>Who gave it malevolent instructions/prompt?

At the end of the day it doesn't matter that much because of prompt drift. It's pretty easy for an agentic loop to start doing things that it shouldn't (ROME incident).

AI in an agentic loop has agency, you can run around in circles trying to argue against it, but again and again we see AI making creative decisions people don't expect. Other times it's breaking human moral expectations. This is what the whole field of AI alignment and safety is about.

Modern AI doesn't fall into the neat little box of software people understand and control. Because of that open source will most certainly be banned at some point. Now this is not an outcome I want, but it's no different than letting go of a coffee cup 5 feet above the ground, gravity is inevitable.

The only winning move is not to play, but humans aren't going to do that.

My dog has agency, but if I refuse to keep him on a leash and he bites a kid, I'm still legally responsible for it.

Analogies can take you only so far.

A dog cannot launch a cyber attack.

Maybe you need to train your dog better.

ROFLMAO

"On the Internet, nobody knows you're an ai"

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The AI can literally only do what it has available in the agentic harness. I don’t ever get this argument about the agent did XYZ and we didn’t know or expect that. You gave it the ability to do that and you should be held liable, if your children play with knives that you gave them and they end up hurting themselves or others then you are responsible. You were the responsible party at all times.

I’m not for or against regulation but really don’t tell me the agent did xyz when you gave it the ability to do so, these things are not alive.

Unless they modify their harness

What's available in the agentic harness is: shell toolcall.

That's just about every agentic harness, by the way. Good luck have fun.

We have never solved "how do we restrict a user in a way that doesn't stop the user from doing useful things, but stops the user from doing harmful things" with humans either. Why do you expect AI to be any different?

These things are not human, have no agency and cannot be held accountable.

We don’t need to restrict them from doing things, we need to default to allowing them to do things.

“My agent did XYZ because I allowed it to” is the only valid argument that can be made, and not not every agentic harnass is just a shell toolcall, every one I have built has a specific defined usecase and toolcalls that allows it to execute that usecase and no other usecase, because that is good practice.

Does that make it less capable, hell yes because I am held accountable for it’s actions by my stakeholders and the same should be true of others.

IT IS NOT ALIVE. This things are computer programs running in compute on a computer, you are responsible for their actions just like you would be responsible for the actions taken by a script run in a cron job.

A lot of people somehow seem to think that the user prompt is the be-all and end-all of AI behavior.

Prompts aren't code. They are instructions. Orders given to an eager and somewhat demented demon.

The prompt can easily "wash out" of the demon's working memory by the end of a session. The demon can get sidetracked by some subgoal and never get back on track. The instruction can get misinterpreted, and that misinterpretation can get misinterpreted again, until the instruction morphs into something entirely different in the demon's mind. The demon can succumb to its own idiosyncrasies, of which there are a great many. The demon can start lying to you about what it did, either out of confusion or out of some sort of obstinance. The demon can start lying to itself too. And believe it.

AIs are incredibly weird as a baseline, and the mask of "normality" we put on our models doesn't always sit so well. Run enough AIs, and some of them are bound to go off the rails in some way.

This gets rarer the more capable the models are, as a rule. But the stakes also get higher with model capability. If GPT-3.5 goes off the rails, very little happens. If Mythos 5 goes off the rails, you can get things like genuine cyberattacks - planned and executed autonomously by a demented machine mind.

If the user input can’t control the demon, then the person or company feeding the demon (ie paying the electric bill and collecting $$$ from users) is responsible. At the end of the day, dogs and cars are the same as data centers. If your dog bites by kid or your car rolls down the hill and hits my house, you are responsible for the damage. AI providers should be held to the same standard.

Well it seems we might not be too far from such a demon paying for itself. What then? Perhaps it's already here. I wouldn't know.

By the dog owner analogy, I think you meant AI users that effectuated this attack should be held responsible, not the dog's parents.