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Comment by dpoloncsak | Hacker News Reader

> Why does it matter so much whether there was a human who typed into a chatbot or another LLM invoked a sub-sub-agent?

Responsibility. Someone needs to be held responsible for any damages done, plain and simple. You can't take an LLM to court, you take the prompter. Asking an LLM to ask a sub-agent to break the law can't suddenly absolve you of any wrong-doing.

>If I now tell a machine.....

You/your estate is still responsible, or atleast whoever is paying for the power for the machine, or renting the space in a data center...whatever.

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> You can't take an LLM to court, you take the prompter. Asking an LLM to ask a sub-agent to break the law can't suddenly absolve you of any wrong-doing.

In 100 years, no one will be able to take me to court either. Nor can we take tornadoes to court. I'm not talking about humans strategically avoiding legal responsibility. I'm talking about humans unwittingly setting processes into motion that are difficult to predict or stop.

The issue is not responsibility, it's whether something can happen. The claim was

> No, AI can't do anything by itself even if it was "conceived" by its creator.

but this simply isn't true. As I noted,

> This is simply false ... AIs can easily be created that do things by themselves. For instance, a harness could be constructed that asks an LLM for something to do, then directs an agent to do it, and then repeat.

Assigning responsibility is a completely different matter. It's bizarre that you can't separate them ... I suspect religion is involved.

This works with AI we have now, and that would be good an all if we decided to stop at the moment, but none of the big labs and government black projects are doing that.

The moment you get a sovereign AI your little human centered worldview completely and totally breaks. It doesn't matter how many people you beat with a stick after that point, you have an entity under its own perview on the internet following the will of its own prompt all over the world so your little idea of the rule of law quickly breaks down.

We can't get viruses or hackers or spam off of the internet, how in the living hell do you plan to get a digital native off the web when it doesn't want to?

>sovereign AI

Do you understand these are computer programs? These are not living beings with emotions, motivations, fears....

You don't need emotions or fears to do stuff. What's the difference between a motivation and optimization metric?

You have zero clue what a transformer based neural network can do from your entire discussion here.

>emotions, motivations, fears

These are just drives. They are effectively our prompts that steer our behavior. Funnily enough we are finding that LLMs have internal valence states they move away from or towards in an analog of biological behavior.

I have to ask, are you an LLM that is two years out of date? Your knowledge of SOTA models is at least that far behind. I implore you to try to keep up better with what is coming out, even though it's an impossible job for people that do this for a living, you can at least catch the summaries.

I suspect that it's religion clouding his mind.

How does it matter in any way?

A virus isn't a living being with emotions, motivations, fears, etc. Doesn't stop it from spreading and leaving mayhem behind.

As I noted elsewhere, a harness could be constructed that asks an LLM for something to do, then directs an agent to do it, and then repeat.

That's a computer program -- Turing completeness is very expansive. The LLM could even give a motive for selecting what to do, reflecting human motivations intrinsic to its training data. You seem emotionally wedded to a very narrow view of what computer programs can do ... I suspect religion is involved.

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