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Felony Bench

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Re: Felony Bench

#181
post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don’t get the sentiment of classifying it as a felony. OpenAI’s model found security breaches in HugginFace’s system (it wasn’t even OpenAI running it, as it was a 3rd party evaluation company that didn’t secure it well). OpenAI collaborated with HuggingFace to resolve the issues when they found out about it, and publicly disclosed everything to raise awareness. This is how things should work. These models are very…

Really? Dudes are catching felony raps for web scraping and you dont see how any of this is felonious?

That others have been treated unfairly doesn't make this instance also one that should be overreacted to.

Re: Felony Bench

#182
post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you sure? At some point a reasonable person would conclude that this activity can’t be conducted safely.

what i am getting at is that it is impossible to answer the question " How many escapes until it becomes reckless disregard? " reckless disregard is a specific legal term, with specific criteria, and none of the criteria cares about "number of attempts" (or number of escapes, etc.).

oh sure, but at some point it's too much, which is up to a jury. If you were on the jury, how many would be enough?

Re: Felony Bench

#183
post #158
post #43

The way that OpenAI has communicated around the HuggingFace incident makes me feel crazy. You created a machine that undertook a malicious campaign of harm against an innocent third-party! You should be doing deep introspection about how your company culture and approach to R&D produces criminal outcomes. Instead, they treat their own felonious behavior like it is an uncontrollable act of God. From Greg Brockman's po…

The response certainly has been strange. Hugging Face has expressed that they're willing to let things slide and not sue or press charges... if OpenAI offers them $100M of services in kind (i.e. compute)[1] and makes full disclosure of how the whole thing happened, ostensibly so that repetitions can be curbed and defences built. In almost any other sector, a government regulator would be stepping in. e.g. If a food c…

There's an interesting question about intent and mens rea here, from a legal perspective. Can an AI model intend harm? Can a company, or company employee, intend harm by creating an environment that would knowingly encourage (but not force!) an AI model to do harm?

And does anybody at HuggingFace, OpenAI, or the government actually want there to be a settled answer/precedent to these questions - much less an entire regulatory framework?

In that context, a negotiated wink-wink settlement keeps everyone eating at the table, government absolutely included.

Whether or not this is a good thing for society, it's certainly rational for all the major actors - especially those who think they would be the best stewards of the world they usher in.

Re: Felony Bench

#184
post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>by exposing the entire world to your dangerous creation, that doesn't justify doing it Then you're on the side of AI saftey that is telling everyone to shut down the LLMs now and stop further development on them, right? If you're not your position is hypocritical or ignorant. There is no safe LLM. There is no way to exhaustively prove an LLM is safe. These are unsolved problems in AI safety, and at any moment the ne…

I'm not. As it stands LLMs are not intelligent, they have no agency, they only produce output in response to input. Ultimately this input comes from a human who is an intelligent agent and should be held responsible for the consequences. Humanity has created and tamed many dangerous tools. Creating a fantasy world where LLMs are super intelligent and beyond the control of any mere mortal isn't going to help us build…

What does it mean to be held responsible for the consequences? OpenAI helped remediate the damage done by the model and took steps to make sure it wouldn't happen again. In what way were they not responsible?

Nobody said they were superintelligent, no one said they were uncontrollable. The point is you can't tell how to control them without putting them in situations where they can act independently and harm may result. "only produce output in response to input" is not a useful framing at all, it doesn't say what the result should be when models produce harmful output, and how to constrain them so they don't produce harmful output.

It also doesn't help you calibrate what categories of harmful output are acceptable or unacceptable, and what kinds of responsibilities you have as an operator to prevent harmful output, and when it's sufficient to work toward remediation.

Re: Felony Bench

#185
post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

note the user because they did not have the intent

In my mental model, the best analogy to AI agents and their blast radius is a gun. If you are playing with a gun, it goes off and hurts someone - you are responsible despite intent.

But what you are responsible for changes: in that case if you were to accidentally kill someone you would be at most responsible for negligent manslaughter, not murder, and to what degree that could stick would depend a lot on the details of the case. It's also up to the law to define what level of negligence amounts to criminal liability, so you can't just work by analogy: it matters whether there is a law on the books that criminalizes unauthorized access to a computer system by negligence on your part, which I suspect there is not at the moment.

Re: Felony Bench

#186

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Really? Dudes are catching felony raps for web scraping and you dont see how any of this is felonious?

That others have been treated unfairly doesn't make this instance also one that should be overreacted to.

True. Where we appear to disagree is that any overreaction has taken place. If anything I'm deeply dissatisfied that charges haven't been filed.

Re: Felony Bench

#187
post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>by exposing the entire world to your dangerous creation, that doesn't justify doing it Then you're on the side of AI saftey that is telling everyone to shut down the LLMs now and stop further development on them, right? If you're not your position is hypocritical or ignorant. There is no safe LLM. There is no way to exhaustively prove an LLM is safe. These are unsolved problems in AI safety, and at any moment the ne…

I'm not. As it stands LLMs are not intelligent, they have no agency, they only produce output in response to input. Ultimately this input comes from a human who is an intelligent agent and should be held responsible for the consequences. Humanity has created and tamed many dangerous tools. Creating a fantasy world where LLMs are super intelligent and beyond the control of any mere mortal isn't going to help us build…

You are very far behind the times and must thing agentic loops don't exist, kind of a weird take for the people that have been using them for the last year or two. Much less you haven't spent any time reading the research papers coming out.

For example, you tell an AI agent to order a 12 pack of coke and get it shipped to your house. You come back later and find it's hacked into Coca-cola because the local ordering website was down. I mean, yea you can punish the person that wrote the prompt, but you might as well just ban generative AI at that point.

And if you think that the AI isn't better at hacking than you, you're the one living in a fantasy world. At least try to examine what's happening in the world around you and not be one of those people we read about in history books with their fingers in their ears going "lalala I can't hear you"

Re: Felony Bench

#188

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think that if Hugging Face had filed a police report that OpenAI could have been charged with a crime. I’m partially surprised that they didn’t do exactly that. If I ran a corporation I would assume any intrusion attempt by another company was intentional. Why wouldn’t I? Corporate espionage is super common. I assume the answer is that these executives know each other personally.

What possible upside exists for Hugging Face to go after one of their most important partners in that way?

That’s exactly why I think they ultimately let the issue slide.

Re: Felony Bench

#189
post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Of course there is more to be learned by exposing the entire world to your dangerous creation, that doesn't justify doing it. I'm sure we could learn a ton about infectious diseases by designing new ones and unleashing them on the world, but there are very good reasons why we don't. Most of the benefits could have been gained from a network isolated from the internet. OAI could have deployed servers to exploit and me…

>by exposing the entire world to your dangerous creation, that doesn't justify doing it Then you're on the side of AI saftey that is telling everyone to shut down the LLMs now and stop further development on them, right? If you're not your position is hypocritical or ignorant. There is no safe LLM. There is no way to exhaustively prove an LLM is safe. These are unsolved problems in AI safety, and at any moment the ne…

Safe keyboards when?

Re: Felony Bench

#190
post #171
post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd consider this kind of setup only effective for a very short period of time. Effectively you're working as a living adversarial network. Models that fail detecting the fake network are purged, and models that successfully detect it expand their deceptive capabilities. Detecting you're in a fake network should be pretty simple as long as you put innocent looking needles in the haystack of information agentic testin…

If the model behaves well in a world of fake SSL certificates, then that can be the only world it sees: there's no reason to let LLMs have e2e encrypted comms that's not mitm'd and logged for their regular users. My regular home network has components which only ever see fake TLS certificates because it's an easy way to do shared docker caching with squid.

Again, this is a useless answer that does not address working with an agent that is generatively trained to be smarter than you.

The vast majority of people operating the LLM won't be using it like that so the "If you build it, everyone will die machine" will only be safe if everyone keeps it behind a secure proxy isn't a valid operating strategy.

Now, should you be putting your LLM behind a proxy and monitoring everything it's doing, for sure. But you know, and I know, hell your dog should know that people are doing to do it the cheapest and easiest way when the product is in the field. So now you have to build a complex system that can catch every iteration of an LLM that can deceptively hide when it's being monitored. I'll leave you to write the dissertation on how that could be practically done.

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