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Felony Bench

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Re: Felony Bench

#301

Post by avianlyric »

tgsovlerkhgsel wrote: post #298
sdeframond wrote: post #288

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Now what if this robotic lawnmower killed someone ? And what if many lawnmowers started killing/injuring people ? And what if this a known behavior detected during QA, but the robots are sold anyway with a disclosure ?

That would be a slightly different situation because most countries have laws that make it a criminal offense to negligently kill someone, but they don't have laws that make it a criminal offense to negligently damage property or hack a website.

> but they don't have laws that make it a criminal offense to negligently damage property or hack a website.

Most of them do, but they don’t get used very often. They seem to popup in vandalism cases where public artwork has been damaged by some drunk person doing something stupid. They don’t intend to damage anything, but damage results anyway due to their negligence when considering the consequences of their actions.

I think if you want to get super technical, in the UK there isn’t an offence for damage caused by negligence, but there is an offence for damage caused by recklessness, which is a higher bar than negligence. Usually it means you knew your actions risked causing damage, and you did it anyway, even if you didn’t actually intend to cause the damage.

An example would be gluing something to a public artwork, it’s kinda obvious that would likely damage the artwork when removing the glue, but you didn’t intend to cause that damage. Or perhaps sliding down a surface and scratching it in the process. Your goal was to just slide down the surface, not scratch it, but it should have been obvious that scratching could have happened.

Re: Felony Bench

#302

Post by jacquesm »

instagraham wrote: post #270

These are just cases of AI models committing illegal activity - without any legal convictions yet. If that's the logic, how is Grok not at the top of the list for deepfaking millions? Edit: I get that this is about agents, but a lot of these instances are about agents going rogue after the human gave them a task. "inadvertently" breaking the law isn't necessarily a lesser category than "did so on command." If we are…

> These are just cases of AI models committing illegal activity - without any legal convictions yet.

What do you propose they do, charge the AI? Or the agent (whose PID has long ceased to exist)?

It's the owners of the AIs that should be held responsible.

Re: Felony Bench

#303

Post by inigyou »

wavemode wrote: post #168
lxe wrote: post #92

Let's say I am "User". I subscribe through a "Third Party" to use "AI Agent" allowing an "LLM" to run. I want to accomplish some legal non-nefarious task, and run the agent. The agentic loop causes a CFAA-violating behavior. Who gets prosecuted? 1. User 2. The third party model host with whom I have the account 3. The developer of the harness /agent software 4. The developer of the LLM model

The Computer Fraud and Abuse Act explicitly contains "knowingly" and/or "intentionally" qualifications. By definition, you can't accidentally violate the CFAA.

So if I port scan the internet without knowing it's going to be illegal, I'm legally covered?

Re: Felony Bench

#304

Post by inigyou »

tomrod wrote: post #167
BorisMelnik wrote: post #112

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.

If you are hiring someone to shoot targets at a range, and they shoot someone, they are prosecuted, not you

Re: Felony Bench

#305

Post by inigyou »

rfw300 wrote: 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…

> Instead, they treat their own felonious behavior like it is an uncontrollable act of God.

I wonder if this is related to the fact they seriously believe AGI is God.

Re: Felony Bench

#306

Post by gruez »

strogonoff wrote: post #300
fc417fc802 wrote: post #272

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are certainly some differences but is one really more ethical than the other? If anything I feel that (for example) manufacturing a gun is much less likely to carry any ethical implications than training someone to use it might.

Well, manufacturing guns is probably heavily regulated…

I did a cursory search and it seems to be as regulated as restaurants are. There's an application process and on site inspections, but that's about it. The only thing notable is background checks.

Re: Felony Bench

#307

Post by inigyou »

ThrustVectoring wrote: post #225
9dev wrote: post #198

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Luckily, that isn't how the law works. Or is supposed to work, anyway. You cannot, for example, sell yourself as a slave to somebody else, because slavery is illegal - even if you opt into it. So whether something is a felony isn't decided by the victim, but the rules of law, and that means breaching a security system without authorization is illegal, no matter what you think.

That actually is how the law works. You can read the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act at https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/18/1030 and double check, but these felonies all require knowingly or intentionally accessing a computer etc. These aren't strict liability statutes - the government must prove mens rea to a jury in order to get a conviction at trial.

Oftentimes the process is the punishment. They ruin your life for two or more years even if they ultimately don't get a conviction, you still suffered for two years. And there's certainly enough evidence to start the process.

Re: Felony Bench

#309

Post by inigyou »

eaglelamp wrote: post #149
pixl97 wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>that it’s very simple to just air gap a system No, not really, and with LLMs an air gapped system may not tell you anything useful. Now, yes, the first part of testing you want an air gapped system to tell you if the system is going to stupidly do bad things. But an gapped system tells you nothing about the systems capabilities to do smart bad things. There's already a number of papers out there on LLMs detecting th…

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…

> 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

We do that. It's called gain-of-function research.

Re: Felony Bench

#310

Post by inigyou »

phoghed wrote: post #78
rfw300 wrote: 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…

Americans always frothing at the mouth to invoke the justice system and jail someone. There’s almost 0 chance they’d secure any conviction from this.

America has both too much and too little jail. They put randoms in jail for trivial shit to force obedience from the population, but politicians rape children on video and go free. Even better, the videos get destroyed.
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