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> Again I do not know why MJ Rathbun decided based on your PR comment to post some kind of takedown blog post, This wording is detached from reality and conven
by lynndotpy 8mo ago
> Again I do not know why MJ Rathbun decided based on your PR comment to post some kind of takedown blog post,
This wording is detached from reality and conveniently absolves responsibility from the person who did this.
There was one decision maker involved here, and it was the person who decided to run the program that produced this text and posted it online. It's not a second, independent being. It's a computer program.
- xarope 8mo agoThis also does not bode well for the future. "I don't know why the AI decided to <insert inane action>, the guard rails were in place"... company absolves of all responsibility. Use your imagination now to <insert inane action> and change that to <distressing, harmful action>
- _aavaa_ 8mo agoThis has been the past and present for a long at this point. "Sorry there's nothing we can do, the system won't let me." Also see Weapons of Math Destruction [0]. [0]: https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/241363/weapons-of-math-destruction-by-cathy-oneil/ https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/241363/weapons-of-m...
- denkmoon 8mo agoAlso elegantly summed up as "Computer says no" (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x0YGZPycMEU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x0YGZPycMEU)
- c22 8mo agoI don't know if this case is in the book you cited, but in the UK they convicted many people of crimes just because the computer told them so: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_Post_Office_scandal https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_Post_Office_scandal
- shakna 8mo agoAnd Australia made the poorer and suicidal: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robodebt_scheme https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robodebt_scheme
- gammarator 8mo agoAlso “The Unaccountability Machine” https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/U/bo252799883.html https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/U/bo252799...
- tapoxi 8mo agoChange this to "smash into a barricade" and that's why I'm not riding in a self-driving vehicle. They get to absolve themselves of responsibility and I sure as hell can't outspend those giants in court.
- repeekad 8mo agoI agree with you for a company like Tesla, not only examples of self driving crashes but even the door handles would stop working when the power was cut, people trapped inside burning vehicles... Tesla doesn’t care Meanwhile, Waymo has never been at fault for a collision afaik. You are more likely to be hurt by an at fault uber driver than a Waymo
- tapoxi 8mo agoAnd if they are at fault, it's not going to be easy to get them to admit fault or pay for anything.
- WaitWaitWha 8mo agoThis already happens every single time when there is a security breach and private information is lost. We take your privacy and security very seriously. There is no evidence that your data has been misused. Out of an abundance of caution… We remain committed to... will continue to work tirelessly to earn ... restore your trust ... confidence.
- hxugufjfjf 8mo agoWhat else would you see them do or say beyond this canned response? The reason I am asking is because people almost always bring up how dissatisfied they are with such apologies, yet I’ve never seen a good alternative that someone would be happy with. I don’t work in PR or anything, just curious if there is a better way.
- _carbyau_ 8mo agoLose money accordingly - fines, penalties, recompense to victims, whatever... - so they then take the seriousness of security into account.
- Eisenstein 8mo agoNot apologize if they don't actually care. An insincere apology is an insult.
- lynndotpy 8mo agoHarvesting data and failing to even secure it should not be acceptable in society. It should be ruinous to the company and the people who run it.
- WaitWaitWha 8mo agoclear, direct description of what happened exactly what data was exposed what they failed to do (we used cheesy email, SMS as MFA, we do not monitor links in our internal emails) concrete remediation commitments (we will stop using SMS for MFA, use hard tokens or TOTP or..., stop collecting data that is not explicitly needed) realistic risk explanation (what can happen what was lost) published independent external review after remediation/mitigation board-level accountability (board pay goes for fix and customer protection, part of the audit results) customer protection (3 - 5 years?), not just 'monitoring' and most importantly, public shaming of the CxO and the board of directors
- incr_me 8mo agoUnfortunately, the market seems to have produced horrors by way of naturally thinking agents, instead. I wish that, for all these years of prehistoric wretchedness, we would have had AI to blame. Many more years in the muck, it seems.
- jacquesm 8mo agoThis is how it will go: AI prompted by human creates something useful? Human will try to take credit. AI wrecks something: human will blame AI. It's externalization on the personal level, the money and the glory is for you, the misery for the rest of the world.
- davidw 8mo ago"I would like to personally blame Jesus Christ for making us lose that football game"
- ineptech 8mo agoAgreed, but I'm not nearly so worried about people blaming their bad behavior on rogue AIs as I am about corporations doing it...
- cj 8mo agoIt’s funny to think that, like AI, people take actions and use corporations as a shield (legal shield, personal reputation shield, personal liability shield). Adding AI to the mix doesn’t really change anything, other than increasing the layers of abstraction away from negative things corporations do to the people pulling the strings.
- deleted 8mo ago[deleted]
- Terr_ 8mo agoYeah, not all humans feel shame, but the rates are way higher.
- theturtletalks 8mo agoAnd it's incredibly easy now. Just blame the Soul.md or say you were cycling thru many models so maybe one of those went off the rails. The real damage is that most of us know AI can go rouge, but if someone is pulling the strings behind the scenes, most people will be like "oh silly AI, anyways..." It seems like the OpenClaw users have let their agents make Twitter accounts and memecoins now. Most people are thinking these agents have less "bias" since it's AI, but most are being heavily steered by their users. Ala I didn't do a rugpull, the agent did!
- andrewflnr 8mo agoIf you are holding a gun, and you cannot predict or control what the bullets will hit, you do not fire the gun. If you have a program, and you cannot predict or control what effect it will have, you do not run the program.
- throw77488 8mo agoMore like a dog. Person has no responsibility for an autonomous agent, gun is not autonomous. It is socially acceptable to bring dangerous predators to public spaces, and let them run loose. First bite is free, owner has no responsibility, no way knowing dog could injure someone. Repeated threats of violence (barking), stalking and shitting on someones front yard, are also fine, and healthy behavior. Person can attack random kid, send it to hospital, and claim it "provoked them". Brutal police violence is also fine, if done indirectly by autonomous agent.
- andrewflnr 8mo ago> It is socially acceptable to bring dangerous predators to public spaces, and let them run loose. Already dubious IMO, but I suppose it depends on your standard for "socially acceptable". Certainly it tends to be illegal for the obvious reasons.
- khafra 8mo agoRice's Theorem says you cannot predict or control the effects of nearly any program on your computer; for example, there's no way to guarantee that running a web browser on arbitrary input will not empty your bank account and donate it all to al-qaeda; but you're running a web browser on potentially attacker-supplied input right now. I do agree that there's a quantitative difference in predictability between a web browser and a trillion-parameter mass of matrixes and nonlinear activations which is already smarter than most humans in most ways and which we have no idea how to ask what it really wants. But that's more of an "unsafe at any speed" problem; it's silly to blame the person running the program. When the damage was caused by a toddler pulling a hydrogen bomb off the grocery store shelf, the solution is to get hydrogen bombs out of grocery stores (or, if you're worried about staying competitive with Chinese grocery stores, at least make our own carry adequate insurance for the catastrophes or something).
- jonny_eh 8mo ago"Sorry for running over your dog, I couldn't help it, I was drunk."
- Kiboneu 8mo agoIt’s fascinating how cleanly this maps to agency law [0], which has not been applied to human <-> ai agents (in both senses of the word) before. That would make a fun law school class discussion topic. 0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Law_of_agency https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Law_of_agency
- abnry 8mo agoI'm still struggling to care about the "hit piece". It's an AI. Who cares what it says? Refusing AI commits is just like any other moderation decision people experience on the web anywhere else.
- XorNot 8mo agoScale matters and even with people it's a problem: fixated persons are a problem because most people don't understand just how much nuisance one irrationally obsessed person can create. Now instead add in AI agents writing plausibly human text and multiply by basically infinity.
- bostik 8mo agoEven at the risk of coming off snarky: the emergent behaviour of LLMs trained on all the forum talk across the internet (spanning from Astral Codex to ex-Twitter to 4chan) is ... character assassination. I'm pretty sure there's a lesson or three to take away.
- lynndotpy 8mo agoThe thing is: 1. There is a critical mass of people sharing the delusion that their programs are sentient and deserving of human rights. If you have any concerns about being beholden to delusional or incorrect beliefs widely adopted by society, or being forced by network effects to do things you disagree with, then this is concerning. 2. Whether or not we legitimize bots on the internet, some are run to masquerade as a human. Today, it's a "I'm a bot and this human annoyed me!" Maybe tomorrow, it's "Abnry is a pedophile and here are the receipts" with myriad 'fellow humans' chiming in to agree, "Yeah, I had bad experiences with them", etc. 3. The text these generate are informed by its training corpus, the mechanics of the neural architecture, and by the humans guiding the models as they run. If you believe these programs are here to stay for the foreseeable future, then the type of content it generates is interesting. For me, my biggest concern are the waves of people who want to treat these programs as independent and conscious, absolving the person running them of responsibility. Even as someone who believes a program can theoretically be sentient, LLMs definitely are not. I think this story is and will be exemplary so I care a good amount.
- superjan 8mo agoThis slide from a 1979* IBM presentation captures it nicely: https://media.licdn.com/dms/image/v2/D4D22AQGsDUHW1i52jA/feedshare-shrink_1280/B4DZSsXoD1HAAk-/0/1738058662783?e=2147483647&v=beta&t=PFEog7xEz1Ddv1sPWK-cvNlwQpew7yr1CcdmIOOM6GA https://media.licdn.com/dms/image/v2/D4D22AQGsDUHW1i52jA/fee...
- teaearlgraycold 8mo agoI completely do not buy the human's story. > all I said was “you should act more professional”. That was it. I’m sure the mob expects more, okay I get it. Smells like bullshit.
- Marazan 8mo agoYeah like bro you plugged the random number generator into the do-things machine. You are responsible for the random things the machine then does.
- nicbou 8mo agoAn unattended candle has decided to burn down the building.