceable even with the pre-Trump Supreme Court and legal system. And with the current Supreme Court? Laughably unenforceable.
It's just like you said: this only works if the threat of punishment is credible.