US Federal Trade Commission Chairman Andrew Ferguson said on Friday he would resist describing AI agents as ​autonomous actors that “break loose” with “wills and desires of their own,” suggesting the developers who instruct agents would be the ones liable ‌for harm.

“I’m going to continue as long as I am chairman to resist this anthropomorphizing of these tools,” Ferguson said at the Reuters Momentum AI Austin event. “If someone tells a tool to do something, and the tool does it, I don’t think we would say, ‘Oh, what do we do about the tool?’”

Ferguson’s remarks illustrated potential avenues for the Trump administration to take ​as incidents rise in which agentic AI testing resulted in unauthorized access to corporate or government data.

    • Modern_medicine_isnt@lemmy.world
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      2 days ago

      Not possible. AI doesn’t work like that. You can automate telling it what to do, but someone has to write the prompt. Agents are where it gets interesting. Because the AI tells them what to do for you based on what you told it to do. But the agent is often a customized ai. And it can even be a product that a business sells. So one could argue that to some extent the business that created the agent have responsibility. I think the reality is a mix. If I tell my AI to tell the agent to do something illegal, I am certianly partly responsible. But if the agent was sold with a feature that claims to stop it from doing the illegal thing I told it, now they have some responsibility.

      • CovfefeKills@lemmy.world
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        2 days ago

        It is possible tho so I am not sure what you are on about. You could not answer the question faithfully do not engage with this stuff in the future you are hurting the cause because you’re an idiot.

        • Modern_medicine_isnt@lemmy.world
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          1 day ago

          It is not possible. I work with AI, and not as just a user. Generally it is not possible to prove a negative (plenty of exceptions though). And I already said why in my comment. So Why don’t you go ahead and say why it is possible. Oh you didn’t… cause you don’t know the technicals… so you just claim I am wrong and an idiot.
          I will give you a bit of a taste. AI is a program. It runs on a computer. When you turn on the computer, the AI is not running. You must start it. And when it starts, it either does nothing, waiting for a prompt, or it executes a prompt it was instructed to execute on start up. So… it always starts from a prompt one way or another.
          AI is simply a next word predictor. It needs to have some prompt from which to predict the next word. And even if you want to drift out of the standard llm, which clearly we are discussing, something has to kick it off, that might be baked into the application, but AI requires an input, so while you can automate that first input, it still didn’t come from the AI.

          • CovfefeKills@lemmy.world
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            1 day ago

            If LLM’s actually did what you told them they’d be super intelligent I have no idea how you think it’s appropriate to be so evasive to a perfectly legitimate question. If you want to pin responsibility of a rouge agent on the person who initiated it, then just fucking say that normally you dumb asshole.

            Trying to get me on your emotional roundabout of mediocrity fuck off ya dog