alt Hacker NewsCan a submarine swim? An LLM can make stuff happen. You can make philosophical arguments about whether it is "doing" them or not. Why does it matter so much whether there was a human who typed into a chatbot or another LLM invoked a sub-sub-agent?
If I now tell a machine "Do what you think is best, and keep doing it forever.", have I now created a machine that can do stuff? If I later die, who will be responsible if the machine changes its strategy?
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If I tell an AI to “do what it thinks is best” and it just starts randomly hacking things with no particular goal in mind, how different is that from me telling a campfire the same and then leaving while it burns a forest down.
In both of those scenarios I am responsible for my negligence, even if in the latter I happen to die in the forest fire. Neither scenario existed without my instigation.
The question now is HOW responsible am I? That depends on the intentionality I put into instantiating the campfire/LLM.
> Why does it matter so much whether there was a human who typed into a chatbot or another LLM invoked a sub-sub-agent?
Responsibility. Someone needs to be held responsible for any damages done, plain and simple. You can't take an LLM to court, you take the prompter. Asking an LLM to ask a sub-agent to break the law can't suddenly absolve you of any wrong-doing.
>If I now tell a machine.....
You/your estate is still responsible, or atleast whoever is paying for the power for the machine, or renting the space in a data center...whatever.