6 ms·

The distinction some people are making is between copy/pasting text vs agentic action. Generally mistakes "work product" as in output from ChatGPT that the huma

The distinction some people are making is between copy/pasting text vs agentic action. Generally mistakes "work product" as in output from ChatGPT that the human then files with a court, etc. are not forgiven, because if you signed the document, you own its content. Versus some vendor-provided AI Agent which simply takes action on its own that a "reasonable person" would not have expected it to. Often we forgive those kinds of software bloopers.

ori_b 9mo ago
If you put a brick on the accelerator of a car and hop out, you don't get to say "I wasn't even in the car when it hit the pedestrian".
- Shalomboy 9mo ago
  This is true for bricks, but it is not true if your dog starts up your car and hits a pedestrian. Collisions caused by non-human drivers are a fascinating edge case for the times we're in.
  - victorbjorklund 9mo ago
    I don’t know where you from but at least in Sweden you have strict liability for anything your dog does
  - deleted 9mo ago
    [deleted]
  - freejazz 9mo ago
    Prima facie negligence = liability
  - ori_b 9mo ago
    In the USA, at least, it seems pet owners are liable for any harm their pets do.
  - cess11 9mo ago
    Legally, in a lot of jurisdictions, a dog is just your property. What it does, you did, usually with presumed intent or strict liability.
    - gowld 9mo ago
      What if you planted a bush that attracted a bat that bit a child?
      - Muromec 9mo ago
        What if you have an email in your inbox warning you that 1) this specific bush attracts bats and 2) there were in fact bats seen near you bush and 3) bats were observed almost biting a child before. And you also have "how do I fuck up them kids by planting a bush that attracts bats" in your browser history. It's a spectrum you know.
      - dragonwriter 9mo ago
        Well, if it was a bush known to also attract children, it was on your property, and the child was in fact attracted by it and also on your property, and the presence of the bush created the danger of bat bites, the principal of “attractive nuisance” is in play.
      - b00ty4breakfast 9mo ago
        what if my auntie had wheels, would she be a wagon?
      - cess11 9mo ago
        Would a reasonable person typically consider this an act that risk causing harm to kids?
  - jacquesm 9mo ago
    It is very much true for dogs in that case: (1) it is your dog (2) it is your car (3) it is your responsibility to make sure your car can not be started by your dog (4) the pedestrian has a reasonable expectation that a vehicle that is parked without a person in it has been made safe to the point that it will not suddenly start to move without an operator in it and dogs don't qualify. You'd lose that lawsuit in a heartbeat.
    - direwolf20 9mo ago
      what if your car was parked in a normal way that a reasonable person would not expect to be able to be started by a dog, but the dog did several things that no reasonable person would expect and started it anyway?
      - jacquesm 9mo ago
        You can 'what if' this until the cows come home but you are responsible, period. I don't know what kind of drivers education you get where you live but where I live and have lived one of the basic bits is that you know how to park and lock your vehicle safely and that includes removing the ignition key (assuming your car has one) and setting the parking brake. You aim the wheels at the kerb (if there is one) when you're on an incline. And if you're in a stick shift you set the gear to neutral (in some countries they will teach you to set the gear to 1st or reverse, for various reasons). We also have road worthiness assessments that ensure that all these systems work as advertised. You could let a pack of dogs loose in my car in any external circumstance and they would not be able to move it, though I'd hate to clean up the interior afterwards.
        direwolf20 9mo ago
        I agree. The dog smashed the window, hot–wired the ignition, released the parking brake, shifted to drive, and turned the wheel towards the opposite side of the road where a mother was pushing a stroller, killing the baby. I know, crazy right, but I swear I'm not lying, the neighbor caught it on camera. Who's liable? I think this would be a freak accident. Nobody would be liable.
  - b00ty4breakfast 9mo ago
    I'm dubious, do you have any examples of this happening?
  - Terr_ 9mo ago
    Being guilty != Being responsible They correlate, but we must be careful not to mistake one for the other. The latter is a lower bar.
observationist 9mo ago
To me, it's 100% clear - if your tool use is reckless or negligent and results in a crime, then you are guilty of that crime. "It's my robot, it wasn't me" isn't a compelling defense - if you can prove that it behaved significantly outside of your informed or contracted expectations, then maybe the AI platform or the Robot developer could be at fault. Given the current state of AI, though, I think it's not unreasonable to expect that any bot can go rogue, that huge and trivially accessible jailbreak risks exist, so there's no excuse for deploying an agent onto the public internet to do whatever it wants outside direct human supervision. If you're running moltbot or whatever, you're responsible for what happens, even if the AI decided the best way to get money was to hack the Federal Reserve and assign a trillion dollars to an account in your name. Or if Grok goes mechahitler and orders a singing telegram to Will Stancil's house, or something. These are tools; complex, complicated, unpredictable tools that need skillfull and careful use. There was a notorious dark web bot case where someone created a bot that autonomously went onto the dark web and purchased numerous illicit items. https://wwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwww.bitnik.org/r https://wwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwww.bitnik.or... They bought some ecstasy, a hungarian passport, and random other items from Agora. >The day after they took down the exhibition showcasing the items their bot had bought, the Swiss police “arrested” the robot, seized the computer, and confiscated the items it had purchased. “It seems, the purpose of the confiscation is to impede an endangerment of third parties through the drugs exhibited, by destroying them,” someone from !Mediengruppe Bitnik wrote on their blog. In April, however, the bot was released along with everything it had purchased, except the ecstasy, and the artists were cleared of any wrongdoing. But the arrest had many wondering just where the line gets drawn between human and computer culpability.
- b00ty4breakfast 9mo ago
  that darknet bot one always confuses me. The artists/programmers/whatever specifically instructed the computer, through the bot, to perform actions that would likely result in breaking the law. It's not a side-effect of some other, legal action which they were trying to accomplish, it's entire purpose was to purchase things on a marketplace known for hosting illegal goods and services. If I build an autonomous robot that swings a hunk of steel on the end of a chain and then program it to travel to where people are likely to congregate and someone gets hit in the face, I would rightfully be held liable for that.
niyikiza 9mo ago
> if you signed the document, you own its content. Versus some vendor-provided AI Agent which simply takes action on its own Yeah that's exactly the I think we should adopt for AI agent tool calls as well: cryptographically signed, task scoped "warrants" that can be traceable even in cases of multi-agent delegation chains
- embedding-shape 9mo ago
  Kind of like https://github.com/cursor/agent-trace https://github.com/cursor/agent-trace but cryptographically signed? > Agent Trace is an open specification for tracking AI-generated code. It provides a vendor-neutral format for recording AI contributions alongside human authorship in version-controlled codebases.
  - niyikiza 9mo ago
    Similar space, different scope/Approach. Tenuo warrants track who authorized what across delegation chains (human to agent, agent to sub-agent, sub-agent to tool) with cryptographic proof & PoP at each hop. Trace tracks provenance. Warrants track authorization flow. Both are open specs. I could see them complementing each other.
- Muromec 9mo ago
  Why does it need cryptography even? If you gave the agent a token to interact with your bank account, then you gave it permission. If you want to limit the amount it is allowed to sent and a list of recipients, put a filter that sits between the account and the agent that enforces it. If you want the money to be sent only based on the invoice, let the filter check that invoice reference is provided by the agent. If you did neither of that and the platform that runs the agents didn't accept the liability, it's on you. Setting up filters and engineering prompts it's on you too. Now if you did all of that, but made a bug in implementing the filter, then you at least tried and wasn't negligible, but it's on you.
  - Wobbles42 9mo ago
    How can you give an agent a token without cryptography being involved?
kazinator 9mo ago
That's the same thing. You signed off on the agent doing things on your behalf; you are responsible. If you gave a loaded gun to a five year old, would "five-year-old did it" be a valid excuse?
- Wobbles42 9mo ago
  If the five year old was a product resulting from trillions of dollars in investments, and the marketability of that product required people to be able to hand guns to that five year old without liability, then we would at least be having that discussion. Purely organically of course.
  - Terr_ 9mo ago
    > If the five year old was a product resulting from trillions of dollars in investments In weird way, that's actually true. It's a highly- (soon to be fully-) autonomous giga-swarm of the most complicated nanobots in existence, the result of investments over hundreds of thousands of years. That said, we don't really get to choose which ones we own, although we do have input on their maintenance. :p
  - kazinator 9mo ago
    No purveyors of agentic AI are taking on liability for the consequences of their users deploying it. It's literally not in any of their terms of use or licensing or whatever document. That's just in the imaginations of the "AI did it" excuse makers. It may be that the imagination is stirred up by marketing and surrounding hype, but it's not in the binding wording. Nobody is going to do that; it would be crazy. Like to owe money to anyone claiming to have lost their files, or lost clients, or whatever other harm.
jacquesm 9mo ago
If you signed the document you are responsible for its content, you are most likely not the owner of it.
Wobbles42 9mo ago
"Agentic action" is just running a script. All that's different is now people are deploying scripts that they don't understand and can't predict the outcome of. It's negligence, pure and simple. The only reason we're having this discussion is that a trillion dollars was spent writing said scripts.
IG_Semmelweiss 9mo ago
Actually, things are heading in a good direction re:AI bloopers. Courts of law have already found that AI interactions with customers are binding, even if said interactions are considered "bloopers" by the vendor[1] [1] https://www.forbes.com/sites/marisagarcia/2024/02/19/what-air-canada-lost-in-remarkable-lying-ai-chatbot-case/ https://www.forbes.com/sites/marisagarcia/2024/02/19/what-ai...
iterance 9mo ago
If I hire an engineer and that engineer authorizes an "agent" to take an action, if that "agentic action" then causes an incident, guess whose door I'm knocking on? Engineers are accountable for the actions they authorize. Simple as that. The agent can do nothing unless the engineer says it can. If the engineer doesn't feel they have control over what the agent can or cannot do, under no circumstances should it be authorized. To do so would be alarmingly negligent. This extends to products. If I buy a product from a vendor and that product behaves in an unexpected and harmful manner, I expect that vendor to own it. I don't expect error-free work, yet nevertheless "our AI behaved unexpectedly" is not a deflection, nor is it satisfactory when presented as a root cause.
- laterium 9mo ago
  [dead]
JohnFen 9mo ago
> The distinction some people are making is between copy/pasting text vs agentic action. I think there is no distinction between the two for liability purposes.

ori_b 9mo ago

If you put a brick on the accelerator of a car and hop out, you don't get to say "I wasn't even in the car when it hit the pedestrian".

Shalomboy 9mo ago
This is true for bricks, but it is not true if your dog starts up your car and hits a pedestrian. Collisions caused by non-human drivers are a fascinating edge case for the times we're in.
- victorbjorklund 9mo ago
  I don’t know where you from but at least in Sweden you have strict liability for anything your dog does
- deleted 9mo ago
  [deleted]
- freejazz 9mo ago
  Prima facie negligence = liability
- ori_b 9mo ago
  In the USA, at least, it seems pet owners are liable for any harm their pets do.
- cess11 9mo ago
  Legally, in a lot of jurisdictions, a dog is just your property. What it does, you did, usually with presumed intent or strict liability.
  - gowld 9mo ago
    What if you planted a bush that attracted a bat that bit a child?
    - Muromec 9mo ago
      What if you have an email in your inbox warning you that 1) this specific bush attracts bats and 2) there were in fact bats seen near you bush and 3) bats were observed almost biting a child before. And you also have "how do I fuck up them kids by planting a bush that attracts bats" in your browser history. It's a spectrum you know.
    - dragonwriter 9mo ago
      Well, if it was a bush known to also attract children, it was on your property, and the child was in fact attracted by it and also on your property, and the presence of the bush created the danger of bat bites, the principal of “attractive nuisance” is in play.
    - b00ty4breakfast 9mo ago
      what if my auntie had wheels, would she be a wagon?
    - cess11 9mo ago
      Would a reasonable person typically consider this an act that risk causing harm to kids?
- jacquesm 9mo ago
  It is very much true for dogs in that case: (1) it is your dog (2) it is your car (3) it is your responsibility to make sure your car can not be started by your dog (4) the pedestrian has a reasonable expectation that a vehicle that is parked without a person in it has been made safe to the point that it will not suddenly start to move without an operator in it and dogs don't qualify. You'd lose that lawsuit in a heartbeat.
  - direwolf20 9mo ago
    what if your car was parked in a normal way that a reasonable person would not expect to be able to be started by a dog, but the dog did several things that no reasonable person would expect and started it anyway?
    - jacquesm 9mo ago
      You can 'what if' this until the cows come home but you are responsible, period. I don't know what kind of drivers education you get where you live but where I live and have lived one of the basic bits is that you know how to park and lock your vehicle safely and that includes removing the ignition key (assuming your car has one) and setting the parking brake. You aim the wheels at the kerb (if there is one) when you're on an incline. And if you're in a stick shift you set the gear to neutral (in some countries they will teach you to set the gear to 1st or reverse, for various reasons). We also have road worthiness assessments that ensure that all these systems work as advertised. You could let a pack of dogs loose in my car in any external circumstance and they would not be able to move it, though I'd hate to clean up the interior afterwards.
      - direwolf20 9mo ago
        I agree. The dog smashed the window, hot–wired the ignition, released the parking brake, shifted to drive, and turned the wheel towards the opposite side of the road where a mother was pushing a stroller, killing the baby. I know, crazy right, but I swear I'm not lying, the neighbor caught it on camera. Who's liable? I think this would be a freak accident. Nobody would be liable.
- b00ty4breakfast 9mo ago
  I'm dubious, do you have any examples of this happening?
- Terr_ 9mo ago
  Being guilty != Being responsible They correlate, but we must be careful not to mistake one for the other. The latter is a lower bar.

observationist 9mo ago

To me, it's 100% clear - if your tool use is reckless or negligent and results in a crime, then you are guilty of that crime. "It's my robot, it wasn't me" isn't a compelling defense - if you can prove that it behaved significantly outside of your informed or contracted expectations, then maybe the AI platform or the Robot developer could be at fault. Given the current state of AI, though, I think it's not unreasonable to expect that any bot can go rogue, that huge and trivially accessible jailbreak risks exist, so there's no excuse for deploying an agent onto the public internet to do whatever it wants outside direct human supervision. If you're running moltbot or whatever, you're responsible for what happens, even if the AI decided the best way to get money was to hack the Federal Reserve and assign a trillion dollars to an account in your name. Or if Grok goes mechahitler and orders a singing telegram to Will Stancil's house, or something. These are tools; complex, complicated, unpredictable tools that need skillfull and careful use. There was a notorious dark web bot case where someone created a bot that autonomously went onto the dark web and purchased numerous illicit items. https://wwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwww.bitnik.org/r https://wwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwww.bitnik.or... They bought some ecstasy, a hungarian passport, and random other items from Agora. >The day after they took down the exhibition showcasing the items their bot had bought, the Swiss police “arrested” the robot, seized the computer, and confiscated the items it had purchased. “It seems, the purpose of the confiscation is to impede an endangerment of third parties through the drugs exhibited, by destroying them,” someone from !Mediengruppe Bitnik wrote on their blog. In April, however, the bot was released along with everything it had purchased, except the ecstasy, and the artists were cleared of any wrongdoing. But the arrest had many wondering just where the line gets drawn between human and computer culpability.

b00ty4breakfast 9mo ago
that darknet bot one always confuses me. The artists/programmers/whatever specifically instructed the computer, through the bot, to perform actions that would likely result in breaking the law. It's not a side-effect of some other, legal action which they were trying to accomplish, it's entire purpose was to purchase things on a marketplace known for hosting illegal goods and services. If I build an autonomous robot that swings a hunk of steel on the end of a chain and then program it to travel to where people are likely to congregate and someone gets hit in the face, I would rightfully be held liable for that.

niyikiza 9mo ago

> if you signed the document, you own its content. Versus some vendor-provided AI Agent which simply takes action on its own Yeah that's exactly the I think we should adopt for AI agent tool calls as well: cryptographically signed, task scoped "warrants" that can be traceable even in cases of multi-agent delegation chains

embedding-shape 9mo ago
Kind of like https://github.com/cursor/agent-trace https://github.com/cursor/agent-trace but cryptographically signed? > Agent Trace is an open specification for tracking AI-generated code. It provides a vendor-neutral format for recording AI contributions alongside human authorship in version-controlled codebases.
- niyikiza 9mo ago
  Similar space, different scope/Approach. Tenuo warrants track who authorized what across delegation chains (human to agent, agent to sub-agent, sub-agent to tool) with cryptographic proof & PoP at each hop. Trace tracks provenance. Warrants track authorization flow. Both are open specs. I could see them complementing each other.
Muromec 9mo ago
Why does it need cryptography even? If you gave the agent a token to interact with your bank account, then you gave it permission. If you want to limit the amount it is allowed to sent and a list of recipients, put a filter that sits between the account and the agent that enforces it. If you want the money to be sent only based on the invoice, let the filter check that invoice reference is provided by the agent. If you did neither of that and the platform that runs the agents didn't accept the liability, it's on you. Setting up filters and engineering prompts it's on you too. Now if you did all of that, but made a bug in implementing the filter, then you at least tried and wasn't negligible, but it's on you.
- Wobbles42 9mo ago
  How can you give an agent a token without cryptography being involved?

kazinator 9mo ago

That's the same thing. You signed off on the agent doing things on your behalf; you are responsible. If you gave a loaded gun to a five year old, would "five-year-old did it" be a valid excuse?

Wobbles42 9mo ago
If the five year old was a product resulting from trillions of dollars in investments, and the marketability of that product required people to be able to hand guns to that five year old without liability, then we would at least be having that discussion. Purely organically of course.
- Terr_ 9mo ago
  > If the five year old was a product resulting from trillions of dollars in investments In weird way, that's actually true. It's a highly- (soon to be fully-) autonomous giga-swarm of the most complicated nanobots in existence, the result of investments over hundreds of thousands of years. That said, we don't really get to choose which ones we own, although we do have input on their maintenance. :p
- kazinator 9mo ago
  No purveyors of agentic AI are taking on liability for the consequences of their users deploying it. It's literally not in any of their terms of use or licensing or whatever document. That's just in the imaginations of the "AI did it" excuse makers. It may be that the imagination is stirred up by marketing and surrounding hype, but it's not in the binding wording. Nobody is going to do that; it would be crazy. Like to owe money to anyone claiming to have lost their files, or lost clients, or whatever other harm.

jacquesm 9mo ago

If you signed the document you are responsible for its content, you are most likely not the owner of it.

Wobbles42 9mo ago

"Agentic action" is just running a script. All that's different is now people are deploying scripts that they don't understand and can't predict the outcome of. It's negligence, pure and simple. The only reason we're having this discussion is that a trillion dollars was spent writing said scripts.

IG_Semmelweiss 9mo ago

Actually, things are heading in a good direction re:AI bloopers. Courts of law have already found that AI interactions with customers are binding, even if said interactions are considered "bloopers" by the vendor[1] [1] https://www.forbes.com/sites/marisagarcia/2024/02/19/what-air-canada-lost-in-remarkable-lying-ai-chatbot-case/ https://www.forbes.com/sites/marisagarcia/2024/02/19/what-ai...

iterance 9mo ago

If I hire an engineer and that engineer authorizes an "agent" to take an action, if that "agentic action" then causes an incident, guess whose door I'm knocking on? Engineers are accountable for the actions they authorize. Simple as that. The agent can do nothing unless the engineer says it can. If the engineer doesn't feel they have control over what the agent can or cannot do, under no circumstances should it be authorized. To do so would be alarmingly negligent. This extends to products. If I buy a product from a vendor and that product behaves in an unexpected and harmful manner, I expect that vendor to own it. I don't expect error-free work, yet nevertheless "our AI behaved unexpectedly" is not a deflection, nor is it satisfactory when presented as a root cause.

laterium 9mo ago
[dead]

JohnFen 9mo ago

> The distinction some people are making is between copy/pasting text vs agentic action. I think there is no distinction between the two for liability purposes.