Love it. AI as Responsibility Laundering. Like the gun that kills people rather than the murderer.
The hypocrisy and willingness to play dumb are kind of staggering.
Institutional rules that require people to break them (eg putting pressure on them to work faster than possible while adhering to all rules) are a great means to selectively enforce them to get rid of undesirables.
Do you have an "offending activity" in mind? The existence of car accidents isn't one. If you want the manufacturer to be liable for every mistake the car does, that's fine. But since that will increase the price of self-driving, likely as a subscription, it basically resolves into a type of insurance.
If the self-driving designers perform actual wrongdoing, that's a separate issue that can be handled like any other recallable hazard.
In both cases, the company operating it promises they did lots of things to make it safe. SDC companies talk about testing, redundancy, simulations, and statistics. LLM companies talk about alignment, sandboxes, defense in depth, and restricting access to dangerous capabilities.
The one substantial difference I can see is that LLM chats are (nominally) passive but SDCs are active. In a chat, you're just having a conversation and then you're choosing how to act. When riding in a car, you the user are not in the loop between AI and taking action that affects the world around you. So they might be designed and engineered a bit differently. A SDC can't get you to agree to review the steering and braking decisions before they're put into action. Since you're not being asked to take that responsibility, it's more defensible to infer that the service has done whatever is necessary to make it safe.
Do you think the average rate of accidents will stay the same ?
If you are using AI and it causes some damage to them, then it's your fault and you'll get reprimanded/fired. If they deploy AI and it causes damage to someone else, then that's proof that AI has extraordinary capabilities that no one could predict and that merit way more investment in this tech.
Its sadly very similar to corporate vs private responsibility.
Relevant (NSFW):
> Guns don't kill people, I kill people - with guns
> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xC03hmS1Brk
:-D
1. my qBittorrent client pirated content without me intending it or taking any irresponsible actions that could reasonably be expected to cause it
2. my chatbot illegally infiltrated servers without me intending it or taking any irresponsible actions that could reasonably be expected to cause it
3. my firearm killed a person without me intending it or taking any irresponsible actions that could reasonably be expected to cause it
> taking any irresponsible actions that could reasonably be expected to cause it
That latter part of the sentence is doing a lot of heavy lifting here
The bittorrent client being used intentionally illegally by a human is something you've invented, it's not something in the original post nor in the comment I replied to.
There's a solid argument to be made that using a powerful LLM in an internet-connected environment constitutes "taking irresponsible actions that could reasonably be expected to cause it". The fact that doing otherwise makes powerful LLMs much less useful is beside the point here.
Sure, and you'd probably be culpable if you wrote the software. But if you purchased Quicken99 to do your taxes, and that software downloaded some copyrighted content with bittorrent, you would not be culpable.
> There's a solid argument to be made that using a powerful LLM in an internet-connected environment constitutes "taking irresponsible actions that could reasonably be expected to cause it".
That is a wild claim and could not possibly be true without some major legal precedent (and almost certainly significant legal/regulatory changes). These are among the most widely used and general purpose internet products in the United States.
Not sure what the poster of the mastodon’s tweet was??
That’s not how things work. There is one set of rules for us and another set of rules for the oligarchy and their corporate vehicles. It’s just like the Taliban legal code (see above) where the closer you are to the top the more lenient and ‘understanding’ the system.
Edit: worth a pull quote
Article 9 explicitly divides Afghan society into hierarchical categories based on social status, including religious scholars (ulema), elites such as tribal leaders and merchants (ashraf), the middle class, and the so-called lower class, assigning different forms and levels of punishment accordingly. This structure grants partial or full impunity to privileged groups while subjecting marginalized individuals to harsher penalties.
Individuals in isolation will be demonized for having only their singular interests in mind.