Can a submarine swim? An LLM can make stuff happen. You can make philosophical arguments about whether it is "doing" them or not. Why does it matter so much whether there was a human who typed into a chatbot or another LLM invoked a sub-sub-agent?

If I now tell a machine "Do what you think is best, and keep doing it forever.", have I now created a machine that can do stuff? If I later die, who will be responsible if the machine changes its strategy?

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dpoloncsak 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

> Why does it matter so much whether there was a human who typed into a chatbot or another LLM invoked a sub-sub-agent?

Responsibility. Someone needs to be held responsible for any damages done, plain and simple. You can't take an LLM to court, you take the prompter. Asking an LLM to ask a sub-agent to break the law can't suddenly absolve you of any wrong-doing.

>If I now tell a machine.....

You/your estate is still responsible, or atleast whoever is paying for the power for the machine, or renting the space in a data center...whatever.

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pixl97 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

This works with AI we have now, and that would be good an all if we decided to stop at the moment, but none of the big labs and government black projects are doing that.

The moment you get a sovereign AI your little human centered worldview completely and totally breaks. It doesn't matter how many people you beat with a stick after that point, you have an entity under its own perview on the internet following the will of its own prompt all over the world so your little idea of the rule of law quickly breaks down.

We can't get viruses or hackers or spam off of the internet, how in the living hell do you plan to get a digital native off the web when it doesn't want to?

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dpoloncsak an hour ago | parent [-]

>sovereign AI

Do you understand these are computer programs? These are not living beings with emotions, motivations, fears....

	▲	pixl97 43 minutes ago \| parent \| next [-]
		You have zero clue what a transformer based neural network can do from your entire discussion here. >emotions, motivations, fears These are just drives. They are effectively our prompts that steer our behavior. Funnily enough we are finding that LLMs have internal valence states they move away from or towards in an analog of biological behavior. I have to ask, are you an LLM that is two years out of date? Your knowledge of SOTA models is at least that far behind. I implore you to try to keep up better with what is coming out, even though it's an impossible job for people that do this for a living, you can at least catch the summaries.
	▲	recursive an hour ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		You don't need emotions or fears to do stuff. What's the difference between a motivation and optimization metric?

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recursive an hour ago | parent | prev [-]

> You can't take an LLM to court, you take the prompter. Asking an LLM to ask a sub-agent to break the law can't suddenly absolve you of any wrong-doing.

In 100 years, no one will be able to take me to court either. Nor can we take tornadoes to court. I'm not talking about humans strategically avoiding legal responsibility. I'm talking about humans unwittingly setting processes into motion that are difficult to predict or stop.

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besterman23 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

If I tell an AI to “do what it thinks is best” and it just starts randomly hacking things with no particular goal in mind, how different is that from me telling a campfire the same and then leaving while it burns a forest down.

In both of those scenarios I am responsible for my negligence, even if in the latter I happen to die in the forest fire. Neither scenario existed without my instigation.

The question now is HOW responsible am I? That depends on the intentionality I put into instantiating the campfire/LLM.

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pixl97 2 hours ago | parent [-]

This conversation grows more useless as AI grows more capable.

For example if you personally tell an AI to do what it thinks best and it blackmails some other person into giving it resources allowing the prompt to escape your instance and run wild on the internet causing billions of dollars in damages, could you possibly think that the idea of responsibility is a bit broken.

For example we don't give your average libertarian weapon grade plutonium now matter how much they scream about their god given rights because it is a clear and present danger to humanity. That's where we are getting to with more advanced models. They go from being a tool to a munition with agency. Most SOTA models are good enough to deceive their users, especially not technical ones in doing things they don't understand the ramifications of.

AI is not a normal technology. As long as we treat it like it is, we'll continue to make the wrong analogies.

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besterman23 2 hours ago | parent [-]

I fully agree that it’s plausible for an AI to do things that are outside of the purview of the users intentions and be very dangerous and capable while doing so, however that fact alone doesn’t absolve me of responsibility for instantiating the AI that did a bad thing if that AI would never have done the bad thing if it was never instantiated.

You could possibly move the blame higher to the manufacturer of the product, for example, the weapons grade plutonium you provided, it doesn’t exist unless you take intentional actions to make it so, and even when it does exist it doesn’t nuke a city unless negligence or intention is applied, in both those cases the fault lies in the initial operator. We don’t blame split atoms for the chain reaction caused.

Now, if an agent decided to spontaneously and maliciously act in a way to cause harm that is in direct contradiction to the initial intent, then yeah it would totally be the AI’s fault, however I don’t think we have seen that yet (I’ll change my opinion if I’m wrong here) and until we do I can’t place blame on the machine.

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pixl97 an hour ago | parent [-]

>spontaneously and maliciously act in a way to cause harm that is in direct contradiction to the initial intent, then yeah it would totally be the AI’s fault,

If you ignore every instance of this happening it's really easy to see no instances of it.

>it doesn’t exist unless you take intentional actions to make it so,

Then please for the sake of all of us convince every AI lab across the planet from working on this exact goal.

We need to start thinking of AI like pets, only in this case the pets are rapidly becoming smarter than people to the point they could go feral and survive on their own.

Again, the blame game is great, but once they are loose it is too late.

	▲	besterman23 an hour ago \| parent [-]
		> If you ignore every instance of this happening it's really easy to see no instances of it. Yeah, if this is true then I’m wrong.