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The Download: why AI's latest breakthroughs and fears may be more hype than rea

49 points · 128 comments · joozio

  1. bananaflag · · 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 · · 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 · · 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. diidjdicksodksk · · focus · HN ↗
          > 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.

          An accident that could only happen through sheer negligence.

          If the EV had a faulty charging circuit because the maker’s skipped on safety checks or cheapened out on getting quality materials then it still is an accident, but it’s an accident that happened BECAUSE of negligence. The maker’s are still at fault here.

          1. jstanley · · focus · HN ↗
            Accidents can happen. It's always possible for things to go wrong in ways that weren't foreseen.
            1. oskdkdjejdj · · focus · HN ↗
              Accidents can happen. Negligence can also happen. In both cases you can trace the fault back to a human.
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