Decision laundering is a great term. There is ultimately a human who gave the program free rein. You can't say "sorry my car hit you, it's not my fault" especially when the person driving works for the car manufacturer too.
This. I agree 100%.
Computers make decisions all the time, and have been doing so for decades. But we still keep the human behind the computer accountable.
That narrative is bullshit. Intelligence is not power. The power comes from hooking these agents up to everything without proper safety controls. The fact that those safety controls don’t exist yet is not humanity’s problem, it’s the frontier labs problem, and we can’t let them wriggle out of it with an Overton window shift or demanding that the government take responsibility via regulation (of course they should but it doesn’t absolve the labs of responsibility for their own actions).
The missing piece right now is that our AI safety and cybersecurity controls are simply not up to snuff with the current risks that AI has introduced. Given the increased risk, we need to level up every aspect of our cybersecurity stance. These are hard problems, but not impossible given proper incentives. The issue is that no one is connecting the dots between the creation of these agents and the tools and access they are given, with the harm they may produce. Often the argument jumps straight to "it's going to get too smart for us to control" while glossing over the fact that all the power AI has was directly given to it by human choices. All this cognitive dissonance and willful blindness is caused by unchecked capitalist incentives. Think of the amount of money every single person in the frontier labs stands to make if the most optimistic predictions pan out. This is moral hazard of the highest order, and the only counter-measure that can work in our current social and political system is liability.
and catering to them (boxes) to not accidentally start disseminating child porn is most commonly understood as a responsibility of the owner, the moment he plugs his device online.
yeah that's BS and the issue is that people actually believe that. the responsible party is whoever is running the ai agent.
Really ? See VW diesel scandal. When there's a will...
When someone hands the reins to an agent or group of agents, the agent(s) have free rein to do things, including things not directly intended by the owner.
If a person has a child, and their child does something bad, there is some mixed responsibility there. It’s a spectrum from age 0 to 18, where 0 is 100% parent responsibility and 18 is 100% child’s (legal adult’s) responsibility
As long as agents are unpredictable and highly capable, this will be a blurry line to draw.
Human user argues to the court with prompt evidence that they never told the agent to hack that company or dump that sensitive data online. The agent “decided” those actions were in service of the prompt but here’s a plethora of perfectly suitable alternative paths it could have taken instead. If I’d paid a human to complete the task, and they broke the law in the process, the onus is on them, not me, as I didn’t instruct them directly or indirectly to perform those specific actions.
It will be a murky legal mess. Though I’m sure it will provide fascinating legal arguments and judicial opinions in the decade to come.
What about a company that’s got an AI workflow and their client initiates some workflow that their AI agents carry out and inadvertently break the law. Is the company responsible because they own the agents? The org upstream that licensed the AI to the company, or the user who may not have even known AI was involved on the back end?
If the legal decisions are that AI are not humans and the human prompter is responsible even if they didn’t instruct or intend said action, well, then any sane person/company wouldn’t touch these tools with a 10 foot pole. Perhaps our salvation lies in that type of legal precedent.
If it cannot be held accountable, it cannot take responsibility. A human is responsible. It's as simple as that.
Which also seems to be in line with the way the frontier labs gathered and used copyrighted data to train their models
And even before AI, limited liability corporations (like LLCs or C corps), also have the intention of protecting the individuals from the repercussions of their actions
In a way this could be generalized as “accountability laundering”. Making someone unaccountable for their actions, by redirecting the responsibility of those actions, to a non-punishable entity (like a C corp or “a computer”)
The act of delegation to chance is the decision.
The question isn’t who or what made the decision, per se. It’s who is responsible for the outcome. The entity making the decision might be the actual cause but not the proximate cause (the cause most closely connected to legal liability) for the harm that occurred.
The company is liable either way. And in that case, there would be plenty of other problems besides the hacking. We'd have look into why they're making Claude work ungodly hours 24/7 without compensation :)
Related: The Unaccountability Machine (good book by Dan Davies, who also wrote Lying for Money about financial fraud).
Don’t confuse lack of accountability with lack of responsibility.
If one needs to be "allowed" to make a decision, does that even qualify as a decision?
For example, I can decide which cereal to purchase at the supermarket. But I cannot decide which cereals are offered to me at the supermarket. The supermarket has allowed/enabled to make a constrained decision.
So does it follow then that the agents in question do have "some" free* will? I'm not sure you realize what conclusion naturally follows from this, and how it contradicts the point made in the article and the top-level comment I replied to.
(*) My earlier question wasn't explicitly about free will but we'll go with it.
While I agree that computers cannot currently be held accountable for decisions (because I do not think they have free will), I think it’s transparently clear that computers make decisions all the time, and have done since they were first implemented.
Many of these incidents relate to hacking, where criminal law commonly requires intent.
Claiming that a machine cannot make a decision does not mean an employee at OpenAI decided to hack an Australian government website.
> Inadequate or broken safeguards do not fall under my definition of reasonable.
I see no such assumption there. In my reading, the implicit assumption is that adequate safeguards are necessary and that anyone who doesn’t build them is irresponsible. And I feel that that is correct.
And yes, it does indeed seem that a UK government agency ran a controlled experiment where they allowed an agent to instigate phishing attacks against members of the public. Attributing this to Anthropic is wrong. I'm not sure how I feel about my government conducting such attacks on non-consenting individuals, but I'm not comfortable about it in the slightest.
The AI labs say "AI can make mistakes". That's why the responsibility of using it is on you. This may change if we get more legislation. But given the argument above, it will probably never shift to the AI itself having any responsibility. Instead the AI labs can be responsible.
It's like having an assistant that can be helpful, but not always. We can bicker about the ratio of helpful to unhelpful interactions, but there will be some unhelpful moments.
And hoo boy, those can range from "eh, whatever" to being like a deranged toddler just got its hands on whatever tools and permissions were granted to the "mostly helpful" assistant.
And we can't get rid of that chance. We can pare it down a bit. But we can't get rid of it because it is fundamental to how the technology works.
It's like a vending machine that 99% of the time it dispenses tasty snacks, but 1% of the time it gives you poison that appears to be normal, unexpired product. It just does this. They did their best to minimize how often it happens, but the poison chance is still there. It can't be removed. It's part of the system.
A "normal" vending machine has failure conditions, sure. They generally can't do worse than cause you to lose your money without giving you a product.
Outlook 2003 never presented a risk of draining my bank account to buy memecoins because a spam email was treated as instructions.