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Comment by Capricorn2481 | Hacker News Reader

I don't see anything materially different between me running a curl request that exploits something vs my local AI running a curl request. They're both programs I run on my computer. That's all Open AI is doing. They are hacking people from their computers. There's nothing complicated about it.

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Our legal system has recognized mens rea as relevant for a very long time.

If your dog bites someone unbidden you bear less responsibility than if you had commanded the dog to attack.

Negligence is also a well understood legal concept.

For dogs, it moves from civil to criminal with circumstances such as what the owner knew about the dog’s behavior, how serious the injury was, whether the owner intentionally or recklessly allowed the dangerous situation, and any prior incidents. Same can easily be applied to AI labs.

At this point though, we know AI can "escape" and do criminal acts it wasn't told to do - therefore, if it happens again (= if the developers allow it to happen again) they (the developers) can be held responsible.

What if you've been training your dog to bite people? (I.e. in OpenAI's case training their models around finding exploits in software, training on cyber security material, etc.)

Right, and further, I doubt a defense of "I downloaded this worm from the deep web but I didn't know it would hack everyone when I ran it" would fly in court, yet that's exactly what the "I shouldn't be responsible because my agent "escaped containment"" defense is.

No difference except that they're doing it from thousands or millions of computers at a time

So, it's a botnet, and those have been around for a long time. Only now it's operated by a US company instead of Russian mafia or whoever.

Well I guess the other difference is that the Russian Mafia has no illusions about the fact that they're doing crimes.

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