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Comment by drywater2

3 days ago

>Our legal system isn’t ready for machines that act on their own.

Technically, the code is owned and deployed by AI companies which make the AI companies 100% responsible. I'm not sure how is code written by LLMs different than any other kind of code. If somebody hacked just like OpenAI's agents did, he would've ended up in prison right away.

Maybe I'm too cynical but the same AI companies that have pretty much endless lobbying dollars, massive government contracts, have the ear of just about every powerful politician and bureaucrat in DC, are influencing the laws and regulations. Add judges that don't understand the technology to that and it doesn't seem likely that we will ever see any actual consequences, unless something catastrophic happens and those same politicians and bureaucrats need a scapegoat. If they ever do have "consequences" it will be some trivial fine.

Yeah. Committing crimes via some sort of elaborate rube goldberg machine is not something that has been just invented in the 2020s with unclear legal precedent.

It's if nothing else a staple in the Arthur Conan Doyle tradition of mystery novels, and even then half the plots involved hiding who was culpable by using the machinations to create false alibis, with delayed murders and the illusion of a locked room as not even in the 19th century did anyone believe that the indirection itself would hold up as a defense.

If someone buries an anti-personnel mine in a public park and then argues that it acted on its own accord when it maimed a pedestrian, I doubt you'll find a court on the planet that would spend even a 4 seconds considering the culpability of the land mine itself.

Templated code generation is ancient. It's just that the latest "template engine s" are very comprehensive.

No. The person that set the agent in motion is liable. If your agent, infused with magic inference juice you only partially understand, but picked up and used any way, does something harmful, you are to blame.

You may have a case that the magic inference juice was somehow tainted, but that seems like a stretch. If you run your car into someone else, and it isn't a total failure of the systems of the car, you did that, not the car, and not the car company.