Join the discussion
Write your take first — we'll ask for email only when you're ready to publish.
- Hacker News
- >Our legal system isn’t ready for machines that act on their own.
What absolute drivel.
Traffic lights? Elevators? ABS brakes? Sprinkler systems? Circuit breakers? HFT?
How about a pacemaker?
We have lots and lots of autonomous systems in the wild with very well-understood definitions for who is at fault when something bad happens.
We are totally in the "railroads" phase of AI industrialization. Waiting for the next Teddy Roosevelt to come along and trust bust before it's too late.
by _doctor_love - The problem isn’t the law. The problem is that wealthy companies can use lobbying, political donations, and influence to avoid or weaken enforcement. In other words, the problem is corruption.
If you or your software hacks a website, the law will hit you hard. But powerful AI companies have the money and influence to avoid the same consequences.
The US administration just needs to enforce existing laws equally. Do that, and AI companies will suddenly have a very strong incentive to take safety seriously.
- I'll quote myself:
> It's not AI that's ignoring the law! It's the OAI that's breaking IT!
> I hope every single journalist who tries to pin responsibility on an LLM gets 100 days of continuous painful diarrhea.
by _davide_ - by pseudolus
- The level of technical understanding of journalists is so deplorably low… There is no rogue agents. That’s not a thing. Nothing about the HuggingFace incident has anything to do with an agent going rogue. It’s standard software that resulted in a hack, which is pretty much the expected output of the system OpenAI engineers implemented.
The company is obviously responsible for what their systems are doing
by dgellow - I think AI is a fantastic tool, including for those who want to do us harm. E.g. hostile governments, extortion gangs, terrorists. But the motive lies in the hostile heart, not in the AI.
That said, I'm very concerned about AI as such a tool. I used to work in RL and it seems crazy to me, the extent that the guardrails are dependent on RL working as planned. I don't personally believe that the tech is ready for what will be (and is) encountered in a dynamic unpredictable real world environment. What I've read from the HuggingFace 'transcripts' only amplifies my concern.
by cleandreams - Answering the headline question, yes, it is above the law. Two reasons.
One, all major governments that have an AI presence in their borders have accepted that there is a high enough probability of a runaway self-improving AI advancement that will result in whoever owns it winning everything forever that they will do nothing to slow the development of the AI within their borders. In fact quite the contrary. Remember, they don't have to believe this is the only possible outcome, only that it is likely enough and catastrophic enough if someone else gets it first. And remember, they don't have to be right, either. It only has to be what they believe.
Secondly, the entire US economy is clearly tied up in AI. By extension, basically the entire world economy is too. The US is not the world economy anymore, but it's still a big enough fraction of it that if it goes down, everyone is going to go down. Every major government, in its own different way, needs the economy to stay up so the populace doesn't get antsy and so they continue to have money to spend. So, again, number must go up and if that means writing a blank check to the AI companies to break the law, so be it.
The good news is, barring the worst-case singularity outcome where the law doesn't matter anyhow, is that this won't go on forever. But I can't predict the exact time or way it'll cease being true.
by jerf - >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.
by drywater2