OpenAI backs Illinois bill that would limit when AI labs can be held liable • Hacker News Board

Re: OpenAI backs Illinois bill that would limit when AI labs can be held liable

#341

Post by imnotlost » Sun, Apr 12, 2026, 2:53 PM UTC

danny_codes wrote: post #338

imnotlost wrote: post #278

Am I alone in thinking this is easy? The human making the decision is always liable. What if the human couldn't reasonably know better? Doesn't matter - If they made the same decision without AI or with old files it is still on them. What if there's no single human decision? Someone is in charge and is responsible. The "I was ordered to" isn't a defense. Does liability without power make sense? People executing have…

Let's say I start an AI program and my initial prompt is "Copy these files to this other computer", and then 100 iterations down the agentic loop the AI decides to hack into Tesla's FSD and ships an update that kills 500 people. Who is liable?

Obviously this is up to courts and juries to hammer out but...

- Your agentic loop hacked something? You're liable. - FSD crashes? The guy in the driver's seat is liable. He/his insurance can sue Tesla to spread the liability...

Nowhere along the line will anyone go "Oh, the AI did it... whoops"

Re: OpenAI backs Illinois bill that would limit when AI labs can be held liable

#342

Post by ben_w » Sun, Apr 12, 2026, 10:47 PM UTC

rafaelmn wrote: post #331

himata4113 wrote: post #232

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you know how to build a nuke? You might know the technicaly details of how a nuke is made, but do you know everything that's required, all the parameters and pressure values that are required? I find that unlikely, but AI seems to be increasingly more capable of providing such instructions from cross referenced data.

That's based on a silly belief (that's becoming more obvious with AI, but is silly in general) : just because you can read about something it means you learned it. Even if I gave you exact instructions on how to use even basic stuff like power tools - if you had no experience using stuff like grinders/saws/routers and I gave you full detailed instructions on how to do something non-trivial - you're more likely to cut…

Aye, that's the kind of thing I had in mind for the difference between information and competency.

(It's also why I wrote that I know what a calutron is and not claimed that I could build one today; the "and a few years" was not decorative).

Re: OpenAI backs Illinois bill that would limit when AI labs can be held liable

#343

Post by danny_codes » Thu, Apr 16, 2026, 1:29 AM UTC

imnotlost wrote: post #341

danny_codes wrote: post #338

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Let's say I start an AI program and my initial prompt is "Copy these files to this other computer", and then 100 iterations down the agentic loop the AI decides to hack into Tesla's FSD and ships an update that kills 500 people. Who is liable?

Obviously this is up to courts and juries to hammer out but... - Your agentic loop hacked something? You're liable. - FSD crashes? The guy in the driver's seat is liable. He/his insurance can sue Tesla to spread the liability... Nowhere along the line will anyone go "Oh, the AI did it... whoops"

I don’t know.

Let’s say someone sells me a shovel and markets it as a shovel. Then the shovel explodes because it was actually a bomb.

Presumably the manufacturer is liable for passing off their bomb as a shovel.

This metaphor seems reasonably accurate for current LLMs