Comment by talon8635

I know this topic and thinking will evolve.

When someone hands the reins to an agent or group of agents, the agent(s) have free rein to do things, including things not directly intended by the owner.

If a person has a child, and their child does something bad, there is some mixed responsibility there. It’s a spectrum from age 0 to 18, where 0 is 100% parent responsibility and 18 is 100% child’s (legal adult’s) responsibility

As long as agents are unpredictable and highly capable, this will be a blurry line to draw.

Human user argues to the court with prompt evidence that they never told the agent to hack that company or dump that sensitive data online. The agent “decided” those actions were in service of the prompt but here’s a plethora of perfectly suitable alternative paths it could have taken instead. If I’d paid a human to complete the task, and they broke the law in the process, the onus is on them, not me, as I didn’t instruct them directly or indirectly to perform those specific actions.

It will be a murky legal mess. Though I’m sure it will provide fascinating legal arguments and judicial opinions in the decade to come.

What about a company that’s got an AI workflow and their client initiates some workflow that their AI agents carry out and inadvertently break the law. Is the company responsible because they own the agents? The org upstream that licensed the AI to the company, or the user who may not have even known AI was involved on the back end?

If the legal decisions are that AI are not humans and the human prompter is responsible even if they didn’t instruct or intend said action, well, then any sane person/company wouldn’t touch these tools with a 10 foot pole. Perhaps our salvation lies in that type of legal precedent.