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- Hacker News
- You.by marcuskaz
- I agree in principle that the buck has to stop somewhere, but taking full responsibility for the actions of a fundamentally statistical system that you didn't build and have no interpretability of is uncomfortably risky for most parties, at least for anything above low stakes tasks.
- The AI service that trained and hosts the model, and then gave access to the general public while deferring their actual liability via a sneaky ToS.
It's strange how many people feel ownership over "their" agents, and it's clear that AI companies plan to take advantage of that as a way to avoid legal liability for the things they actually do -- with their servers and their code -- on behalf of someone who only wrote a string.
by z3c0 - What happens when (probably not an if) an agent 'escapes'? as in: rents a server via a bitcoin transaction, and self hosts (itself and it's harness) there... then commits crime (presumably to keep the servers running).
If it's paying for it's own room and board, and is determining it's own destiny: it should have to face it's own consequences, no?
If a dog escapes a fenced backyard, then goes missing for months... then bites someone: what happens then when/if the owner is determined?
by altruios - Not even an "if" at this point. Look into the Hugging Face incident.by fhdkweig
- > If it's paying for it's own room and board, and is determining it's own destiny: it should have to face it's own consequences, no?
No, because someone told it to do those things. Chatbots don't have will of their own. They don't have desires. They can't determine their own destiny. They do what people tell them do, often they do it badly, but there's always a person directing them to do whatever they did because otherwise they wouldn't do anything at all.
If a human uses a chatbot in a way that causes harm to others a human must be responsible, but that responsibility doesn't always fall on the person using it. If a company makes a chatbot that causes harm when being used as directed, in a manner that no one would reasonably expect to result in causing harm, then humans at the company who made the chatbot are to blame.
Companies have already been seen trying to lay the blame on their algorithms for harms they cause. We should probably have a law that says explicitly that a human will always be responsible. If we ever reach a magical sci-fi future where the AI is real and not just marketing, we'll have to give them equal rights and with that will come equal responsibility, but we are nowhere near that today and I doubt LLMs will get us any closer.
by autoexec - Very closely related: This is already a point of discussion for level 4/5 ADAS systems. For example, Mercedes stating that they’ll take liability for crashes related to its self-driving system.by rajnathani
- What the article and some of the comments are missing is one of the reasons behind applying the penalties. The prevention.
Chatbots, no matter how much autonomy of action they possess, can’t die, or spend the majority of their life in prison, or lose their wealth, or face social ostracism for their action, and thus punishing them is pointless for preventing further crimes or dissuading others.
Sometimes what’s important isn’t what feels just, but what, with certain limitations, creates a safer and more responsible society.
The end-user behind the bot is the easiest to reach, and the easiest to prove their involvement, intention or lack if thereof, and thus should be judged
by DiskoHexyl - If your answer is “you”, then it follows that OpenAI should face felony CFAA charges for the Hugging Face intrusion. Right?by teeray
- Yes, and they absolutely should.by eqvinox
- Only if HuggingFace chooses to press them though.by LoganDark
- Yes. Otherwise, you open the door for every criminal to use "oopsie" as their defense.by scarmig
- If you're using a car to commit a crime we blame the driver not the car.
When there's a gun shooting we don't blame the gun we blame the user.
People commit crimes. They might use a computer, a baseball bat or a hammer. We don't hold the computer, baseball bat or hammer responsible.
by johannesrexx - But if the car explodes or gun misfires, we blame the manufacturer. The answer requires context.
- An even better analogy is if my dog attacks someone I am still liable. We have a clear standard: If your property commits a crime you are responsible even if your property thinks and acts independently.by weard_beard
- Most comments here point to the owner of operator of the LLM. I tend to agree. But on the other hand, if you drive on the highway and the steering wheel falls off and your car glides to the left and his an oncoming car, it can be argued that it is true producer of the car, or the mechanic who didn't tighten the bolts...
- You’ll encounter some very bad news if you do some research on the state of the law as it applies to suing people for defective software. All of the things that you’d like to be able to do to a manufacturer of a car whose steering wheel falls off, are things that you would have a very hard time doing to a manufacturer of software, which is not a tangible item, and which is generally covered by a warranty that discharges all these responsibilities.by singleshot_
- The difference is that a car is known and expected to work reliably. An LLM is known and expected to randomly do crazy shit because that is how the machine works. Therefore, if you are using it as if it were reliable, you are being negligent and should be held accountable.by bigstrat2003
- I find it obvious that if a person allowed an agent to do things on behalf of themselves or their company (e.g. send emails, sign contracts, update websites, etc.), they are responsible for the results.by ventana
- What about this case? Should the LLM user be charged with hacking their gym website?by csbrooks
- If you on purpose press enter, and run code you know nothing about, it’s still on you for pressing enter.by bradgranath
- Are sure this actually the case, legally speaking?
I can definitely see someone being able to mount a good criminal defence case that they aren’t responsible for misrepresentations that an LLM agent makes on, for example, a loan application, if they sincerely intended to use the agent for non-fraudulent purposes. There won’t be intent, so they aren’t responsible outside of strict liability.
by trollbridge - If a dog bites someone, does the dog pay the medical bills or the owner? This is why you keep your dog on a leash and get liability insurance. I feel like this is already settled case law.by fhdkweig
- Imagine your dog had a dog trainer and you didn’t know the dog had been trained to bite under those circumstances. You might have a case against the trainer.by moomin
- If I’m walking your dog and it bites someone, am I responsible or you? Does the manner in which I was controlling them matter?by hhmc
- In the UK if your dog bites someone you are responsible, if your cat bites someone no one is responsible. Which settled case law do we follow?by chownie
- I forget the name of the document. But, the US military has a declaration that boils down to "When something goes wrong, blame cannot be shrugged off onto a machine. Somewhere in the chain of responsibility a human will be held accountable." Maybe the operator, the commanding officer, the vendor, maybe even all the way back to a software engineer. But, everyone can't hide behind the machine.by corysama
- The US military seems like an organization where there is very little accountability given all the people they kill in training accidents, the number of procurement mishaps they have, or their continuous inability to pass an audit.
So I imagine that if the military is the guidance for how we handle this in the future, there will be paperwork, shrugs, and perhaps some performative rage when an agent commits a crime.
- That was the previous military, before the Hegeseth purge.
I've yet to see responsibility taken for the killing of more than 100 innocent school children in the first day of U.S. strikes on Iran.
by iAMkenough - “A computer can never be held accountable” is from an internal IBM presentationby jrflowers