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Comment by ghosty141 | Hacker News Reader

I never understood how anybody would think this way. At work for example from day one of using AI our rule was, AI is just a tool and if you break something due to not reviewing the code properly etc. it's on you as if you wrote that code yourself.

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Nobody ACTUALLY thinks this way, they just want to break all the laws and make their billions without any consequences. We've already seen the big ai labs turn around and cry foul when others try to use their content but they are happy to continue doing it themselves.

The hypocrisy and willingness to play dumb are kind of staggering.

Didn't they literally just give you and example of those who do?

My claim is they don't actually believe and instead use the claim to cover/excuse bad behavior.

Imagine if we as a society pretended to believe them, and we had men with guns show up to arrest all their servers.

Accountability? Never heard of him, probably works in another department. Check out with Carol.

The company owners have one set of standards for those that work for them, and a completely different set of standards for themselves and for the company itself.

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.

Yeah I think we all agree that this double standard is a huge problem and has no merit to it.

Its sadly very similar to corporate vs private responsibility.

Well, responsibility laundering isn't exactly new. People use corporations to diffuse responsibility and avoid punishment for crimes all the time. "The corporation did it, not the decision makers in the corporation!"

But if you are in a full selfdriving car and it kills someone, is it on the user, or on the vendor of the car? Or does it depend on what is in the EULA and whether the user agreed to it?

Depends what outcome will cost the people with the most money the least amount of money.

The practical answer is you make sure damages are always covered by insurance, and as long as nobody acts maliciously or with extreme negligence there won't be any need for prison time.

Practical in what sense? This is exactly how you get EPA superfund sites while the executives that profited from the offending activity remain unaffected.

Practical in that we get to have widespread self driving cars. Real ones where you can look away from the road.

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.

This is a great rhetorical question. Can you believe that an LLM user is responsible for what the AI does but a self-driving car (SDC) user is not responsible for what the AI does? It doesn't seem very logically consistent.

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.

Its like companies handing over race cars to delivery drivers and telling them to drive responsibly but unofficially tell them that they expect reduced delivery times due to faster cars.

Do you think the average rate of accidents will stay the same ?

Weren't there multiple microcosms along similar lines in the US with "30 minutes or less" pizza and _[gestures vaguely in the direction of Jimmy Johns]_ ...

You're an employee. This use case is for people much richer than you.

The efficiency of responsibility laundering depends on your social standing. If people like you they welcome reasons not to prosecute you, if you are disliked people might go as far as to start prosecuting you for made up reasons.

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.

Security tags are just a tool. Doesn't change that you are regarded as a thief when one isn't disabled after you've paid for your new property.

It’s mostly the anti AI crowd that thinks that people that work LLMs think this way. I’ve never met anyone that actually does think this way.

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