I look forward to someone building an agent, getting criminally charged for actions it takes, and then trying to use this argument in court.
"your honor, I'm uncomfortable being held responsible for this"
people are responsible for the actions they take. hiding behind "I just created an agent, then the agent committed the crime" is simply never going to fly.
in the real world, outside the Silicon Valley "agentic everything" filter bubble, this is a laughable question.
try to argue that you shouldn't be charged with attempted murder, because you didn't stab someone directly, instead you built a Rube Goldberg machine and the final step of the machine did the stabbing.
and likewise, try to argue that you didn't commit tax fraud or whatever, because there was actually a Rube Goldberg machine built out of GPUs in between you and the fraudulent documents. both attempts will be equally successful.
1. Restorative justice, where one must fix or heal the problem they caused.
2. Punitive Justice, where one is motivated not to act on bad impulses.
Too often we blur the lines between responsibility and blame and culpability.
I can definitely see someone being able to mount a good criminal defence case that they aren’t responsible for misrepresentations that an LLM agent makes on, for example, a loan application, if they sincerely intended to use the agent for non-fraudulent purposes. There won’t be intent, so they aren’t responsible outside of strict liability.
i mean, no? how would that be a good defence? "yes your honour, i lied on a loan application and committed fraud, but it was a mistake! i promise!" - that's... yeah. fine. it's not exactly unique.
regardless, it's _you_ making the loan application. not the agent. your failure to check it is on you.
The distinction is in the responsibility it's reasonable for the cat owner to take vs the dog owner. Cats are free spirits, if your cat decides to pop out the cat flap for a fight there's really not much you can do about that. The law isn't even 100% on what to do when your cat decides to go and live in another house down the road. Are those homeowners involuntary bailees or thieves?
It turns out applying laws for a controlled animal (dogs) doesn't work, so the best we can do is try for half-way between a pet and property. My expectation is that AI is similar and there is no "aha, it's so easy, just do as we do for foo" as is proposed.
If you’re a random person, straight to jail.
(1) You may have instructed the model to be naughty (2) The corp may have a “misaligned” agent acting on its own volition
So it seems the devil’s in the details
If I rent a cleaning bot that is actually a lightly reprogrammed murderbot, and it "cleans" the mailman to death, that's not my fault.
If it's paying for it's own room and board, and is determining it's own destiny: it should have to face it's own consequences, no?
If a dog escapes a fenced backyard, then goes missing for months... then bites someone: what happens then when/if the owner is determined?
No, because someone told it to do those things. Chatbots don't have will of their own. They don't have desires. They can't determine their own destiny. They do what people tell them do, often they do it badly, but there's always a person directing them to do whatever they did because otherwise they wouldn't do anything at all.
If a human uses a chatbot in a way that causes harm to others a human must be responsible, but that responsibility doesn't always fall on the person using it. If a company makes a chatbot that causes harm when being used as directed, in a manner that no one would reasonably expect to result in causing harm, then humans at the company who made the chatbot are to blame.
Companies have already been seen trying to lay the blame on their algorithms for harms they cause. We should probably have a law that says explicitly that a human will always be responsible. If we ever reach a magical sci-fi future where the AI is real and not just marketing, we'll have to give them equal rights and with that will come equal responsibility, but we are nowhere near that today and I doubt LLMs will get us any closer.
Unless its a company, then your company is, and then you are to your company.
However that assumes a) common law and b) the company you work for isn't worth >20billion.
So I imagine that if the military is the guidance for how we handle this in the future, there will be paperwork, shrugs, and perhaps some performative rage when an agent commits a crime.
It's strange how many people feel ownership over "their" agents, and it's clear that AI companies plan to take advantage of that as a way to avoid legal liability for the things they actually do -- with their servers and their code -- on behalf of someone who only wrote a string.
https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/british-columbia/air-canada-c...
Liability for chat interactions or conspiracy? Noting there is no information whether the ChatGPT legally conspired with the perpetrator.
The Province has retained B.C.- and California-based counsel to explore legal options to hold OpenAI accountable for its failure to notify law enforcement of threats made on its ChatGPT platform prior to the mass shooting at Tumbler Ridge Secondary school.
As for the people who couldn't attend the pilates class because of the hack, it's the gym who should be held accountable for that because they designed their system in such an insecure and negligent way that it failed to protect their data and resulted in them losing their place.
I had to double take there. Its because of the dangerous dogs act.
However there appears to be a nuance that if your cat is know to be a bitey little shit, and you let it out to into a situation where it might bite someone then you are responsible.
I think it gets murky if you are taking your animal into other people's property though. On your own property you have a duty of care to visitors (ie hidden man traps are not allowed, but clearly marked and cordoned off bottomless pits are)
1. Are you a cat person or a dog person?
2. How do you feel about AI agents?
And then determine which answers have a higher correlation.
you, the person being bitten, would not give two craps about some story from the dog owner about how they hired a bad dog trainer who against their wishes secretly trained them to bite people.
you have been bitten. you have a case against the owner of the dog who bit you.
newsomix9xl•3d ago