alt Hacker NewsI think its pretty easy to solve these problems: Whenever an AI agent commits a crime, the CEO is held personally accountable, as if they'd committed it themselves.
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Do you think a law that nuclear meltdowns would send the CEO to jail would have stopped nuclear accidents from happening?
I don't think this takes seriously enough the possibility that said CEO doesn't think the failure mode is likely and ignores it. Plenty of people are willing to take risks of the flavor "heads you win, tails everyone loses".
People just want to give up all responsibility these days. If you use the model to do harm to someone else or commit a crime I would think it a lot more reasonable that you be held responsible, instead of making yourself the victim and blaming the manufacturer.
OK, so an AI does something bad and we throw Altman and Dario in jail. Heck, let's throw Elon in, he should be in there anyway, and the rest of the whole bunch just in case.
What about the next incident? Or the ones done by Chinese models, because they sure as heck aren't slowing down? And the thousands of other incidents that will happen as we deploy these things everywhere?
Because this is not happening just now in labs, it's only where they are most visible; this has been happening in the wild from the beginning, starting with the earliest AI-assisted suicides. Which is a perfect example of the problem, because not these CEOs, literally nobody in the world asked for suicide ideation machines. Or the hacks, or any of this other stuff. Yet here we are.
We have to understand: it's not these CEOs that are driving this headlong mad dash towards more powerful models. It's a force of economics. There is just too much money to be made. If we dispose of these people, there will just be somebody else doing exactly the same thing because the incentives as they exist today all force that outcome. This is why they're asking for regulation, or "urging us to urge them to stop."
Holding CEOs accountable certainly would feel good and may even be justified, but it's like putting a band-aid on a cancer; it does nothing to change the underlying cause.
This has been litigated endlessly with guns. The ceo of Smith & Wesson is not personally responsible for what people do with their guns.