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.
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? ✅
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.
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.
Yes
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.
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.