I never understood how anybody would think this way. At work for example from day one of using AI our rule was, AI is just a tool and if you break something due to not reviewing the code properly etc. it's on you as if you wrote that code yourself.
Nobody ACTUALLY thinks this way, they just want to break all the laws and make their billions without any consequences. We've already seen the big ai labs turn around and cry foul when others try to use their content but they are happy to continue doing it themselves.
The hypocrisy and willingness to play dumb are kind of staggering.
The company owners have one set of standards for those that work for them, and a completely different set of standards for themselves and for the company itself.
If you are using AI and it causes some damage to them, then it's your fault and you'll get reprimanded/fired. If they deploy AI and it causes damage to someone else, then that's proof that AI has extraordinary capabilities that no one could predict and that merit way more investment in this tech.
Well, responsibility laundering isn't exactly new. People use corporations to diffuse responsibility and avoid punishment for crimes all the time. "The corporation did it, not the decision makers in the corporation!"
But if you are in a full selfdriving car and it kills someone, is it on the user, or on the vendor of the car? Or does it depend on what is in the EULA and whether the user agreed to it?
This is a great rhetorical question. Can you believe that an LLM user is responsible for what the AI does but a self-driving car (SDC) user is not responsible for what the AI does? It doesn't seem very logically consistent.
In both cases, the company operating it promises they did lots of things to make it safe. SDC companies talk about testing, redundancy, simulations, and statistics. LLM companies talk about alignment, sandboxes, defense in depth, and restricting access to dangerous capabilities.
The one substantial difference I can see is that LLM chats are (nominally) passive but SDCs are active. In a chat, you're just having a conversation and then you're choosing how to act. When riding in a car, you the user are not in the loop between AI and taking action that affects the world around you. So they might be designed and engineered a bit differently. A SDC can't get you to agree to review the steering and braking decisions before they're put into action. Since you're not being asked to take that responsibility, it's more defensible to infer that the service has done whatever is necessary to make it safe.
The practical answer is you make sure damages are always covered by insurance, and as long as nobody acts maliciously or with extreme negligence there won't be any need for prison time.
Practical in what sense? This is exactly how you get EPA superfund sites while the executives that profited from the offending activity remain unaffected.
Practical in that we get to have widespread self driving cars. Real ones where you can look away from the road.
Do you have an "offending activity" in mind? The existence of car accidents isn't one. If you want the manufacturer to be liable for every mistake the car does, that's fine. But since that will increase the price of self-driving, likely as a subscription, it basically resolves into a type of insurance.
If the self-driving designers perform actual wrongdoing, that's a separate issue that can be handled like any other recallable hazard.
Its like companies handing over race cars to delivery drivers and telling them to drive responsibly but unofficially tell them that they expect reduced delivery times due to faster cars.
Do you think the average rate of accidents will stay the same ?
Weren't there multiple microcosms along similar lines in the US with "30 minutes or less" pizza and _[gestures vaguely in the direction of Jimmy Johns]_ ...
The efficiency of responsibility laundering depends on your social standing. If people like you they welcome reasons not to prosecute you, if you are disliked people might go as far as to start prosecuting you for made up reasons.
Institutional rules that require people to break them (eg putting pressure on them to work faster than possible while adhering to all rules) are a great means to selectively enforce them to get rid of undesirables.
For certain specific cases, sure, but there is a general concern about an AI agent doing something illegal or harmful against the intentions of the human operator. And this analogy of a BitTorrent client being used intentionally by a human to download copyrighted content is just not applicable.
I disagree. Fifteen years ago, you absolutely could have written a web crawler that aggregated torrent links, and occasionally picked one and downloaded it. You could even build in an attempt to screen filenames to only download legal content. Your program very well could have downloaded illegal content regardless.
The bittorrent client being used intentionally illegally by a human is something you've invented, it's not something in the original post nor in the comment I replied to.
There's a solid argument to be made that using a powerful LLM in an internet-connected environment constitutes "taking irresponsible actions that could reasonably be expected to cause it". The fact that doing otherwise makes powerful LLMs much less useful is beside the point here.
> Fifteen years ago, you absolutely could have written a web crawler that aggregated torrent links...
Sure, and you'd probably be culpable if you wrote the software. But if you purchased Quicken99 to do your taxes, and that software downloaded some copyrighted content with bittorrent, you would not be culpable.
> There's a solid argument to be made that using a powerful LLM in an internet-connected environment constitutes "taking irresponsible actions that could reasonably be expected to cause it".
That is a wild claim and could not possibly be true without some major legal precedent (and almost certainly significant legal/regulatory changes). These are among the most widely used and general purpose internet products in the United States.
Actually, not sure how to take it, because it can be viewed the opposite way than trying to escape blame for crimes, that it’s a parody of something AI did that everyone is making a big deal about.
Not sure what the poster of the mastodon’s tweet was??
That’s not how things work. There is one set of rules for us and another set of rules for the oligarchy and their corporate vehicles. It’s just like the Taliban legal code (see above) where the closer you are to the top the more lenient and ‘understanding’ the system.
Edit: worth a pull quote
Article 9 explicitly divides Afghan society into hierarchical categories based on social status, including religious scholars (ulema), elites such as tribal leaders and merchants (ashraf), the middle class, and the so-called lower class, assigning different forms and levels of punishment accordingly. This structure grants partial or full impunity to privileged groups while subjecting marginalized individuals to harsher penalties.
