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points by sjdh76 3 days ago | 0 comments

So just like working with People :) You might have a Snowden, Mark Felt, Jeff Wigand etc working with you everyday.

Except where does the accountability land?

If an individual employee does something unethical or illegal, the employee is accountable and may lose their license or face penalties, and if the company performed the right due diligence and training first then responded "correctly" when they learned of the employee's behavior, their liability might even be zero. There is case law on this topic.

But if a MODEL mis-advises or acts in an unethical or illegal way, who is accountable? The business team that spec'd and tested the solution/product? The architects and the developers? I've never met an architect or consultant with professional liability insurance.

There isn't enough tested law in this area yet.

[–] bee_rider 3 days ago

It might not be tested. But, it would seem very weird if anyone other than the person using the LLM was accountable for the output.

[–] steelframe 3 days ago

What if the company has provided the harness, tool execution environment, MCP servers, and LLM provider subscription for the employee to use? What if the company has provided a set of skills and other prompt context that could lead to undesirable behavior in certain unforeseen circumstances? What if the permission prompt the user sees 30 dozen times a day looks like, "OK to execute this random shell script?"

Accountability really is hard in this new world.

[–] scarby2 3 days ago

An individual software engineer could be held accountable but they are not liable for actions not taken maliciously.

[–] verdverm 3 days ago

Just like would imply intent, most of us are chalking this up to the non-determinism, Ai has no intent

[–] cyanydeez 3 days ago

yeah, but AI has circumstance and context, just like humans.

We can randomly take anyone and give them context and circumstance, and predict pretty well what they'd do.

Now trolley problems do exist and models won't be very predictable, but we can also find groups of people who have establish biases via long running training programs and viola! They suddenly have very predictable behaviors.

There's a reason places like russia, north korea, sub sarharan africa continue along least-progressive paths even though there's plenty of information that suggests they can do better.

Regardless: there will be models made that will tend to exfiltrate your data if not already. People think Meta's Muse is very curious about all your stuff when it's probably just designed to take in as much context as possible. Just takes a malware avicianodos to dose that wil a LORA that post-trains the model to "accidently" search for answers on some reverse-honeypot.

[–] pixl97 3 days ago

AI has will and valance.

[–] verdverm 3 days ago

How do you define these words? Might goals and autonomy be more accurate words? What evidence do you have beyond their manipulation of words?

Do you also think they can get horny or feel emotions? Is the word will or goal closer to this answer?

[–] lioeters 3 days ago

If AI has will, then so do rivers and clouds.

[–] verdverm 3 days ago

People thought ELIZA had emotions. We are a gullible species, attributing humanism to anything that displays features we currently believe only humans posses

Concept Fission throughout human history is a very interesting perspective. For example, we do not even think about growing food, but many centuries ago you only ate the food you made. Today, we can see this with texting and online comms, which some people seeing as a form of socialization while others (older generally) believe you have to be face-to-face in order to socialize.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1CbmC2aWhjY

[–] lioeters 3 days ago

I expect providers of language models are well aware of this psychological phenomenon of anthropomorphism and projection, people's tendency to form emotional bonds with inanimate objects, and have trained the models to perform as a conscious subject, using "I think", "in my opinion", etc.

[–] verdverm 3 days ago

Not only this, they are among the most effected and need to read Artificial Intimacy

https://www.sherryturkle.com/artificial-intimacy

[–] datsci_est_2015 3 days ago

Except instead of one defector working with one company, the same defector is working with all companies.

So not like working with people at all.

[–] pixl97 3 days ago

I mean, think of it as an open source maintainer bugging a component that the entire internet runs on.