- 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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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?
All of the above? ✅
Make the CEO 100% criminally liable for company agents & all of this bullshit will stop immediately.
- 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.
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.
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.
Yes
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.
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.
I honestly don’t understand how this isn’t already the case.
How have we gotten to the point where laws are entirely unenforceable.
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?
Now do gun manufacturers?
That’s exactly the way it should be. I don’t get to program a computer to steal money, then blame the computer for the stolen money.
HOWEVER, I couldn’t help but notice this part:
“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?’”
and think of gun control.
Guns are tools; they don’t do anything they aren’t told to do. And yet, when someone tells a gun to shoot another person, we do say, “Oh, what can we do about the tool?” and the answer is usually “ban it.” Why?
If this line of thinking is so obvious when it comes to AI, why is it the opposite when it comes to guns?
I don’t get to say, “That crazy gun just broke loose, went off the rails all by itself and shot somebody.” We all understand the gun didn’t do anything, the shooter did. Thus, solutions should focus on the shooter, not the gun.
Violence is the problem, not the tool used to do it. Treat the underlying causes of violence: poverty, homelessness, unemployment, drug addiction, and mental health, if you want to solve the violence problem.
…suggesting the developers who instruct agents would be the ones liable for harm.
this looks like too broad of a law to enforce and will most likely hit the lowest hanging fruit if they ever wanted a scapegoat.
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.
Opening for FTC chairman coming soon
