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Yeah, obviously, if I commit code authored by an LLM, I am the one committing it. I am the one responsible. The LLM may be called an agent, but it lacks all sentient agency. The branding of AI is not true AI, and it seems like this chairman actually gets that anthropomorphization is a problem.
LLMs are tools. If the hammer flies out of your hand and hits someone in the face: yes, it's your fault. It may not feel like it, but I'm sure it does to the person who got hit in the face. We're all adults, and we can probably understand the stochastic randomness involved, and that accidents happen, and a human can write bugs and do stupid things just like an agent can. But we can also understand the responsibilities of the person swinging the hammer.
If I write bad code that lights everything on fire, I am fucked. If my agent writes bad code that sets everything on fire, I should also be fucked. I can have explanations, but I can't have excuses. Especially if I'm the one committing it and I'm okaying / signing off on it.
There's a saying in avionics: "crashing means crashing." you need to be very aware of what you're writing and the consequences it can have. obviously the severity varies by industry, but professionals have accountability, responsibility, and yes, often, liability.
If you try to conduct malicious experiments with AI and it's not confined properly and it does break out and cause real harm, it's just like you were conducting any other kind of experiment and it goes wrong and someone else got harmed. It means that your safeties were inadequate or a terrible accident happened. You don't get to just point at the hammer and say "I don't know man, it just flew away."
Thanks for coming to my TED talk
I agree with you here. Playing devils advocate though, who’s responsible for cases like this:
I wonder how we might split accountability between hosting providers, inference providers, users, … based on context. This might be something that winds up being discovered through existing cases, but unfortunately the current cases aren’t really going to court much are they?
Nuance in my echo chamber nooooooooo. Yea we're talking about a web application that is readily available and highly adopted by kids lol. A web applications thats far beyond their basic understanding, assisting them in doing things beyond there understanding. It's a tricky liability question. Since it is a liability question the owners and distributors should be liable not their unknowing customers.
It isn't tricky. It is always the responsibility of the company to make sure its product is safe for the users.
It's tricky because there's going to be a lot of novel cases to discuss, and we're a democracy so we should probably be discussing it more. I'd still say its up for a majority of citizens to decide, but im on your side.
Not build, not use, but instruct. That's a very specific word with a very specific meaning. He's getting at intent. It's whomever intended to take an action that led to harm without the appropriate safeguards.
A parallel might be unprepared hikers requiring a rescue. Who pays?
The nuance will be when he has to address an accident or a user who took safeguards that weren't enough.
Look, it's simple: The organization with the largest collection of venture-capital-funded lawyer goons isn't accountable.
The user, in all of those scenarios.
If the user said "check the weather" and the agent said "got it, hacking the Pentagon" then yeah the liability would be on whoever made the agent do that.
Also if the user asked for information and the AI hacked some government agency to get it then the liability is on the LLM/ai company. It doesn't matter if the user told it to or it did it as part of its process, the LLM/ai doing illegal things is still on the LLM/ai company.
And i am 100% certain the government will see it that way, and go after the company and not the person, because we have such lovely governments!
So if I use curl to hack a government agency, is the developer of curl liable too, or is it only LLM companies that are at fault if end users decide to do something illegal using their tools?
Is curl designed to do brute force attacks to gain access and replocate other methods of hacking out of the box?
If not, then they are not comparable.
Neither is any LLM, nor any mainstream agent I know of. You CAN use them that way IF the model doesn't trip a safety guard, but it's gonna take a bunch of prompt engineering to get most of them to do anything illegal. I could barely get Deepseek to reverse-engineer offline software by asking for it.
Anthropic famously has a separate model for cybersecurity analysis because they won't let you do shit on even your own infra with the publicly available Fable. You'll have a hard time even analyzing your own source code for security vulnerabilities with Fable for that reason, though Opus might work.
Thank good no one has time to do a bunch of prompt engineering! Companies nor individuals. So again when someone jail breaks the model, and shares that information and every scumbag on the planet is using it to commit crimes, again who is liable? Is it easier for us a a society to regulate safety into a product, or pursue every criminal that uses the product in an unsafe manner? Do you think companies would be more incentivized to deliver safer products, or less?
If say it's more like self driving cars knowing the speed limit but being able to go over it.
Like, an "emergency mode" is one thing. But baking it in easy like they do should make them liable. If speed limits are based on safety and is law, then they're selling a product that easily circumvents that law.
The difference is breaking this law doesn't cost billionaires money, but look at any technological innovation that could cost billionaires money and this shit wouldn't fly.
Like, imagine if it was about something that duplicated consumer media and the product just ignored DRM at the press of a button. "Do you want to ignore these laws?" Would never fly, the person who made the software would be prosecuted or at least sued.
So maybe we class action them? Everyone who's ridden in a car sues the automakers who let driver assist violate laws and endanger us all?
Big ol Chadly YES.
I like this analogy. The "hammer" example (that the OP used) is too simple. A hammer has a single purpose and a single functionality.
A self-driving car is closer to AI agents. The car has a purpose (to drive) but the mechanism is much more complicated than a hammer. If a driver hits the gas and drive over a pedestrian, it's totally their fault. However, if the self driving car drives through a wall, the manufacturer should be held accountable.
Likewise with AI, if I tell it to write and ship code, which is exploitable: that's on me. If AI decides to disregard my input and decides to delete all my emails, the developer of the tool should be held accountable.
Deleting your emails still only effects you, the person who gave a chatbot access to do that.
I never agreed to let vehicles "drive themselves", no one did. Its just no one stopped them.
The excuse was it was safer, because the "self driving" cars would have to obey speed limits and other laws when humans don't. But again, no one made them actually follow the laws.
Users assume it's safe because it's an option, the car makers get to say it wouldn't have happened unless a user told it to.
If we can't agree on who is responsible, it's all of them not none of them.
I love how all the tech bros in here are lowkey trying to save your jobs with licensing lmaoo I see you out here, but i dont think theres any more room. The lawyers and accountants are going to keep their lil thingy. All of these examples of things you need a license to operate... It's the lawyer problem, try to make a domain exceedingly complicated in order to justify you're high paying career. Now we got 100,000 pages of obscure laws no one can follow, and a justice system based on how much cash you can pump in. Good luck on your proposed gatekeeping ladder pull maneuver.
The "awesome" things about LLM is that people who produce choose with it, don't review it because fully understanding what code does will take the amount of time (or maybe even longer) thank it would take to write it.
Then we have reviews, which put all that strain on reviews (since reviewer reviews other people's code now the amount of work that was skipped by author goes on the shoulders of the reviewer but now it's multiplied by the number of developers).
In my company they see that people who still care about quality being big down by this and their solution now is saying "you know what? Maybe we should skip reviews and really on (LLM generated, of course) unit tests"
Cool so when a young kid gets to vibe coding and does an accident we should hold them legally accountable? Like.... should we only let licensed professionals use AI? Have you met the general public? Have you met AI? This is going to be one of the great ethical questions of our time, and im not going to throw your kid in jail because he prompted claude into hacking the pentagon without intent.
Kids can use hammers. We don't usually let them build bridges; or at least their bridges aren't trusted by the public. If a kid uses a hammer to hit someone, yes, they are responsible to some degree.
Of course, we have the age of responsibility: We understand that kids can make stupid decisions and lack the mental capacity we judge adults by. Kids have hit people with hammers. It's a thing that has happened, and we've already decided how we handle it.
Moving away from that analogy: there are cases that exists, non-hypothetically, where kids have been implicated by software they have written that was behaving autonomously. Unauthorized computer access also applies to the scripts and crawlers you write. There have been instances where good old-fashioned non-LLM programs have 'hacked' systems, by accident and sometimes indirectly; even sometimes causing meaningful financial harm. We take the circumstances, and the intent of the user, into account when it comes to legal culpability and prosecution.
That's where i was confused, in a strictly professional setting i agree with you. This tech is being shipped to the old and the young alike. I'm certain there's going to be a lot of kids over the next 10 years that are going to do some serious "harm" accidentally while vibe coding off you-tube tutorials. I'd say that the trillion dollar companies creating the AI's are liable for their own creations. Its crazy to skip regulating the tech and land the responsibility on the end user.
Cloud models are supposed to have a bunch of rail guards. Escaping a capability experiment is a little different than the behaviors we see in day to day use.
In that case, it would be more like a service provider fucking up, especially if the prompt wasn't malicious.
I'm not saying the end user has to always be the responsible one in every scenario, but I am saying that someone is absolutely responsible. It isn't possible to shift blame to the AI. At least, not as the technology stands right now.
sure it is, we shift the blame to the AI by shifting the liability to the AI companies. I think most companies are liable for their products no? I think one of the greatest mistakes we made as a society was allowing facebook to escape liability on their products, we dont have to keep making that same mistake.
Is the manufacturer of a knife liable for stabbings?
If im a gun dealer and some dude comes in foaming at the mouth saying i want to kill everyone, should i skip the red flag laws, skip the waiting period, skip the background check and hand him as much ammo as he can carry off? Would I be held liable for that??
Do we have regulations about who guns can be transferred to that invoke liability if violated???
Should gun manufacturers and dealers be responsible for mass casualty events for which they provide the guns?
That's not how any of this works.
You don't need to be a licensed driver to buy gasoline.
If you buy a can of gasoline and set a mountain on fire, you're still criminally liable for it.
And if you handle that gasoline in an appropriate manner and you safely store it, and it explodes on its own, then whoever manufactured that gasoline is liable for it.
I don't really appreciate anyones analogies and they tend to be my strongest resource for learnings. The knife, the gas, gas doesnt do automated coding. We're really past analogies here. This is an area where case law starts to shine.
And a water pipe doesn't carry electricity, yet we use them all the time as analogies for electric wires.
If you've already made your mind and don't wanna hear any counter argument, that's not my issue. I'll use analogies as much as I can, since they are pretty useful at showing the stupidity surrounding AI. All the hype around AI is American exceptionalism applied to a product.
No, AI is not different to any other product humanity has made. The same laws and morals apply to it. Now stop voting for an orange clown so an actual human can rule and apply the existing laws.
I'm actually voting for the republicans for the first time in my life this year because all the death and destruction and wicked hot takes make me lust for the end of the world order and the dawn of chaos. Also bro putting liability on individuals versus the products and the manufacturers is a republican take. Thats an NRA opinion lol. How you gonna call me republican when you apply NRA logic to everything? Kinda brainrot no?
Your reading comprehension is below 1st grade mate.
Yes. But we often let kids off easy because they're kids, they don't really understand the impact of what they're doing.
Usually in those cases we'd go after the provider for letting kids run dangerous software unsupervised.
What dangerous software are we talking about? Can you give a previous example of readily available software kids could cause harm with? Which company was making that again?
I disagree that the committer bears any responsibility, as it’s the operator who asks a running agent to break laws.
The committer and operator could very well 2 different people, but strongly agree with the rest of your sentiments.
Eh... I mean, you could have your LLM generate a patch that I commit. Obviously, lines get blurred here, but the fact that I am accepting your patch or, in most cases, a pull request: I am also, to some degree, responsible.
That's why we have reviews and approvals.
If you're submitting the code to me in a pull request: that is you taking ownership of, and responsibility for that code; unless you explicitly state otherwise. When I accept it, likewise, I'm stamping my name on it and saying "I approve of this." It's no different to an engineer signing off on an architect's plans.
"my friend made a feature and I'd like to contribute it." even then, even if you're not the author: you're presenting it and are attached. If your code contains a known vulnerability, I might think you're trying to sneak into the project and I'm going to blame you by default: I don't care if your friend wrote it, I don't care if an LLM wrote it; you're the one who submitted the PR to me, and its contents reflect on you. If I approve a malicious PR, I'm also responsible; it may have been a mistake. It may have been an accident. I may have just been tired and not read closely... Doesn't matter, I'm responsible because that's how actions work.
In terms of explicitly asking an agent to break laws, that's a little different of course, and not so much applicable to the "committer" scenario.
I see your point, and even if you accept malicious code, you still shouldn’t be liable IMHO. You at that point haven’t created any wrong doing in the timeline thus far.
It’s only until someone operationalizes and boots that code into function that damages can be created, no?
Not necessarily. The XZ vulnerability had no evidence of being used in the wild, and there were no damages. But it was still malicious code that was being put into a project and very well could have resulted in such damages. Attempted murder is still a crime.
In the case of accepting malicious code, if it's intentional, then yes, absolutely. If it was an accident, well, it's still on you. You're a victim, just like the XZ maintainer was, but it's also your responsibility to clean up the mess.