YHK - yet another hacker news clone

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.

– IBM Training Manual, 1979

This really is just a tool and courts should treat it as such.

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.

Sigh, this meme again

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.

Just because a person should be accountable doesn't mean that the AI company can't also be if their service should never have allowed something to happen in the first place, but we're probably going to want actual regulations around what sort of guardrails they're expected to have.

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.

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.

Must be the data scientists in their rooms calculating the response rate of every token to blame ? Our version of AI is not sentient. Stop making it seem so. But we need to ask where to look for the culprit ?

What's less obvious is who should be held accountable when a customer of one of these corporations uses their product and it unexpectedly does bad things. e.g. A fellow asks his AI assistant to book him into a high-demand class at the local gym, so the LLM probes the gym's website for vulnerabilities, books him into a date that is farther into the future than the system is supposed to permit, and then drops other people from earlier classes until he's bumped into the one he wanted. If the gym decides to press charges, who should they be applied to?

This sort of case is more difficult to answer. The company that provided the AI certainly bears some responsibility. Perhaps most of it. Possibly even all of it if they represented their AI as reliably law abiding. If a user knowingly uses an AI that is not guaranteed to abide by the law, is that user partially liable for what the AI does too?

IANAL. I'd love to hear perspectives on this question.

So if an AI agent is asked to build a giant base for someone in MineCraft, and decided to build a swarm of additional agents, and one of those agents says "Time to destroy all humans" and autonomously hacks into the pentagon and fires the nukes - the company that developed the model is responsible. That being said - if the nukes deploy successfully, I have two questions:

1. If no one finds out, is anyone responsible?

2. Was any of this actually real?

And they are. I don't think there's any controversy about the civil liability exposure frontier labs have if their agents cause damages, and it is remarkably easy to rack up damages by causing computer intrusions even if those intrusions don't cause obvious direct damages; for instance, many organizations are required to engage forensics firms at nosebleed-high costs to assess the impact of breakins in order to retain insurance coverage.

The "controversy", if you want to call it that, is over criminal liability. People feel that frontier labs should be at least as responsible criminally as human hackers are when they're caught (to be clear: an extraordinarily rare outcome).

The problem is: they're not criminally liable, not so long as the frontier labs operate without specific intent to cause breakins. Mens rea thresholds are their own whole area of criminal law, and there are stark differences between "recklessness" and "intent". All of the meaningful criminal CFAA predicates require actual intent: someone, a human being, has to deliberately set out to create the outcome where a specific intrusion happens. They have to want it to happen and act accordingly. In the most severe cases, they also have to do so with intent to defraud.

We could change the law to make it easier to prosecute breakins without provable intent, but I don't think that would make HN people happier.

In both cases, someone ran some software that maybe called other software that ended up doing an action which was possibly illegal.

Downloading journal articles is worthy of punishment but compromising multiple websites is worthy of… heady press coverage?

The model’s operator is directly liable for any undue harm caused in the course of the model’s operation. This includes models acquired from third-party vendors. The operator is responsible for ascertaining the model’s fitness for purpose prior to deployment, and for ongoing monitoring of its operation.

If the model came from a vendor, and the operator conducted due diligence but it turns out that the vendor materially misrepresented the model’s capabilities in a way that contributed to the harm, then the vendor can also be held liable.

If that happens then it’s up to a court to apportion the liability.

IANAL but I see no reason why these principles shouldn’t apply to GenAI.

Unless the money and decision makers are held liable, there will be no impact on the direction of the company.

Seems pretty simple to me.

A business plan is not a human right, you know. If I have a nice good idea to make money, but on random it may veer into illegal sometimes, I'm not entitled to just claim innocence because all other times it works in the legal just fine.

Just because uncontained AIs work in the legal most of the time, doesn't excuse people running these programs from when they veer into illegal.