Grumpy Old Fart

🚨Sam Altman should be jailed - whistleblower Edward Snowden “Just because you put out a press release saying how ‘surprised’ you were that your AI model hacked your neighbor … that doesn’t release you from the liability,” Edward Snowden stated at the Ethics Forum at ETH Zurich. “I think we need to put Sam Altman in jail, and I think it would be an instructive experience,” Snowden concluded, adding that it is the prompter that is responsible for AI mistakes, as they are the ones who task the agents. 📑But the idea is that now they're talking about agentic AI, which I think is a huge mistake that they're gonna be discovering very soonly. You should not brand this thing as your agent because if the government uses it, you are an agent of government, and that means the Constitution applies to you. And if they ... the government is using your model running on your server, where you are submitting queries, they are then intercepting your query, applying their own system prompt to it, which recomposes your query running through their systems, and it makes a mistake, and people die as a result. Or even if it's correct, people die as a result, as they have in Iran, if reporting is to believe. They believe we're, we're bombing the wrong, buildings, you know, because, oopsie, the LLM made a mistake. And tremendous numbers of, you know, children, the most innocent that we can imagine, are being killed. 🚨Well, who owns the liability there? And of course, naturally, they would say the government owns the liability because you're never gonna successfully, uh, sue the government for this, even though they, they should eat it. But maybe that doesn't work anymore because maybe they are an agent of government. And I don't know where we're ever gonna see standing to sue on this, but we, we should. And people in this room, I think, are frankly going to be called upon in the course of their careers and the course of their studies and the course of whatever you do to contend with these kind of issues. 🚨Where are we gonna draw a line? Because an algorithm cannot make mistakes in the way that we understand it as, you know, you making an error. Because the errors in its outputs are not the computer's. It's the slave to its instructions. The responsibility lies with its developer, its programmer, its creator, its architect, which is to say responsibility lies with a person. And we cannot hide that. We cannot abrade that away, right? A gunmaker is not liable, it's true, for the misuse of a gun. But if during the testing of their latest piece of artillery, they mistakenly obliterate, you know, a nearby village it's not the cannon that should go to jail. And, you know, just because you put out a press release describing how surprised you were that your new model, you know, hacked the neighbor, or you know, how impressed you are by the destructive power of your missile, that doesn't release you from the liability of launching it. The missile didn't launch itself. You pushed it. And, and so there's a lot we can get into, but the idea that I want people to, contend with is, is how we deal with this. And right now, these closed models are saying AI safety, AI safety, safetyism, as they call it, where the idea is these things are so dangerous. Oh gosh, they're so dangerous, but they're so dazzling. They're so important. They're so valuable. We can't get rid of them. But, you know, oh, it's gonna kill some people, but it's all right. You know, that just happens. Oh, it's gonna hack some companies. Oops, you know, whatever. We'll invest in them. 🚨The idea here is who operates this? And this should apply to our devices more broadly around the world. Right now, you buy a cell phone from Apple, and before you're allowed to use it, you have to click okay to continue. And they go, "Well, you're assuming liability for that. You, you clicked okay to continue." You know, Google sells you an Android phone. Samsung sells you an Android phone. You click okay to continue, and now that's all you. But that can't be possibly how it works because you can't inspect the system. You can't understand how it's used. And particularly in the context of LLMs, where you are submitting queries to a model that they are running, where they are for your safety and everyone else's safety, intercepting the prompt and recomposing the prompt saying, "We're doing, uh, applying safety rules and transformations to it," that's on you. But it's not. I can't even see what you did. I asked you a question. You gave me something back in return. And if it's an agentic AI where I'm putting this thing in a harness, right? The harness being just a little program that basically uses these large models to feed it instructions that it can then provide to tools that are existing on your local system. So now your computer that is connected to the internet is being, frankly, remotely controlled, by a model that's far away that you don't understand how it works. But, you know, you hope it works pretty well. And frankly, they do work reasonably well. But every now and then, it might hack, you know, some random company or whatever out there. 🚨I think we need to put Sam Altman in jail, and I think it'll be an instructive experience.