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FTC chair suggests AI developers should be liable for conduct of agents (www.reuters.com)

submitted 6 days ago by HaraldvonBlauzahn@feddit.org to c/programming@programming.dev

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cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/52426446

US Federal Trade Commission Chairman Andrew Ferguson said on Friday he would resist describing AI agents as autonomous actors that "break loose" with "wills and desires of their own," suggesting the developers who instruct agents would be the ones liable ‌for harm.

"I'm going to continue as long as I am chairman to resist this anthropomorphizing of these tools," Ferguson said at the Reuters Momentum AI Austin event. "If someone tells a tool to do something, and the tool does it, I don't think we would say, 'Oh, what do we do about the tool?'"

Ferguson's remarks illustrated potential avenues for the Trump administration to take as incidents rise in which agentic AI testing resulted in unauthorized access to corporate or government data.

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[–] gastroglizzy@piefed.social 7 points 5 days ago (2 children)

That's exactly the way it should be. I don't get to program a computer to steal money, then blame the computer for the stolen money.

HOWEVER, I couldn't help but notice this part:

“If someone tells a tool to do something, and the tool does it, I don’t think we would say, ’Oh, what do we do about the tool?’”

and think of gun control.

Guns are tools; they don't do anything they aren't told to do. And yet, when someone tells a gun to shoot another person, we do say, "Oh, what can we do about the tool?" and the answer is usually "ban it." Why?

If this line of thinking is so obvious when it comes to AI, why is it the opposite when it comes to guns?

I don't get to say, "That crazy gun just broke loose, went off the rails all by itself and shot somebody." We all understand the gun didn't do anything, the shooter did. Thus, solutions should focus on the shooter, not the gun.

Violence is the problem, not the tool used to do it. Treat the underlying causes of violence: poverty, homelessness, unemployment, drug addiction, and mental health, if you want to solve the violence problem.

[–] JakenVeina@midwest.social 8 points 5 days ago

I'd say the difference is that a gun doesn't HAVE any other use-case. Its purpose is exclusively to injure or kill living things.

Also, there's definitely a difference in the capabilities of each tool. The severity of what a gun is capable if is a heck of a lot higher than what an LLM agent is capable of (doomsdayers notwithstanding).

I do generally agree with you, though. America's gun violence problem is not reeeeally a function of America having more guns. That's just an exacerbating factor.

[–] shawarma@lemmygrad.ml 3 points 5 days ago* (last edited 5 days ago)

I don't think that question is framed correctly.. We don't give guns agency the way we do for LLMs. The manner in which these attacks are discussed is "look at this crazy thing AI did, it's so smart and dangerous!" so the way the discussion is framed around the tool is completely different from the way guns are discussed. Discussion around banning certain classes of weapons is usually centred on how easy it makes it for a single person to commit murder at scale. The discussion about LLMs is not about how easy it makes it for attackers to find and exploit systems at scale. Instead we've got this gaslighting campaign insisting the tool is acting under its own initiative. So I don't think, right now, you can draw a straight line between arguments about AI safety and arguments about gun safety because they're arguing different things.