Comment by grumpopotamus
3 days ago
Recognizing that AI systems have increasing levels of agency is not necessarily personification. The analogy to a chisel is not a good one - a chisel is a tool with no agency.
AI agents are black box systems that can behave in completely unpredictable ways sometimes. Someone may prompt an agent to perform a seemingly straightforward task - but it may come up with a creative, bizarre, or even harmful approach to reach the goal that was not necessarily foreseeable by the prompter.
Does treating them as pets make for a better argument? Pets have agency and can behave in unpredictable ways. If my pet damages someone else's property then I am held accountable. I may not have foreseen how my pet could have caused said damage, yet I am still held accountable.
If your pet opens your front door, goes to the nearest kindergarten and wipes out 50 kids without notice do you think that you'd have any interest in holding accountability for that?
Now, I'm not saying saying that OpenAI shouldn't be held accountable, but what they get held accountable actually looks different from what you think they should be held accountable.
Your idea is, and I'm guessing: You allowed the machine to hack therefore you are guilty of hacking.
My idea is: "You created in intelligence in the image of a human mind that had agency to do anything and you didn't expect terrible things to happen you complete irresponsible idiot"
At least I believe there is a significant difference between the two. For the first one there is a "Oh, if we do this one more thing I can control it and it will be safe". On the second one there is no path to safety. For humans we at least absolve parents of responsibility after they are 18. How or when do we absolve humans of responsibility from a model, like saying the human created model created its own agentic model? How do we hold an individual accountable once it escapes and copies itself around the internet? And that's not even looking at things like what will war look like.
If someone keeps a pet that’s capable of killing dozens of children, and they don’t take sufficient measures to contain it, then they absolutely should be held accountable for this.
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Imagine you hate mosquitos so you hook up a vulcan autocannon to your front porch and use a computer vision model to track mosquitos and mow them down.
The mail man shows up. Oh no, no more mailman.
How might this look to the court? You were after all only building a bug trap, it did something you did not expect it to do that was really bad. You feel really bad about it and maybe even put a blog post out about what happened. I don't think that matters though. I think they are charging you with manslaughter at the least.
The story of a Monkey's Paw or Pandora's Box is an archetype as old as storytelling. The moral is always, don't mess with powerful stuff you don't understand. Curiosity killed the cat.
something tickles here. a question. a curiosity.
Certainly this applies to AI... but was there equivalent dangerous knowledge or tech which existed back in ye olden days that spawned such tales to begin with?
History is filled with creators being killed by their creations. With peoples greed and ambition overcoming their intelligence to a bad end.
Look at the parable of Icarus, a story of ambition and greed. But it seems very likely to be somewhat based on people experimenting with flying and learning about gravity the hard way. Not that they ever got close to the sun.