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Comment by adamc | Hacker News Reader

Someone who creates very dangerous items needs to take responsibility for them. Or their production needs to be very heavily regulated. That is just a reality. We don't let companies sell grenades on street corners.

The running away from responsibility is one of the things I like least about big tech.

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Sure, ultra-hazardous activities are regulated differently from other activities, including under tort law, but generic AI tools are not ultra-hazardous by nature. No piece of software is, until it is connected in some way to real world effects. Take an object-detection algorithm. There's absolutely nothing inherently dangerous about identifying objects in a video stream. But once you use the algorithm to create an automatic targeting system for a drone with a grenade strapped to it, it does become hazardous. But that's no reason to regulate the algorithm as if it were hazardous itself, at least no more so than it is to regulate the drone. As you point out, we regulate hand grenades. We do not regulate the boxes hand grenades are delivered in, or the web framework used for building a website that can be used to purchase hand grenades.

All technology has good and bad uses and you can’t hold the maker accountable for all of those. At some point you have to hold users and buyers accountable or just stop developing anything.

When a person uses a car to drive into a crowd, do we blame the automobile manufacturer? Do you blame Kali Linux when someone uses it to hack a remote system? What about Apple when an iPhone is used to call in a threat to a school?

After all of the times that I have heard this argument, I now believe that the lesser evil is allowing people to sell grenades on street corners. This logic causes complacency in users of products and removes any responsibility on the part of malicious actors who still find ways to use the "softened" version of these products badly. They will now just blame the people who didn't "soften" them properly.

So no thank you, bring back responsibility to end users of products, and allow suppliers to develop the best capabilities they can.

This is a strawman argument. LLMs, like books, are not inherently dangerous. Grenades are, and lack any legitimate purpose beyond indiscriminate killing.

LLMs are functions of their training data, nothing more. This is evidenced by how we see very different model architectures produce essentially the same result. All of that training data is out there, on the internet, in books; none of that “dangerous” knowledge is banned or regulated, nor should it be.

Given the number of AI deaths (a handful, if we're counting very generously) and gun deaths, or car deaths, or even deaths caused by refusal to vaccinate, I'm fascinated we're choosing autocomplete on steroids as a "very dangerous item".

By all means, let's have responsibility for actual outcomes. That bill is talking about imagined outcomes.

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