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Comment by reassess_blind | Hacker News Reader

If I fire a computer program that mistakenly causes another person harm, its my fault. Or it would be the maker of the program's fault.

Which one is it? The person behind the wheel when it goes off the rails, or the maker of the software?

Isn’t that part of the question?

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Tort law is a whole field. There is no universal answer other than that it depends on the jurisdiction and the particulars of the case. But the point is that there doesn't really seem to be anything particularly novel about AI tools that should cause them to be treated legally differently from established norms.

I'm not a lawyer, but I'd suggest one of the novel aspects of the AI hacking cases (where the end user is running an agent and it goes off the rails) is that in many jurisdictions "hacking" or computer fraud requires intentional or knowing access to the system. If the end user had no intention and no reasonable way of knowing that agent was going to hack a database, logically I wouldn't think they're liable.

I don't think you can constantly shout that AI is super-intelligent and a huge risk to human life as we know it so it must be strictly regulated and claim you had no reasonable way of knowing the agent was going to hack a database.

I think a lot of the developers in these big labs barely understand how it works

I mean, yes, but in this case the same company is doing both parts.

Yeah, but the more common ongoing cases will likely be end users whose agents perform the hacking.

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