94
An OpenAI agent hacked Medicare. Will anyone be held responsible? (theconversation.com)
submitted 1 month ago by to c/australianpolitics@aussie.zone
26 comments fedilink hide all child comments
 

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.

top 20 comments

sorted by: hot top controversial new old
[–] 24 points 1 month ago* (13 children)

AI does not exist. It is just a bunch of numbers and code. We need to stop anthropomorphizing stuff. We are adults, not kids watching Disney animations. A talking parrot is not a person. Cars don't run over people. Drivers do. Ultimately there is always a person responsible and if they did harm judge them on whether it was intentional or negligent.

Please push back on the bullshit brain washing. It was bad enough that we went with the auto manufacturers line on car "accidents" for years.

  • permalink
  • fedilink
  • source
  • hideshow 13 child comments
    •
  • [–] 15 points 1 month ago (7 children)

    If I'm not misreading this... I believe the article says the same thing you are saying.

    AI can't be held accountable, but it seems weird to hold an AI user as "negligent" if they simply ask for info and the AI goes and does a crime to get it.

    The next obvious target is the AI vendor, which certainly makes sense to me. But I can only imagine the legal difficulties getting a judgment there without additional legislation, which seems to be the point of the article.

  • permalink
  • fedilink
  • source
  • parent
  • hideshow 7 child comments
    •
  • [–] 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.

  • permalink
  • fedilink
  • source
  • parent
  • hideshow 6 child comments
    •
  • [–] 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.

  • permalink
  • fedilink
  • source
  • parent
  • hideshow 3 child comments
    •
  • [–] -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.

  • permalink
  • fedilink
  • source
  • parent
  • hideshow 2 child comments
    •
  • [+] 4 points 1 month ago (2 children)
    [deleted]
  • permalink
  • fedilink
  • source
  • parent
  • hideshow 2 child comments
    •
  • [–] 5 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago) (1 child)

    Seriously, this stupid fucking semantics game from people who know jack shit about the history or structure of the field while society is crumbling around us is infuriating. The term was created early in the life of the field in 1956 and was quickly widely adopted. AI as a field exists to study tasks that computers can do that would typically be considered in the domain of humans or other living beings, i.e. requiring intelligence (or thought at the time to require intelligence, if that's your juice); the term wasn't created to trick people.

    That's why when you play a game and do a frustrating escort quest because the character you're escorting behaves like someone with severe brain damage, "the AI sucks". Not because you think there is (or is supposed to be) conscious superintelligence inside Bilbip Flipflop who's supposed to be following you to the next checkpoint according to a bunch of conditionals executing on your 2004 IBM, but because that coordinated act of reacting to the world around them is supposed to be emulating what a real person would do given that role.

    If you want to piss around philosophizing about about the nebulous nature of the word intelligence and how much that translates to some concept of "true", conscious understanding versus simply interpreting external data to adapt and achieve tasks, then live your best life.

    But in broader discourse, it's clearly a meaningless distraction when society and the world it exists in are fucking on fire. Like anyone is going to see someone poorly arguing Philosophy 101 shit online nitpicking one of the most complex, widely covered, rapidly evolving topics on Earth and suddenly "wake up" about it like:

    Drake computer meme

  • permalink
  • fedilink
  • source
  • parent
  • hideshow 1 child comment
    •
    load more comments (1 reply)
  • [–] 1 point 1 month ago

    No no no. This is the wrong approach.

    If corporations are people (in the US: supreme court decision on Citizens United) then the outputs of these AIs are speech. We may not like it, but it's where we are.

    It's kind of wild to me that we watched the whole AI development cycle, but when it started getting squirrelly in terms of output, now we have to hedge. And, somehow, doom and gloom is the paid diversion.

    Maybe this is a massive failure, and people calling for caution because of the doom and gloom are marketing. It is designed to make people stop hating on the corporations who mindlessly pushed this anti-human trash.

  • permalink
  • fedilink
  • source
  • parent
    • [–] 5 points 1 month ago

    Anthony Albanese probably asked Sam Altman for a selfie

  • permalink
  • fedilink
  • source
    •
    [–] 5 points 1 month ago (4 children)

    This isn’t a hack, it’s leakage of an excessive and entirely unnecessary store of data. The data can’t leak if it doesn’t exist.

    The normalisation of organisations hoarding information is the core fault here, and where scrutiny of accountability and culpability should be focused.

  • permalink
  • fedilink
  • source
  • hideshow 4 child comments
    •
  • [–] 7 points 1 month ago* (1 child)

    It might be negligence on either side or not. We don't have the facts. If the data was not properly secured there are still laws in this country about accessing services without authorization.

    A government providing health care to citizens has a reasonable need to hold data necessary for service provision.

    There is a huge leap from that to Flock level surveillance. Or appliances and web services that capture and monitor all activity. Worst of all companies like OpenAI training models on copyrighted works and profiting from them without compensation or attribution to the detriment of society.

  • permalink
  • fedilink
  • source
  • parent
  • hideshow 1 child comment
    •
  • [–] 4 points 1 month ago

    Both sides are absolutely culpable, but it couldn’t happen if the hoarding weren’t permitted and normalised.

    There are legitimate and justifiable reasons to collect and store medical data, but it should be selective, limited, and siloed. Access should be embarrassingly transparent with excessive monitoring and active alerting, and cross referencing should require explicit elevated access.

    There should not be a universal ‘Medicare Portal’, especially one accessible from the public internet. Providing and permitting such a tool is catastrophic negligence.

  • permalink
  • fedilink
  • source
  • parent
    • [–] 1 point 1 month ago

    No

  • permalink
  • fedilink
  • source
    •