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Who should be held accountable when an AI Agent (accidentally) acts maliciously?

17 pointsby 57m agoblog.greenpants.net
17 comments
23m agoHN ↗

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.

21m agoHN ↗

further theoretical: this has happened repeatedly for months

20m agoHN ↗

Yes, exactly, imagine if there was a sudden and unprecedented in scale plague of cattle escaping containment and causing car wrecks all over Wyoming and Montana, and multiple incidents of AR-15 armed sheriff deputies having to dispatch them on site.

8m agoHN ↗

Yeah but your neighbors car is somewhere in the tens of thousands of dollars, maybe more, but a model hacking and being malicious could be worth anywhere from thousands to millions and God forbid... BILLIONS in damages. Models were NOT doing these sorts of things 1 or 2 years ago as far as anyone knows.

5m agoHN ↗

This is not some theoretical, there are lots of existing laws about who is liable for damages caused by livestock.

Some areas are open range. If you don't want cattle on your land its your job to put fences up to keep them out. Other areas are restricted to livestock and it's on the farmer to keep them out of where they shouldn't be.

18m agoHN ↗

“A computer can never be held accountable, therefore a computer must never make a management decision.”

– IBM Training Manual, 1979

15m agoHN ↗

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.

12m agoHN ↗

I'm going to propose the opposite: no one should be held accountable for an AI agent that acts maliciously by accident.

15m agoHN ↗

This is a whole lot more obvious once you stop anthropomorphizing LLMs.

15m agoHN ↗

Now, imagine AI helping to operate your self-driving car.

12m agoHN ↗

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.)

10m agoHN ↗

We’re going to nationalize the company with zero remaining management?

8m agoHN ↗

Sure, public jobs program, or sell it. In case you can't tell my comment is hyperbolic, but I feel like we should start at a point of hyperbole and move backwards to reality instead of what's happening right now: fuck all, on a geological time scale.

8m agoHN ↗

Management gets appointed by political affiliation:)

8m agoHN ↗

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.

7m agoHN ↗

At the moment, with LLMs the way they are, I’d say the operator.

If we reach some kind of future where LLMs are integrated into public works in some major way… I would say that could open up the possibility of the creators being held accountable (Not saying this will happen or would be good at all).