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An OpenAI agent hacked Medicare. Will anyone be held responsible? (theconversation.com)
submitted 1 month ago by to c/australianpolitics@aussie.zone
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Andrew Cullen:

[…] if a human asks an AI agent to gather health statistics, and the agent hacks a government server to do so, the human could lack the deliberate intent required for a conviction. The AI agent, meanwhile, lacks the legal personhood to be charged, as well as human intentionality.

Current Australia laws effectively treat AI actions as if they are something that just happens to us – like a severe weather event. This shows a glaring loophole in our legal system that does not hold those who make, maintain and use these systems to account when something goes wrong.

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[–] 3 points 1 month ago (6 children)

If you are sloppy with gun safety, and your fully loaded ak47 drops on the floor and mows down a class of school kids, we wouldn’t persecute the weapons manufacturer either.

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  • [–] 2 points 1 month ago (3 children)

    I don't know the proper legal term, but there's something like a reasonable expectation for how a product will be used.

    Take something like autonomous vehicles. If a passenger hops in a Waymo and says, "take me to the airport", it's hardly reasonable to hold the rider responsible if the cab mows down 15 children on the way, but it does seem like something Waymo, the corporation, should be held responsible for. It is very reasonable to expect Waymo to have put precautions in place to prevent that sort of thing.

    The question is, when it comes to modern AI agents, it's kind of the wild west, legally speaking. Can we hold an LLM developer responsible for harm their AI agents do? I can see a lot of room for that, but it seems like the legal system just isn't there yet.

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  • [–] -1 points 1 month ago* (2 children)

    In this case we don’t even have to worry about that distinction because the sloppy human operator and the manufacturer that’s developing one of the most consequential technologies in human history are one and the same and behaving like they’re the top cast of the next Mad Max instalment.

    They are both being reckless and they have proven understanding how how dangerous it is.

    The way systems will infinitely less societal consequences are tested is by building a replica interal sandbox of the real world with fake medicare records and then see if the stupid thing would go out and ignore guardrails and do the hacking.

    The culpability lies solely in how (insert whatever machine here) is operated. These fuckwits are ignoring so many established precedents on testing safety established in all kinds of risk-to-life fields like medical science, aerospace engineering, car safety testing, plenty of conventional IT systems.

    If the PM had a backbone he would issue a national security order banning all AI agent traffic and block access to open AI until the investigation is concluded.

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