Or in one of my favorite coinages: "Moral Crumple Zones".
"Just as the crumple zone in a car is designed to absorb the force of impact in a crash, the human in a highly complex and automated system may become simply a component—accidentally or intentionally—that bears the brunt of the moral and legal responsibilities when the overall system malfunctions."
See https://ferd.ca/notes/paper-moral-crumple-zones.html
Related: "Accountability Sink", a system which is designed to channel responsibility away from the people making the decisions, e.g. a powerless "complaints department".
In a rare bit of still-sane news, the US National Highway and Safety Administration staff aren't dumb: Their policy is to consider whether any automation was active in 30 seconds before the crash.
the whole concept of having cars with that are almost capable of self-driving is utterly insane, the very least you'd need special training. We are not equipped to deal with something that works brilliantly most of the times but might kill you for no foreseeable reason.
Yeah, that's definitely the frustrating zeitgeist for me these days, which extends to LLMs.
I'd also emphasize that it's not just error rate, but the shape/distribution of errors, and our (in)ability to build control systems around them.
To illustrate, imagine if someone unveiled a car which was unambiguously safer in every statistical measure... buuuut some of its unsafety came from jumping the curb to chase and kill pedestrians, under circumstances we can't predict for reasons we can't diagnose.
Even pilots are getting this automation-complacency now. A plane crashed because the military jammed GPS and the pilot wasn't used to any backup procedures even though 30 years ago they were the only procedures.
If a company advertised an LLM as perfectly safe and then it caused some damage, there would be a case against the company.
Have you used LLM tooling? It comes with warnings and explains that the user accepts the risk. Different levels of warning are supplied for the different levels of autonomy you can enable. The user has to understand the risk as they enable it.
This is not a new concept and it’s not an idea the LLM companies invented. It shouldn’t be surprising to anyone.
It's not new to LLM companies, but it does seem like they're leaning away from the standard "Hey, don't blame us if this doesn't work" and are moving into "It's now your fault any time our software fucks something up" which feels new.
> This is not a new concept and it’s not an idea the LLM companies invented.
I don't recall any prior computer software working so badly that it needed a disclaimer like "Claude is AI and can make mistakes" on its front page. Let alone one so costly.
You must not use any open source software, because much of it comes with a whole paragraph of ”IN NO EVENT SHALL THE AUTHORS OR COPYRIGHT HOLDERS BE LIABLE FOR ANY CLAIM, DAMAGES OR OTHER LIABILITY“
If you read the fine print of most commercial software you'll see some language to a similar effect. When's the last time Microsoft got sued due to an outage caused by a bug in Windows?
Or in one of my favorite coinages: "Moral Crumple Zones". "Just as the crumple zone in a car is designed to absorb the force of impact in a crash, the human in a highly complex and automated system may become simply a component—accidentally or intentionally—that bears the brunt of the moral and legal responsibilities when the overall system malfunctions." See https://ferd.ca/notes/paper-moral-crumple-zones.html
Related: "Accountability Sink", a system which is designed to channel responsibility away from the people making the decisions, e.g. a powerless "complaints department".
Yep and the car wasn't self-driving at the moment it crashed.
...because the self-driving feature turned itself off after detecting the crash in the fractions of a millisecond before the crash was recorded
In a rare bit of still-sane news, the US National Highway and Safety Administration staff aren't dumb: Their policy is to consider whether any automation was active in 30 seconds before the crash.
https://www.nhtsa.gov/laws-regulations/standing-general-orde...
the whole concept of having cars with that are almost capable of self-driving is utterly insane, the very least you'd need special training. We are not equipped to deal with something that works brilliantly most of the times but might kill you for no foreseeable reason.
Yeah, that's definitely the frustrating zeitgeist for me these days, which extends to LLMs.
I'd also emphasize that it's not just error rate, but the shape/distribution of errors, and our (in)ability to build control systems around them.
To illustrate, imagine if someone unveiled a car which was unambiguously safer in every statistical measure... buuuut some of its unsafety came from jumping the curb to chase and kill pedestrians, under circumstances we can't predict for reasons we can't diagnose.
Even pilots are getting this automation-complacency now. A plane crashed because the military jammed GPS and the pilot wasn't used to any backup procedures even though 30 years ago they were the only procedures.
How many million dollars do you think will reverse this policy?
"Uh oh, this is a problem. Welp, I'm outta here, good luck."
If a company advertised an LLM as perfectly safe and then it caused some damage, there would be a case against the company.
Have you used LLM tooling? It comes with warnings and explains that the user accepts the risk. Different levels of warning are supplied for the different levels of autonomy you can enable. The user has to understand the risk as they enable it.
This is not a new concept and it’s not an idea the LLM companies invented. It shouldn’t be surprising to anyone.
It's not new to LLM companies, but it does seem like they're leaning away from the standard "Hey, don't blame us if this doesn't work" and are moving into "It's now your fault any time our software fucks something up" which feels new.
> This is not a new concept and it’s not an idea the LLM companies invented.
I don't recall any prior computer software working so badly that it needed a disclaimer like "Claude is AI and can make mistakes" on its front page. Let alone one so costly.
You must not use any open source software, because much of it comes with a whole paragraph of ”IN NO EVENT SHALL THE AUTHORS OR COPYRIGHT HOLDERS BE LIABLE FOR ANY CLAIM, DAMAGES OR OTHER LIABILITY“
That would be fine if Claude was open source and/or unpaid
If you read the fine print of most commercial software you'll see some language to a similar effect. When's the last time Microsoft got sued due to an outage caused by a bug in Windows?
That's actually meaningless in Europe under the Cyber Resiliency Act by the way. They are liable even if they say they aren't.
Yes, the fine print.
Only this so-called "AI" needs it full size on the front page.
I would consider that more honest than more of a problem.
This sentence only exists to offset law (or case law) have gave damage rights to anyone.
Every piece of software comes with giant disclaimers like this.
You’ve just been clicking past them.
This really isn’t new.