I'm surprised nobody makes a connection with animal ownership / responsibility.
If your dog maims someone else, you are responsible for the dog's actions, unless it was self-defense.
On the other hand, if people start arguing that if LLM's are like animals, some will start arguing they're like Godzilla..., or at least a panther, but there's probably laws against keeping arbitrarily dangerous / powerful animals as pets.
Perhaps animal welfare should intervene and house ChatGPT,etc. in better conditions?
While I agree, that isn’t true of all pets. It doesn’t apply to cats for example.
I’ve pasted an extract from a UK guide on legal responsibilities of cat ownership below, which to me sounds similar to AI. If the inbuilt behaviour is ‘it’s nature’ then perhaps there is less legal repercussions if the tool does something outside of its known guardrail/guidelines to meet its goal.
“Cat owners are generally not responsible for the 'normal' behaviour of cats because the law accepts that cats tend to wander into other properties and have instincts which, for example, lead them to prey on small birds. So cat owners should be reassured that the simple fact of their cat trespassing onto a neighbour's land would not make them responsible if, for example, the cat kills a pigeon or garden bird, urinates on plants or flowers, or defecates in a neighbour's soil. These would be 'normal' cat behaviours that would be expected”
https://www.gccfcats.org/ownership-health-welfare/owning-a-c...
> Perhaps animal welfare should intervene and house ChatGPT,etc. in better conditions?
I first saw a headline to the effect that this was a PETA some decades ago.
I cannot recall now if this was April 1st, an instance of Gell-Mann amnesia, or sincere.