alt Hacker News> 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.
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Your analogy assumes that no one ever has summoned demons before and that the demons would be predisposed to rob banks.
A closer analogy to what's happening would be someone trains a monkey to steal jewellery and then is shocked when the monkey steals jewellery from their neighbors when they told it to steal from their own shop.
Clearly all liability falls to the monkey operator and you know the existence of trained monkeys is not that shocking.
This analogy is dumb. You could extend it to any novel tech that surprises people. If someone displayed CSAM on a screen, we’d say they were a predator, not gasp and say “he summoned images that appeared as real as you and me and moved as if they were alive, but behold they were but apparitions like shadows on the cave wall that disappear when the fire goes out!”
Thank you for the laugh, but I bet on the internet (and especially here) you surely would find people debating exactly that.
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.
The authors (Timnit Gebru and Emily Bender) are dyed-in-the-wool AI denialists. Famously they were the lead authors on "On the Dangers of Stochastic Parrots".
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That's not what the LLM hacking accidents have been like at all though. To improve the analogy, it would be like summoning a totally passive demon, giving it weapons and placing it next to a bank, place a small fence around it, and then command it to perform a totally safe "exercise" that is exactly like robbing a real bank.
LLMs do not have agency, they are just producing tokens based on a prompt that a person entered, and some of these tokens can trigger the tools that a person gave them access to.