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- Hacker News
- We had the same debate when self driving cars started to be a thing, and we decided that the companies making the self-driving tech are responsible..
So if an AI agent is asked to build a giant base for someone in MineCraft, and decided to build a swarm of additional agents, and one of those agents says "Time to destroy all humans" and autonomously hacks into the pentagon and fires the nukes - the company that developed the model is responsible. That being said - if the nukes deploy successfully, I have two questions:
1. If no one finds out, is anyone responsible?
2. Was any of this actually real?
- A major problem with LLM's is that they don't reason in a way humans are used to thinking of reason. If we tried to give them something like Asimov's laws of robotics, they likely wouldn't be able to apply them reliably. This is a challenge for AI companies working on the bleeding edge, and it's fairly obvious those companies should be held accountable for mistakes, whether caused by carelessness or not. It's no different than an oil spill. They may or may not be subject to charges based on what happened but, regardless, they are responsible for cleanup costs.
What's less obvious is who should be held accountable when a customer of one of these corporations uses their product and it unexpectedly does bad things. e.g. A fellow asks his AI assistant to book him into a high-demand class at the local gym, so the LLM probes the gym's website for vulnerabilities, books him into a date that is farther into the future than the system is supposed to permit, and then drops other people from earlier classes until he's bumped into the one he wanted. If the gym decides to press charges, who should they be applied to?
This sort of case is more difficult to answer. The company that provided the AI certainly bears some responsibility. Perhaps most of it. Possibly even all of it if they represented their AI as reliably law abiding. If a user knowingly uses an AI that is not guaranteed to abide by the law, is that user partially liable for what the AI does too?
IANAL. I'd love to hear perspectives on this question.
by beloch - I’m pretty sure that this is a solved problem. For “classical” machine learning, it worked like this in my neck of the woods:
The model’s operator is directly liable for any undue harm caused in the course of the model’s operation. This includes models acquired from third-party vendors. The operator is responsible for ascertaining the model’s fitness for purpose prior to deployment, and for ongoing monitoring of its operation.
If the model came from a vendor, and the operator conducted due diligence but it turns out that the vendor materially misrepresented the model’s capabilities in a way that contributed to the harm, then the vendor can also be held liable.
If that happens then it’s up to a court to apportion the liability.
IANAL but I see no reason why these principles shouldn’t apply to GenAI.
by bunderbunder - An ordered list of officers of the company who go to jail depending on how many years must be served as determined by sentencing. Assume something like 10 years per person. If it's 300 years of sentencing, then 30 people. If the sentence exceeds the list of people, the company is nationalized. (And everybody goes to jail.)by newobj
- Both the operator of the AI agent and whomever released it. I'm sure the user agreement that companies agree to would shift the blame onto the operator but I feel that both should be held accountable.
This really is just a tool and courts should treat it as such.
by ngetchell - If a person's use of AI would cause a reasonable person to expect harm to result, the person should be accountable. Otherwise, if AI causes harm and it was used in a way that a reasonable person would not expect to result in harm, the AI company should be held accountable.
Just because a person should be accountable doesn't mean that the AI company can't also be if their service should never have allowed something to happen in the first place, but we're probably going to want actual regulations around what sort of guardrails they're expected to have.
by autoexec - I wonder if there's any legal precedent for other "not fully human intelligence" property that escapes containment and causes damage to a third party without any active malice, but nonetheless damage was caused. For example:
A. You own a large amount of cattle on a ranch.
B. Cattle are property. They're not human level of sentience, but people agree that cattle are capable of autonomous actions and going places and doing things based on their own instincts and nature.
C. Your cattle bust out of a fence on your ranch and damage something belonging to your neighbor. Let's say for the sake of an example of something cattle are known to do, they go spend a whole day rubbing up against your neighbor's car and severely scratch it and mess up the paint job on it.
D. You didn't instruct or train the cattle to cause damage, and the cattle have no actively malicious intent of their own, but nonetheless damage was caused.
Further theoretical: Your cattle wander into a major highway and cause a car wreck, the local sheriff's department is called out as part of the chaos and has to shoot some of them to put down the wounded beasts.
by walrus01 - I don't see how this is such an unclear legal question. If I fire a computer program that mistakenly causes another person harm, its my fault. Or it would be the maker of the program's fault. I feel we have established pattern for this already.
Until we can agree whether AI is conscious, which we never will, AI and AI agents are just property working on behalf of humans.
I could see a future where AI companies/services indemnify consumers who use their agents but _not_ indemnify corporations that use their services.
by CatDaaaady