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Comment by Beached | Hacker News Reader

There is a single individual in that company who said "Yes, this is a good idea. Do that". That individual should be held accountable for their decision. They should be treated in the exact same way any average individual submitted that same false tip.

If you use AI to perform a crime, you should be held accountable for that crime. Saying "Oh, AI did it, so no consequences" isnt acceptable. And "I didnt know AI would do it" shouldnt be an excuse either.

You authroied untested and unproven hardware to skate around the internet at random unsupervised and take liberties on its own.

My ass would be thrown in jail if I wrote code that skated around the internet chucking RCE's at random sites. WHy is "AI did it" a get out of jail free card?

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> If you use AI to perform a crime, you should be held accountable for that crime.

Correct, but intentions matter. In this case the intention, most likely, was to test a system in the real world environment to catch any anomalies to, in turn, improve the system safety. We don't have enough information to decide whether it was a criminal negligence due to insufficient prior testing of the system in a controlled environment.

If I dont put my car in park, and it rolls down the hill and kills grandma. I dont get off scott free. Yes it wasnt pre-meditated murder. It is still involuntary manslaughter.

The situation is more like: an engineer who designed the parking brake hadn't foresaw a possibility that a squirrel might store peanuts in the mechanism or something like that and gramma's foot got run over (the Anthropic case we are talking about is benign: the tip got into spam). Should we jail the engineer for causing bodily harm?

This situation is negligence: the engineer who designed the system that interacts with random websites didn't account for the fact those interactions could be harmful? What kind of excuse is that.

You seem to be a reasonable person judging by your comment history. But you don't have programming or engineering experience, I guess? Knowing that those interactions can be harmful and acting on this knowledge and following established practices (that are born from the past errors) is not enough to prevent all errors in a novel situation.

I am a software engineer - the wording we use around Open AI, Anthropic, et al. removes all sense of responsibility when they run an unmonitored piece of software against the public internet.

The idea that running what appears to be an LLM assigned to random websites and told to interact with them possibly having negative side effects seems incredibly obvious.

And? How do you know they weren't testing mitigations?

I suppose I don't - but I question what they could have been doing.

Was the direction of the model not to enter data in forms? If it was, then this is incompatible with what we know about the general competency of these models. If it wasn't, then this type of thing ("we submitted fake data to a website") is a clear outcome of "interact with random websites."

No, not really. It’s more like they parked 1000 cars on top of a hill and then just pushed them down to see what they do expecting that the cars will stop on their own before hitting anyone.

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