Thread

1. bananaflag · 1790163465 · focus · HN ↗

   > Describing them as “superintelligence” or “rogue models” ascribes agency to products rather than to the companies building them. This framing markets these companies’ products as “superhuman” and, at the same time, helps the companies evade accountability for their actions.

   If someone discovered how to summon demons to aid them in robbing banks the main issue wouldn't be "but who has the responsibility for the crime, the human or the demon", it would be "OMG DEMONS".

   Seriously, I don't get what sort of world these people are living in.

   1. ForHackernews · 1790163699 · focus · HN ↗

      If I run a port scanner / vulnerability fuzzer pointed at your network that churns for days and eventually cracks something and breaks your system, would you be upset with me, or my bash loops?

      What if you tried to sue me for damages and my defense was, "Your honor, this was a highly advanced AI gone rogue, I couldn't possibly be held negligent, no one could have foreseen this - I accidentally summoned dark magiks from the silicon itself!"

      Note the point I'm making: I am not claiming LLMs are equivalent to a for loop, I'm saying that you can't evade moral and legal responsibility through technical obscurantism.

      A bomb wired to a sufficiently-complex RNG is still a bomb.

      1. jstanley · 1790164083 · focus · HN ↗

         But they're not obfuscating things just to evade responsibility.

         Do you think that OpenAI hacked HuggingFace on purpose and set up the whole LLM training environment thing just to try to evade responsibility? That it was really just a complicated way of hacking HuggingFace on purpose?

         Yes, they made a mistake and a system they were responsible for hacked HuggingFace, but the nature of the mistake still matters, and their intent still matters.

         > A bomb wired to a sufficiently-complex RNG is still a bomb.

         Right, but an EV that explodes because of a fault in the charging circuit is not a bomb, it's an accident. Just because something exploded for complex reasons doesn't make it an obfuscated bomb.

         1. ForHackernews · 1790164574 · focus · HN ↗

            Despite continuously waving their hands and shrieking about how this thing will literally wipe out all of humanity they couldn't be bothered to airgap it from the internet when testing.

            So yes, I think it was equivalent to testing their new rocket by launching it over a population center. oops, we didn't intend for it to crash on that preschool, but we also didn't follow the most basic safety protocol imaginable

            1. afthonos · 1790166032 · focus · HN ↗

               The problem is that the world has spawned the insane take that because they didn't use the most basic safety protocol imaginable, they were clearly only testing a hot air balloon, and hot air balloons obviously destroy preschools in giant explosions, nothing to see here.

               "If they believe what they say they were incompetent" -> absolutely true statement.

               "They were incompetent, therefore they didn't believe what they said" -> Sir, I'd like to introduce you to human beings, you may not have met one before.

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