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.
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.
Right, and this is the guy chosen by Trump who is obsessed with AI and “American Superiority of AI”. The point isn’t to make liability happen, it’s to make sure it’s not a concern of the frontier companies, the leadership of the companies that use the models, etc. They need cannon fodder to appease the masses, headlines that say “pioneering AI regulation by Trump Administration,” just look at the top comment in this thread being applauded.
Funny enough it may have the exact opposite of Trump wants by drastically stagnating the AI industry, but specifically in the US, which will fall behind and then just outsource AI agent building to other nations where these laws don’t apply. “Oops all our agents are built by the cheapest foreign contractor we could find.” Developers leave and don’t take jobs building agents, as they are now responsible for if the model doesn’t follow agent instructions, is prompt poisoned, etc. Companies now have aging, broken, or no agents, and no developers to work on them. The ecosystem of token usage is significantly lower because the language models are there, but there are no downstream consumers of them because to work in that field entails personal liability on systems completely out of your control.
It’s like saying a doctor should be personably liable for if the robotic surgeon device hurts someone. Easy way to get no doctors (who will work for companies in other countries, either in person or remotely, or into other positions) and nobody buying robot surgery devices