Comment by edwcross
17 days ago
Yet decisions are still made by abstract entities such as "companies" and not the individuals working for them. So that blame can be diluted and deflected in a very convenient manner for CEOs. Just find someone to fire, but keep doing the same thing.
Instead of "Anthropic submits false tip to police", I'd prefer "Anthropic employee John Smith deploys an agent that submits false tip to police". Of course, John Smith will be able to then say "I did so as ordered by my superior, Ms Sue", and so on, with a very clearly established chain of liability.
A corporation and an AI are not very different in many aspects, except one of them is very favourably treated by law, almost as a living person.
It's always people - I at least have not seen a corporation deciding itself.
There is an agreed legal mechanism for distributing this responsibility - limited liability. Now, we might not like this, but it is what our society came to (it could be undone, but it hasn't been). AI models do not fall into this chain of liability any more than guns do (IMO). So the output should be:
"Anthropic employee John Smith [killed the children with the gun||launched a cyber attack] because he was ordered to by his superior and [has all the blame because such orders are null || we agree that Anthropic can order children to be killed]"