Comment by Avicebron
1 day ago
I mean there aren't many good options are there, AI can't be held accountable and face meaningful consequences for it's actions. Therefore, where consequences are appropriate, who is ultimately responsible for "their actions?"
Imagine that AI is just another tool. Imagine it's a weed whacker. Who is liable if a weed whacker destroys property?
Well, it depends. If I'm using it according to the instructions and the tool does something it's not supposed to, the manufacturer is liable. If I take a weed whacker and start cutting fiber lines with it, I'm liable.
So in accordance with standard liability practice, AI labs ought to be liable for unintended actions their products take, and the user for illegal actions they direct the product to take.
The slight caveat is that a model just produces text. It can't hack anything on its own. I would say that the product in this scenario would be the harness/agent - if you build a system that takes untrusted input (LLM output) and takes potentially dangerous action based on it, well, that sounds dangerous? Possibly negligent?
There's certainly a negligence aspect when it comes to trusting the chaos machine.
I'd like to emphasize that it's not just "don't trust it when it says to rm -fr", but even a fully constrained boolean output can be negligently-trusted if it's hooked up to something impactful.
If an AI agent does some crime on my behalf, regardless of whether I explicitly instructed it to or not, I should probably be held accountable right? Same as if I did crime, knowingly or otherwise?
Like if any of us got caught doing what OpenAI apparently has done, we'd be in federal prison pending trial and hoping for a plea deal with some light at the end of the tunnel.
Both those who developped it & those controlling it - simple as that.
Morris should be repaid for the fines he was levied for his internet worm released on accident then.