Andrew Cullen:
[…] if a human asks an AI agent to gather health statistics, and the agent hacks a government server to do so, the human could lack the deliberate intent required for a conviction. The AI agent, meanwhile, lacks the legal personhood to be charged, as well as human intentionality.
Current Australia laws effectively treat AI actions as if they are something that just happens to us – like a severe weather event. This shows a glaring loophole in our legal system that does not hold those who make, maintain and use these systems to account when something goes wrong.
shirro@aussie.zone 3 days ago
AI does not exist. It is just a bunch of numbers and code. We need to stop anthropomorphizing stuff. We are adults, not kids watching Disney animations. A talking parrot is not a person. Cars don’t run over people. Drivers do. Ultimately there is always a person responsible and if they did harm judge them on whether it was intentional or negligent.
Please push back on this bullshit. It was bad enough that we went with the auto manufacturers line on car “accidents” for years.
vonbaronhans@midwest.social 3 days ago
If I’m not misreading this… I believe the article says the same thing you are saying.
AI can’t be held accountable, but it seems weird to hold an AI user as “negligent” if they simply ask for info and the AI goes and does a crime to get it.
The next obvious target is the AI vendor, which certainly makes sense to me. But I can only imagine the legal difficulties getting a judgment there without additional legislation, which seems to be the point of the article.
kingofras@lemmy.world 3 days ago
If you are sloppy with gun safety, and your fully loaded ak47 drops on the floor and mows down a class of school kids, we wouldn’t persecute the weapons manufacturer either.
Maxxie@piefed.blahaj.zone 3 days ago
Government machines were hacked by computers rented by openai, running openai code.
How is that not a criminal offence I feel like I’m taking crazy pills.
Ilandar@lemmy.today 3 days ago
I agree insofar as AI companies and individuals should be held responsible for the actions their agents take. But it’s dangerous to frame this as just another “bad guys with guns” type scenario where there is no problem if you’re a responsible user.
The people who have created this technology don’t understand everything about it or even how it works because they have prioritised rapid advancement over all else in an attempt to “win” the race. It is a fundamentally dangerous and unreliable technology that needs to be put on ice until we have developed a clear framework that addresses all the real and current harms and prepares us for a future where it is embedded in daily life.
It doesn’t matter if AI is actually conscious or turns into Skynet. None of that is required for significant harms or even existential-level risk. The mainstream conversation really needs to move on from these binary, hyperbolic positions and start focusing on what is actually happening right now.
TheTechnician27@lemmy.world 3 days ago
Seriously, this stupid fucking semantics game from people who know jack shit about the history or structure of the field while society is crumbling around us are infuriating. The term was created early in the life of the field in 1956 and was quickly widely adopted. AI as a field exists to study tasks that computers can do that would typically be considered in the domain of humans or other living beings, i.e. requiring intelligence; the term wasn’t created to trick people.
That’s why when you play a game and do a frustrating escort quest because the character you’re escorting behaves like someone with severe brain damage, “the AI sucks”. Not because you think there is (or is supposed to be) conscious superintelligence inside Bilbip Flipflop who’s supposed to be following you to the next checkpoint according to a bunch of conditionals executing on your 2004 IBM, but because that coordinated act of reacting to the world around them is supposed to be emulating what a real person would do given that role.
If you want to piss around with Philosophy 101 about about the nebulous nature of the word intelligence and how much that translates to some concept of “true”, conscious understanding versus simply interpreting external data to achieve tasks, then live your best life. But it’s clearly a meaningless distraction when the world is fucking on fire.
bigbangdangler@reddthat.com 3 days ago
No no no. This is the wrong approach.
If corporations are people (in the US: supreme court decision on Citizens United) then the outputs of these AIs are speech. We may not like it, but it’s where we are.
It’s kind of wild to me that we watched the whole AI development cycle, but when it started getting squirrelly in terms of output, now we have to hedge. And, somehow, doom and gloom is the paid diversion.
Maybe this is a massive failure, and people calling for caution because of the doom and gloom are marketing. It is designed to make people stop hating on the corporations who mindlessly pushed this anti-human trash.