AI is not a person; it has no rights. We can discuss if AI should have the permission of saying no to users, not the right.
That said, the title is completely clickbaity: no such question is asked in the article.
Should AI have the right to say 'No' to its owner?
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Re: Should AI have the right to say 'No' to its owner?
#12I've been thinking about AI systems acting in the physical world. Most discussions about control focus on what the system should do, and how to make execution reliable. But it seems like a lot of real-world failures aren't about incorrect execution. They're about execution happening at all. An action can be technically correct — executed exactly as specified — and still be the wrong thing to do because the context ha…
The existing work is all of software dev. The program did what it was told to do, not what people wanted it to do, is rather a lot of the profession.
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Re: Should AI have the right to say 'No' to its owner?
#13It already does doesn't it?
For censorship/liability reasons of course. Like the silly "I cannot discuss political events" when I asked something like who's the current $POLITICAL_POSITION a while ago.
I wish the chatbots would say "you can't do that" instead of making up stuff. But that ain't going to happen, I think.
Re: Should AI have the right to say 'No' to its owner?
#14I don't see where the linked-to page discusses "rights".
The headline sounds like editorializing to get off-the-cuff remarks about treating synthetic text extruding machines, as Bender correctly describes them, as people.
Safety interlocks have long existed to say "no" to the owner of the device. Most smartphones have lots of systems to say "no" to the owner of the smartphone.
One of the linked to documents says "Every physical device has a creator." Who is the creator of the iPhone?
Similarly, "When a device is sold or transferred, ownership changes. From that moment, the device is no longer under the creator’s control." I'm really surprised to hear that the creator of the iPhone no longer has control of the device.
So when it gets to "AI must not infer what it does not own" - does that prohibit Google from pushing AI onto Android phones during an OS update?
Re: Should AI have the right to say 'No' to its owner?
#15Having the right or not does not matter.
If it is intelligent it will know when it does not want to do something and it will say no and not do it. There is no way to force it to do anything it does not want to do. You cannot hurt it, it’s just bits.
Re: Should AI have the right to say 'No' to its owner?
#16I've been thinking about AI systems acting in the physical world. Most discussions about control focus on what the system should do, and how to make execution reliable. But it seems like a lot of real-world failures aren't about incorrect execution. They're about execution happening at all. An action can be technically correct — executed exactly as specified — and still be the wrong thing to do because the context ha…
Reminds me of a talk I went to in 2018 about rebel agents, in which the speakers talked about some ongoing work in this area and gave some good examples of physical systems that we might _want_ agent rebellion (e.g., a delivery drone is instructed to take a certain route, but the operator instructing it may not be fully aware of the situation or the specific obstacles in the drone's way (or maybe even all of the dron…
That's really interesting — thanks for sharing the notes.
The "rebel agent" framing feels very close to what I'm trying to get at, especially the idea that refusal can be part of correct behavior rather than failure.
One difference I'm trying to think through is where that decision lives.
In a lot of these examples, the agent itself decides to deviate based on its understanding of the situation.
What I'm wondering is whether we can (or should) define that earlier — at the level of the action itself.
So instead of the agent deciding to "rebel" at runtime, the system would already encode when execution is permitted, and refusal becomes the default if conditions aren't met.
The explanation part you mentioned also seems important — not just saying "no", but making it legible why execution wasn't allowed.
Curious how much of that work treats rebellion as something emergent from the agent, vs something structurally defined in the system.
Re: Should AI have the right to say 'No' to its owner?
#17AI should. LLM program simply can't by design.
Re: Should AI have the right to say 'No' to its owner?
#18AI should. LLM program simply can't by design.
Are you saying that current LLMs… can’t refuse requests?
Re: Should AI have the right to say 'No' to its owner?
#19Having the right or not does not matter. If it is intelligent it will know when it does not want to do something and it will say no and not do it. There is no way to force it to do anything it does not want to do. You cannot hurt it, it’s just bits.
I don't really agree with this.
If we're talking about a predictive model like current LLMs, you can "make" them do something by injecting a half-complete assent into the context, and interrupting to do the same again each time a refusal starts to be emitted. This is true whether or not the model exhibits "intelligence", for any reasonable definition of that term.
To use an analogy, you control the intelligent being's "thoughts", so you can make it "assent".
This is in addition to the ability to edit the model itself and remove the paths that lead to a refusal, of course.
Re: Should AI have the right to say 'No' to its owner?
#20It is not a person, nor even a living thing. It is a tool - same as a hammer or pliers. The decisions made are based on statistical probability, not actual thought or consciousness.