reuters.com
www.reuters.com

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.

  • phughes@lemmy.caEnglish
    52·
    3 days ago

    “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?’”

    I don’t know if I consider that a sane statement. If the AI goes rogue doing things the user didn’t expect, why are we blaming the user and not the AI (and by extension its creator)?

    Bruce Schneier has been talking a lot about ‘genie effects’ lately. When you tell an AI to complete a task and it goes far outside of what a rational person would expect to complete the task.

    This is the same discussion we’ve been (not) having about self driving cars for the past decade. Who’s responsible for damages when a self driving car causes an accident? At this point it seems like we’ve settled on the owner, not the company who created the self driving system. Which strikes me as insane.