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- cross-posted to:
- [email protected]
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.
Kids can use hammers. We don’t usually let them build bridges; or at least their bridges aren’t trusted by the public. If a kid uses a hammer to hit someone, yes, they are responsible to some degree.
Of course, we have the age of responsibility: We understand that kids can make stupid decisions and lack the mental capacity we judge adults by. Kids have hit people with hammers. It’s a thing that has happened, and we’ve already decided how we handle it.
Moving away from that analogy: there are cases that exists, non-hypothetically, where kids have been implicated by software they have written that was behaving autonomously. Unauthorized computer access also applies to the scripts and crawlers you write. There have been instances where good old-fashioned non-LLM programs have ‘hacked’ systems, by accident and sometimes indirectly; even sometimes causing meaningful financial harm. We take the circumstances, and the intent of the user, into account when it comes to legal culpability and prosecution.
That’s where i was confused, in a strictly professional setting i agree with you. This tech is being shipped to the old and the young alike. I’m certain there’s going to be a lot of kids over the next 10 years that are going to do some serious “harm” accidentally while vibe coding off you-tube tutorials. I’d say that the trillion dollar companies creating the AI’s are liable for their own creations. Its crazy to skip regulating the tech and land the responsibility on the end user.
Cloud models are supposed to have a bunch of rail guards. Escaping a capability experiment is a little different than the behaviors we see in day to day use.
In that case, it would be more like a service provider fucking up, especially if the prompt wasn’t malicious.
I’m not saying the end user has to always be the responsible one in every scenario, but I am saying that someone is absolutely responsible. It isn’t possible to shift blame to the AI. At least, not as the technology stands right now.
sure it is, we shift the blame to the AI by shifting the liability to the AI companies. I think most companies are liable for their products no? I think one of the greatest mistakes we made as a society was allowing facebook to escape liability on their products, we dont have to keep making that same mistake.