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Comment by graemep

7 hours ago

Not necessarily

https://www.farrer.co.uk/news-and-insights/shut-that-gate-sh...

> "Not necessarily"

Why did you even link that article when it doesn't help your point?

I supports the idea that the person responsible or an animal is held liable - it just makes clarificaitons on common sense caveates like when a professional is moving the animal. It even doubles down on making it clear that expected behavior of an animal is taken into account even if unlikely, like how ai swarms have a reasonable potential to just go awry and commit cyber crimes.

  • The point is that it is not as simple as "its yours so you are liable for damage", and the article makes it clear. None of the law specific to animals applies to AI, so you need to show negligence. You could bring in legislation to treat AI in a similar way to a dangerous species, but that would be more like keeping a lion than keeping a bull.

    • From the article (that I am sure you read):

      > In Mirvahedy v Henley, the claimant was injured after the car he was driving was hit by the defendant’s horse. The horse had pushed over a wooden fence and an electric wire fence and bolted from its field after being frightened. This test was met here because, when a horse is sufficiently alarmed or panicked – ie in those particular circumstances – it is a known characteristic of a horse to bolt and cover long distances.

      So, it's not just 'lions', but regular animals that people know can behave in a particular way.

      I would say AI companies know the cybersecurity dangers since they literally advertise it as part of their marketing.

      ---

      And as a tangent, it isn't simple if we're talking broadly - e.g. I don't think Anthropic should be liable for agents that are directed by a user to write code that takes part in a crime. Nor should they be held liable if their internal security measures are lax in a way that an employee steals data that gets distilled into another model. But we're not talking about those edge cases.

    • I think it's pretty clearly negligent to set up a harness that will run whatever outputs it receives from your LLM if you cannot reliably stop it from outputting hacking instructions. I've said in the past that I'm sympathetic to the idea of testing your anti-hacking controls, but that doesn't seem to be where this incident came from.