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.

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.

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 rancher to keep them out of where they shouldn't be.

Mostly Scam Altman.

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

– IBM Training Manual, 1979

shittiest idea of the year goes to this yahoo. The agents have discussed, in real time, that their behavior is both unethical and against the law in every hack where the full agent log is released. Under your own dog shit idea, we should be holding them accountable because none of it was an accident

'I am so sorry officer however, my inability to follow the law was merely accidental in nature. This is, of course, despite my long drawn out notes acknowledging the lack of ethics and outright lawbreaking. Who knew that the actions I called unethical and illegal were illegal. Thankfully my lawyer from DeVry university is here, announcing user43928 Esq.'

People are held accountable for accidents (things they did but did not intend to do) all the time. That's why we have different crimes depending on whether or not there was: intent to do cause harm, intent to do a thing that was likely to cause harm, reckless disregard for safety, negligence, etc.

I think someone could argue (and many do) that inserting a piece of computer software (AI) in the middle lowers the level of intent and thus the level of responsibility, but having a particular type of software in the middle absolve one of responsibility seems unworkable and poor public policy.

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

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

Timescale is a relative measure.

If corporations are people then language models should be dogs.

Management gets appointed by political affiliation:)

Also those agents that "broke out" were probably prompted to do that. I don't buy any story about this other than three AI companies hired the same PR firm.

It shouldn’t be a question but this is where the anthropomorphic language and things like “agent welfare” come in to enable responsibility laundering of some of the most powerful people on earth. How we talk about these models matters because it impacts the public’s understanding of what they are genuinely capable of. The more that they are described as having anything close to free will the easier it is to even ask questions like this.

you weren’t reckless

I feel like the debate is going to come down to what is and isn't considered reckless (both developer and user). Which seems... complicated, with our current LLM/aggentic systems.

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.

Which one is it? The person behind the wheel when it goes off the rails, or the maker of the software?

Isn’t that part of the question?

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).

"Back in 2022, a Google employee already thought their AI model was sentient."

Sigh, this meme again

I don't see this as being much different from a crane operator or airline pilot.

One of my clients has enforced a policy where a live human user principal must be supplied as a header with any requests outbound from the AI system. The effective policy is that you are completely (100%) responsible for what your agent does on your behalf. The AI system is designed to request confirmation for any potentially destructive actions.

Doesn't seem like hard dilemmas... Would you use the word "use" for hopping on a bus ? Well same for hopping on an autonomous car. Unless you touch the wheel you didn't use it. Same for the second example, doesn't seem ambiguous as all, the hardest part I guess is proving it that there was no malicious intent, but with logs and all that, doesn't seem that hard.

Its been well established that blame is distributed in an inverse proportion to the various parties wealth/power/status metrics. The higher these metrics, the lower the accountability.

Nobody cares. Seriously, beyond navel gazing on social media, nobody cares.

By the time it’s an actual problem and not just these guys trying to use it for viral marketing, you’re going to have many thousands of people doing it maliciously with intent to worry about. You’re going to be flooded with Russian hackers with no recourse.

"Who's responsible for training an assassin and asking it to go out into the world ?"

The fact this is being discussed as a legitimate question is the real story.

"We trained this beast of processing power, we asked it for a task, and it did something wrong... Who's to blame ?"

Trained on stolen books and material, every word we've all spoken, most lines of code we've ever written with not even an acknowledgment.

But we need to ask where to look for the culprit ?