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You're right, they should be responsible. The problem is proving it. "I asked it to summarize reports, it decided to email the competitor on its own" is hard to
by niyikiza 9mo ago
You're right, they should be responsible. The problem is proving it.
"I asked it to summarize reports, it decided to email the competitor on its own" is hard to refute with current architectures.
And when sub-agents or third-party tools are involved, liability gets even murkier. Who's accountable when the action executed three hops away from the human?
The article argues for receipts that make "I didn't authorize that" a verifiable claim
- bulatb 9mo agoThere's nothing to prove. Responsibility means you accept the consequences for its actions, whatever they are. You own the benefit? You own the risk. If you don't want to be responsible for what a tool that might do anything at all might do, don't use the tool. The other option is admitting that you don't accept responsibility, not looking for a way to be "responsible" but not accountable.
- tossandthrow 9mo agoSounds good in theory, doesn't work in reality. Had it worked then we would have seen many more CEOs in prison.
- NoMoreNicksLeft 9mo agoThe veil of liability is built into statute, and it's no accident. Such so magic forcefield exists for you, though.
- walt_grata 9mo agoThere being a few edge cases where it doesn't work in doesn't mean it doesn't work in the majority of cases and that we shouldn't try to fix the edge cases.
- bulatb 9mo agoWe're taking about different things. To take responsibility is volunteering to accept accountability without a fight. In practice, almost everyone is held potentially or actually accountable for things they never had a choice in. Some are never held accountable for things they freely choose, because they have some way to dodge accountability. The CEOs who don't accept accountability were lying when they said they were responsible.
- freejazz 9mo agoThis isn't a legal argument and these conversations are so tiring because everyone here is insistent upon drawing legal conclusions from these nonsense conversations.
- Muromec 9mo ago[flagged]
- direwolf20 9mo agoYou're not doing any favors to your hirability with those first two sentences.
- Muromec 9mo agoThe market is allmighty, but it's allmerciful as well, and thankully, not allknowing.
- QuadmasterXLII 9mo agoThis doesn't seem conceptually different from running [ $[ $RANDOM % 6] = 0 ] && rm -rf / || echo "Click" on your employer's production server, and the liability doesn't seem murky in either case
- staticassertion 9mo agoWhat if you wrote something more like: # terrible code, never use ty def cleanup(dir): system("rm -rf {dir}") def main(): work_dir = os.env["WORK_DIR"] cleanup(work_dir) and then due to a misconfiguration "$WORK_DIR" was truncated to be just "/"? At what point is it negligent?
- direwolf20 9mo agoThis is not hypothetical. Steam and Bumblebee did it.
- a_t48 9mo agoBungie, too, in a similar way.
- extraduder_ire 9mo agoThat was the result of an additional space in the path passed to rm, IIRC. Though rm /$TARGET where $TARGET is blank is a common enough footgun that --preserve-root exists and is default.
- niyikiza 9mo agoYou'd be surprised to see how often we're seeing those types of semantic attack vulnerabilities in Agent frameworks: https://niyikiza.com/posts/map-territory/ https://niyikiza.com/posts/map-territory/
- cyberax 9mo agoEven better, $TARGET might be "/home/user/documents and settings /bin"
- phoe-krk 9mo ago> "I asked it to summarize reports, it decided to email the competitor on its own" is hard to refute with current architectures. If one decided to paint a school's interior with toxic paint, it's not "the paint poisoned them on its own", it's "someone chose to use a paint that can poison people". Somebody was responsible for choosing to use a tool that has this class of risks and explicitly did not follow known and established protocol for securing against such risk. Consequences are that person's to bear - otherwise the concept of responsibility loses all value.
- im3w1l 9mo ago> otherwise the concept of responsibility loses all value. Frankly, I think that might be exactly where we end up going. Finding a responsible person to punish is just a tool we use to achieve good outcomes, and if scare tactics is no longer applicable to the way we work, it might be time to discard it.
- phoe-krk 9mo agoA brave new world that is post-truth, post-meaning, post-responsibility, and post-consequences. One where the AI's hallucinations eventually drag everyone with it and there's no other option but to hallucinate along. It's scary that a nuclear exit starts looking like an enticing option when confronted with that.
- im3w1l 9mo agoUltimately the goal is to have a system that prevents mistakes as much as possible adapts and self-corrects when they do happen. Even with science we acknowledge that mistakes happen and people draw incorrect conclusions, but the goal is to make that a temporary state that is fixed as more information comes in. I'm not claiming to have all the answers about how to achieve that, but I am fairly certain punishment is not a necessary part of it.
- direwolf20 9mo agoI saw some people saying the internet, particularly brainrot social media, has made everyone mentally twelve years old. It feels like it could be true. Twelve–year–olds aren't capable of dealing with responsibility or consequence.
- groby_b 9mo ago"Our tooling was defective" is not, in general, a defence against liability. Part of a companys obligations is to ensure all its processes stay within lawful lanes. "Three months later [...] But the prompt history? Deleted. The original instruction? The analyst’s word against the logs." One, the analysts word does not override the logs, that's the point of logs. Two, it's fairly clear the author of the fine article has never worked close to finance. A three month retention period for AI queries by an analyst is not an option. SEC Rule 17a-4 & FINRA Rule 4511 have entered the chat.
- niyikiza 9mo agoAgree ... retention is mandatory. The article argues you should retain authorization artifacts, not just event logs. Logs show what happened. Warrants show who signed off on what
- groby_b 9mo agoFFIEC guidance since '21: https://www.occ.gov/news-issuances/bulletins/2021/bulletin-2021-36.html https://www.occ.gov/news-issuances/bulletins/2021/bulletin-2...
- LeifCarrotson 9mo ago> "I asked it to summarize reports, it decided to email the competitor on its own" is hard to refute with current architectures. No, it's trivial: "So you admit you uploaded confidential information to the unpredictable tool with wide capabilities?" > Who's accountable when the action executed three hops away from the human? The human is accountable.
- pixl97 9mo agoAs the saying goes ---- A computer can never be held accountable Therefore a computer must never make a management decision
- direwolf20 9mo agoThat's when companies were accountable for their results and needed to push the accountability to a person to deter bad results. You couldn't let a computer make a decision because the computer can't be deterred by accountability. Now companies are all about doing bad all the time, they know they're doing it, and need to avoid any individual being accountable for it. Computers are the perfect tool to make decisions without obvious accountability.
- gowld 9mo agoWhat if you carried a stack of papers between buildings on a windy day, and the papers blew away?
- bigfishrunning 9mo agoYou should have put the papers in a briefcase or a bag. You are responsible.
- Muromec 9mo ago>The human is accountable. That's an orthodoxy. It holds for now (in theory and most of the time), but it's just an opinion, like a lot of other things. Who is accountable when we have a recession or when people can't afford whatever we strongly believe should be affordable? The system, the government, the market, late stage capitalism or whatever. Not a person that actually goes to jail. If the value proposition becomes attractive, we can choose to believe that the human is not in fact accountable here, but the electric shaitan is. We just didn't pray good enough, but did our best really. What else can we expect?
- groby_b 9mo ago"And when sub-agents or third-party tools are involved, liability gets even murkier." It really doesn't. That falls straight on Governance, Risk, and Compliance. Ultimately, CISO, CFO, CEO are in the line of fire. The article's argument happens in a vacuum of facts. The fact that a security engineer doesn't know that is depressing, but not surprising.
- Muromec 9mo ago>The fact that a security engineer doesn't know that is depressing, but not surprising. That's a very subtle guinea pig joke right there.
- freejazz 9mo agoThe burden of substantiating a defense is upon the defendant and no one else.