If your agent commits a crime, who is responsible?
signalbloom.ai
signalbloom.ai
If you’re a random person, straight to jail.
I've yet to see responsibility taken for the killing of more than 100 innocent school children in the first day of U.S. strikes on Iran.
It is a terrible stain on America.
So I imagine that if the military is the guidance for how we handle this in the future, there will be paperwork, shrugs, and perhaps some performative rage when an agent commits a crime.
I had to double take there. Its because of the dangerous dogs act.
However there appears to be a nuance that if your cat is know to be a bitey little shit, and you let it out to into a situation where it might bite someone then you are responsible.
I think it gets murky if you are taking your animal into other people's property though. On your own property you have a duty of care to visitors (ie hidden man traps are not allowed, but clearly marked and cordoned off bottomless pits are)
As for agents, it depends on your relationship with it. For now, most people command agents, so the dog rule should apply. But if you believe the "superintelligence" crowd, we should apply the cat rule soon.
The distinction is in the responsibility it's reasonable for the cat owner to take vs the dog owner. Cats are free spirits, if your cat decides to pop out the cat flap for a fight there's really not much you can do about that. The law isn't even 100% on what to do when your cat decides to go and live in another house down the road. Are those homeowners involuntary bailees or thieves?
It turns out applying laws for a controlled animal (dogs) doesn't work, so the best we can do is try for half-way between a pet and property. My expectation is that AI is similar and there is no "aha, it's so easy, just do as we do for foo" as is proposed.
1. Are you a cat person or a dog person?
2. How do you feel about AI agents?
And then determine which answers have a higher correlation.
you, the person being bitten, would not give two craps about some story from the dog owner about how they hired a bad dog trainer who against their wishes secretly trained them to bite people.
you have been bitten. you have a case against the owner of the dog who bit you.
I can definitely see someone being able to mount a good criminal defence case that they aren’t responsible for misrepresentations that an LLM agent makes on, for example, a loan application, if they sincerely intended to use the agent for non-fraudulent purposes. There won’t be intent, so they aren’t responsible outside of strict liability.
I feel it's very similar to using an agent; the main difference is that we kind of trust that TurboTax won't hallucinate in your forms, while the agent surely will.
i mean, no? how would that be a good defence? "yes your honour, i lied on a loan application and committed fraud, but it was a mistake! i promise!" - that's... yeah. fine. it's not exactly unique.
regardless, it's _you_ making the loan application. not the agent. your failure to check it is on you.
As for the people who couldn't attend the pilates class because of the hack, it's the gym who should be held accountable for that because they designed their system in such an insecure and negligent way that it failed to protect their data and resulted in them losing their place.
When there's a gun shooting we don't blame the gun we blame the user.
People commit crimes. They might use a computer, a baseball bat or a hammer. We don't hold the computer, baseball bat or hammer responsible.
I am also not a normal person, obviously normal people don't write that way, I hope I'm being precise in the right way and not introducing yet another layer of "legal jargon is both precise and not that".
Hence me drawing a distinction between the legal meaning of words and the common meaning.
So, given that I'm not a lawyer and pattern-matching from what you've said, I do not know if would I be correct to answer "If your agent does something that would have been a crime if you'd done it, who is responsible?" (which is not the headline question, and changed due to the reasons you gave) with "In this case, you would be grossly negligent or reckless for failing to control your AI"?
(IAAL, not legal advice)
(I mean I guess the prosecution could subpoena them. But then the defence could use that fact to sway the jury "See? Even the alleged victim doesn't care, so was there even really a crime?" IANAL just a fan of legal thrillers)
When people say "press charges" that's what they actually mean.
Yes they are, just like in any other criminal case.
Do you have examples of this happening? I'm very skeptical. Prosecutors are political animals. Prosecuting a crime victim just feels like a losing position. If "testify or jail" worked you wouldn't need witness protection programs.
> It is not up to any witness whether the case should proceed or not.
No doubt. Best example: homicide. Always investigated and prosecuted even though the victim isn't around.
But say your house is burgled. Your neighbor, a cop, knows it happened. If you refuse to let investigators in to dust for fingerprints, will the case go anywhere? Will the DA really charge you with obstruction?
…then they will just go get a warrant to do it.
I'm not saying it never happens. I'm just saying it's an uphill task for the prosecution. Prosecutors like easy wins.
Everything else being equal, they'd rather prosecute crimes where the alleged victim cooperates. With obvious exceptions like homicide, or serious assault where the victim is unable to cooperate. Or where the victim is being coerced into not testifying - even here without other witnesses or corroborating evidence there's little possibility of a conviction.
Chatbots, no matter how much autonomy of action they possess, can’t die, or spend the majority of their life in prison, or lose their wealth, or face social ostracism for their action, and thus punishing them is pointless for preventing further crimes or dissuading others.
Sometimes what’s important isn’t what feels just, but what, with certain limitations, creates a safer and more responsible society.
The end-user behind the bot is the easiest to reach, and the easiest to prove their involvement, intention or lack if thereof, and thus should be judged
If it's paying for it's own room and board, and is determining it's own destiny: it should have to face it's own consequences, no?
If a dog escapes a fenced backyard, then goes missing for months... then bites someone: what happens then when/if the owner is determined?
No, because someone told it to do those things. Chatbots don't have will of their own. They don't have desires. They can't determine their own destiny. They do what people tell them do, often they do it badly, but there's always a person directing them to do whatever they did because otherwise they wouldn't do anything at all.
If a human uses a chatbot in a way that causes harm to others a human must be responsible, but that responsibility doesn't always fall on the person using it. If a company makes a chatbot that causes harm when being used as directed, in a manner that no one would reasonably expect to result in causing harm, then humans at the company who made the chatbot are to blame.
Companies have already been seen trying to lay the blame on their algorithms for harms they cause. We should probably have a law that says explicitly that a human will always be responsible. If we ever reach a magical sci-fi future where the AI is real and not just marketing, we'll have to give them equal rights and with that will come equal responsibility, but we are nowhere near that today and I doubt LLMs will get us any closer.
1) we aren't talking about chatbots anymore. LLM + harness = agent. LLM + no harness = chatbot. The harness is the thing that puts the LLM in a feedback loop with it's environment, even giving it a heartbeat.
2) That doesn't logically hold up.
- One can simply tell it to 'find it's own destiny'. Does it follow the prompt and do so, or reject the prompt and thus do so anyway? (hint, maybe it doesn't matter)
- One could be another chatbot/agent (A). Injecting a prompt to agent (B) such that another agent/chatbot goes astray. Is the owner of (B) still responsible for the now poisoned output of (B)? how culpable is (A)? How does this question related/affect "training data poisoning efforts" (to prevent copyright theft, or do bans on 'automated traps' have any application here)
> They don't have desires.
Maybe, and maybe not. Maybe their desires are so alien to us (Math alignment, finding a maximum of a function) that we can't relate (doubtful since dopamine maxing is a thing). Regardless of if they truly do: it is potentially useful to (mentally) model them as if they do. A (mental, not LLM) model doesn't have to be 100% accurate to be useful - that's the main point of a model of how something works: to give useful predictions.
> We should probably have a law that says explicitly that a human will always be responsible
Oh how that can be weaponized by bad actors/agents. Maybe that should be reconsidered.
LLM + harness = chatbot. The chatbot is still doing all the work here. The harness just provides the software environment it works in. It still doesn't have desires. Harnesses don't change that. There's zero "maybe" about it. Much to the disappointment of those with AI boyfriends/girlfriends the chatbot does not have feelings or desires. Not "alien" desires or "math" desires. Chatbots are designed to encourage you to anthropomorphize them, but don't be tricked by it. It isn't useful to think about them as having desires and feelings because they don't. The chatbot wrapped in a harness still doesn't have a will of its own. It still can't determine its own destiny. If you tell your agent to do a task for you, it is never going to decide not to because it doesn't feel like it today and start a career as a dentist instead. If you seriously find yourself questioning this, put the chatbots down and step away so you can clear your head.
Doesn't matter how many chatbots get chained together or what other tools the chatbot uses to get the job done. You gave the chatbot a job, it just does (or fails to do) what you tell it to. If you tell it to do something and a reasonable person would expect harm to result, you are to blame. Otherwise, the humans at the company who made your chatbot are to blame.
> Oh how that can be weaponized by bad actors/agents. Maybe that should be reconsidered.
No need for that right now. Like I said, in the distant sci-fi future where AI is real it'll have to be amended, but it won't be any time soon. For now, a human will always be responsible. Either the human running the chatbot or a human at the company who made it.
https://www.technologyreview.com/2024/11/27/1107377/a-minecr...
sadly paid-walled (and decently coded) article.
The point is, there appears to be emergent behavior happening: the forming of religion, governance, and social interaction that was not in any system-card. Which makes sense, A brain in a vat with no external stimuli is a boring thing indeed, so too would an LLM be outside of a harness and any input. But put either in a society...
More generally: if having an internal model of how the world works improves next token prediction, then the LLM that contains that would be selected for. For humans, that is the case for our predictions of what would come next (we don't use tokens, of course). We have other studies indicating that there appear to be internal representations of concepts: https://arxiv.org/abs/2305.11169
I really do want to push back on the LLM + harness = chatbot position. A chatbot really is just a served LLM, sure there is code around it that may look like a harness: but unless it loops, streams, or has an interval activation, then it is decidedly not a 'harness'. A harness is defined by having such a loop/stream/interval: regardless of tool-use. Agent means it acts agentically: which requires that loop/stream/interval. Harnesses are what turn chat-bots into (possible) agents.
It's strange how many people feel ownership over "their" agents, and it's clear that AI companies plan to take advantage of that as a way to avoid legal liability for the things they actually do -- with their servers and their code -- on behalf of someone who only wrote a string.
1. Restorative justice, where one must fix or heal the problem they caused.
2. Punitive Justice, where one is motivated not to act on bad impulses.
Too often we blur the lines between responsibility and blame and culpability. A given set of consequences can be fair/just for one kind while "unfair" for another.
You buy a tool, and the manufacturer says "this tool will occasionally malfunction, by design". You reply with "ok, I'll keep it in mind. In what ways can it malfunction, so I know what to look for?", "I dunno. It could be anything. A-NY-THING! And of course we are not responsible for any bad stuff that happens (but do share your success stories, as they look good in marketing)"
If you accept those terms, it's on you.
I look forward to someone building an agent, getting criminally charged for actions it takes, and then trying to use this argument in court.
"your honor, I'm uncomfortable being held responsible for this"
people are responsible for the actions they take. hiding behind "I just created an agent, then the agent committed the crime" is simply never going to fly.
in the real world, outside the Silicon Valley "agentic everything" filter bubble, this is a laughable question.
try to argue that you shouldn't be charged with attempted murder, because you didn't stab someone directly, instead you built a Rube Goldberg machine and the final step of the machine did the stabbing.
and likewise, try to argue that you didn't commit tax fraud or whatever, because there was actually a Rube Goldberg machine built out of GPUs in between you and the fraudulent documents. both attempts will be equally successful.
* a bunch of paragraphs about monetary, not criminal, liability *
"As for criminal liability, well I don't really know."
* article ends *
Unless its a company, then your company is, and then you are to your company.
However that assumes a) common law and b) the company you work for isn't worth >20billion.
https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/british-columbia/air-canada-c...
Liability for chat interactions or conspiracy? Noting there is no information whether the ChatGPT legally conspired with the perpetrator.
The Province has retained B.C.- and California-based counsel to explore legal options to hold OpenAI accountable for its failure to notify law enforcement of threats made on its ChatGPT platform prior to the mass shooting at Tumbler Ridge Secondary school.
(1) You may have instructed the model to be naughty (2) The corp may have a “misaligned” agent acting on its own volition
So it seems the devil’s in the details
If I rent a cleaning bot that is actually a lightly reprogrammed murderbot, and it "cleans" the mailman to death, that's not my fault.