- cross-posted to:
- news@lemmy.world
- cross-posted to:
- news@lemmy.world
cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/52426446
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.
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I honestly don’t understand how this isn’t already the case.
How have we gotten to the point where laws are entirely unenforceable.
Now do gun manufacturers?
About frigging time someone said this. Now enforce it!
Just for comprehension… Who exactly should be liable?
Companies which build “ai” models (LLMs)?
Companies which use them?
Software developers?
Evil black hats with bad intentions?
Make the CEO 100% criminally liable for company agents & all of this bullshit will stop immediately.
That’s a good list to start with, we can add to it as needed.
Remember when you’re not a billionaire, there are things called “conspiracy charges”, all these people would be roped in already if this were any other kind of crime.
All of the above? ✅
- Yes, they built them and knew the possible consequences.
- Yes, they bought tokens for them and now certainly know the potential consequences.
- Not if they as employees were ordered by their bosses (see 1. and 2.) to use it or face firing (unless whistleblower protections become an actual thing again, which they aren’t these days – then employees woudl be expected to blow the whistle).
- Yes, if we can find out who they were.
Same as with any tool. If your boss orders you to use some power tool that you arent qualified to use and this causes an injury or death then your boss should be held responsible, if you decided to do it on your own, then you should be held responsible, if it turns out the tool had a critical manufacturing defect which caused this incident, then sometimes the manufacturer needs to be held responsible. Not really a new concept.
Easy.
Replace “manager” with “prompter” and “employee” with “LLM”.
The manager told the employee to do something.
Afterwards, something bad happened.
Did the employee do what the manager told it to do. And the bad situation is a consequence of following those instructions? Yes -> manager’s fault. No -> employee’s fault.
Did the employee do something illegal (or against some other rule)? Yes -> employees fault
The thing requested was illegal to request (or against some other rule)? Yes -> Manager’s fault
Note that more than one thing can be true at the same time. So even if the employee does whatever the manager told it to do. If that thing was illegal to do, both of them are at fault.
If it’s the “manager”'s fault -> the prompter is liable
If it’s the “employee”'s fault -> the LLM company is liable.
Easy as that. It works like any other situation.
If any machine has been properly maintained and malfunctions, the maker of that machine is liable. If the operator was using a chainsaw to cut through concrete and the chainsaw malfunctions the operator (and whoever (if anyone) ordered the operator to do that) is liable.
The operator should ultimately be responsible for the output and actions taken by the system.
Yes
FTC chairman’s comments sound reasonable on the surface, but just vague enough to be meaningless.
It sounds to me like the “guns don’t kill people, people kill people” argument, but a first draft attempt to put AI issues away from the tool. Then, his definition of ‘developer’ is unclear.
With guns the argument is more straightforward, the tool is made to send projectiles in one direction when a user pulls the trigger.
With AI, does the end user know what the tool is capable of doing to achieve their goal when they direct it to do something?
No, they don’t know precisely what the tool will do, it’s unpredictable, but they do know it’s capable of dangerous shenanigans, they do know that they don’t have oversight or control of all it’s actions. They know it’s risky to use so they should take at least some responsibility.
All of them. there’s enough liability to go around, if people want to fuck around with this garbage they can be responsible when it goes off the rails.
put enough people in prison for this and the message will be received to the rest.
It’s important to hold people accountable, but it’s also important to consider regulation that might be needed specifically for AI. I’m concerned this might be similar to the “guns don’t kill people” framing that’s used to resist gun control.
Plus, this is more attention on those hacking test exercises that led to AIs doing hacking. That’s a distraction from the real causes of concern around AI: environmental impact, job loss, fraud
Guns don’t kill people is a ridiculous argument that no one believes, but people who like guns fall back on as a last refuge, and it is good enough to dig your heals in, so they can keep their toys. Also the 2nd amendment is the real reason gun control is hard, not arguments.
The difference is there are a lot more gun owners than AI supporters, so unbelievable arguments don’t really work when you don’t have a population primed to ignore the obvious fallacies.
I made a machine that fires a gun based on a random number generator. Obviously it’s the tool’s fault if it shoots somebody
Rolls a 1-10 int every nanosecond when I pull the trigger, if it lands on an even number or an odd number that isn’t 7, the gun will fire.
Clearly the algorithm is at fault, not me.
suggesting the developers who instruct agents would be the ones liable for harm.
But, of course, not the top of the chain. They’re too powerful to be held liable.
Of course blame the developers. Don’t blame the managers who push for whatever functionality. Don’t blame the execs who push the managers. Don’t blame the bribed politicians who don’t create or enforce regulations. Don’t blame the sales people who sell it. Don’t blame the users who use it.
Right, and this is the guy chosen by Trump who is obsessed with AI and “American Superiority of AI”. The point isn’t to make liability happen, it’s to make sure it’s not a concern of the frontier companies, the leadership of the companies that use the models, etc. They need cannon fodder to appease the masses, headlines that say “pioneering AI regulation by Trump Administration,” just look at the top comment in this thread being applauded.
Funny enough it may have the exact opposite of Trump wants by drastically stagnating the AI industry, but specifically in the US, which will fall behind and then just outsource AI agent building to other nations where these laws don’t apply. “Oops all our agents are built by the cheapest foreign contractor we could find.” Developers leave and don’t take jobs building agents, as they are now responsible for if the model doesn’t follow agent instructions, is prompt poisoned, etc. Companies now have aging, broken, or no agents, and no developers to work on them. The ecosystem of token usage is significantly lower because the language models are there, but there are no downstream consumers of them because to work in that field entails personal liability on systems completely out of your control.
It’s like saying a doctor should be personably liable for if the robotic surgeon device hurts someone. Easy way to get no doctors (who will work for companies in other countries, either in person or remotely, or into other positions) and nobody buying robot surgery devices
This sounds like shirking the responsibility. It’s not on openai for building a bot that would hack something, it’s on the developer who asked it a problem that it decided to hack to solve it? If they didn’t specifically tell it to hack someone, how is it the person’s fault?
For example, if I asked AI to make me money on the stock market and it hacked the stock market rather than look for good stocks, why is that my fault?
Because you let it commit a crime? I’m not sure why you think you should not be held liable? You do something, you’re responsible for it, that’s extremely simple, and not exactly something we didn’t have before openai
I let it commit a crime? Do you think I can think as fast as a computer? It can write code far faster than I can read it. And it’s also a bold assumption that I would be able to see what the computer is doing in the first place considering OpenAI themselves did not during the hack on hugging face.
This really only makes sense to blame developers of deterministic software. LLMs are very much not that.
The decision to use a non-deterministic system is a decision you can attribute risk and risk assessment to.
The non-deterministic nature and risk is something we should consider and take into account just like any other attribute and property of algos, tools, systems, libraries, etc.
So, a less deterministic software means you are blameless?
Opening for FTC chairman coming soon
