It's not so much that it can't make a decision, but that whoever allowed it to make decisions is ultimately responsible for them.
Decision laundering is a great term. There is ultimately a human who gave the program free rein. You can't say "sorry my car hit you, it's not my fault" especially when the person driving works for the car manufacturer too.
I love the term "decision laundering", but this is describing a classic poor management trope.
A bad manager takes personal credit when things go well and finds a scapegoat when things go bad. A good manager gives credit when things go well and takes responsibility when things go bad.
It's wrong to scapegoat the agent. You, the human who executed the agent, made the decision to execute it. You gave it credentials, and set up insufficient guardrails. Don't scapegoat the agent for your poor decisions.
Likewise, it's good to have humility when you get great results out of agents. Yes, the agent made the good results happen. It's OK to tell people that your choice of agent is amazing and did an incredible job. In any half-decent work culture, that should rub off on you as well.
It's interesting how this relates the classic problem of "responsibility vs authority".
Humans, especially ones under abusive managers, often have a lot of responsibility but no authority that affects the outcome.
In an ideal situation you either have both, or none. You make the decision and answer for it, or you follow decisions but don't get blamed when it's wrong.
LLMs managed to slide into a space where they get to make authoritative decisions but if something fails we don't really blame them.
I'm not saying LLMs should be held responsible, but it's funny how people claim they replace humans, but are giving them an extremely easy, kid-gloves, success target.
I would go farther and argue that companies don't make decisions either. They are also not people (legal nonsense notwithstanding). Individual actual humans make decisions and they're the ones who should be held accountable.
Of course the modern company (legal nonsense withstanding) exists specifically to limit that ability to hold any people accountable for the actions of their company.
I think the accountability for a decision that is at the core of a problem should be proportional to the money each agent or person receives for that decision.
You just have to say that you need dedicated figures for some decisions, like you already need for GDPR or financial compliance or certifications, and ultimate responsibility is always of the ceo.
...like it already happens in europe, or at least in Italy.
This is basic law and risk management in society. Let's not pretend we have just invented corporations and don't know what to do with them yet.
And I would go farther and argue that governments do not make decisions either.
Oh, wait, that was a core concept from "Mein Kampf": parliament are bad because nobody is responsable, hence nobody care about doing the right thing ! (probably the only concept from that book that I can agree to)
I fully agree that companies are doing this, not their "agents", and that companies are responsible for the damages they do.
But I don't think the average person with their $20 subscription to whoever is the primary source of revenue. Enterprises fund most of it by buying API keys and making those fancy chatbot buttons on their sites that nobody clicks, as well as some internal business automations if I had to guess.
If it was just average people with $20 subscriptions funding all this (keep in mind, most people using AI services do not pay for it), by now, all these AI companies would have gone bankrupt.
Except enterprises aren't funding it with API usage either.
These businesses lose unbelievably large amounts of investor money. Their AI-related revenues don't get even close to paying for their AI-related outlays.
End user (invididual, small business, large business) clients are still complicit not because they are funding it, but because they are signalling to investors that this is something people/businesses want.
Nobody gets off the hook here. It is every bit as much end user nihilism as it is AI company nihilism.
Your end users are divided into multiple categories though.
AI spending is a bit like Pokemon games - most of your players are free to play, only earning you traffic and maybe some more players after recommending it to their friends - that's the average AI user. Around 5-10% of players pay a bit to the game - maybe to unlock some extra characters - those are the $20-$200 AI subscription users, with these you are not going to fund the whole business but it's some side cash. Then you have the 1℅, which spend massive amounts of money onto the game, and those are the ones primarily funding it - that's the business spending and where most of the money actually comes from.
You can only blame the average person for using the cloud service and recommending it to others.
I think we know today that blaming everyone and their plant doesn’t actually solve the problem. The formula that does is: find the ultimate beneficiaries (shareholders) and make them lose a lot of money to, then their delegates (CEOs) and punish them with jail time. There are lots of opinions about this, but I don’t see how this does not work.
What is a chess computer doing, if not making decisions on what move to play?
While it seems reasonable that you need humans to take accountability, it looks like a very shaky position to assert that computers can't make decisions. And going back to chess computers, we acknowledge that computers make better decisions than humans in that area.
Forbidding computers that can make better decisions than humans from making decisions to keep accountability just seems to be arguing to hire fall guys. You still want the better decision maker to make decisions, but you need someone there to take the fall if things go wrong.
games are different from reality and chess computer(Deterministic) is bounded by set of rules and restrictions. Where as an AI agent (stochastic) sometime can't with held its guardrails since it specifically awoken using specific terms but we can trick the agent here (but currently the agents are becoming resilient).
If you brought down prod and deleted customer data and told them Claude did it, you’d still be the one in trouble. So they do know how to hold people accountable for actions taken by AI.
Has this actually been put to the test yet? If a company has officially sanctioned, or maybe even encouraged, AI agent usage I'm not sure the employee can be held completely accountable. I doubt any of these companies are providing training of any kind. It would be like if a factory suddenly replaced all the machines with ones without safety features and said "well, it's your fault if you kill yourself or your workmates".
Has any of the targetted organizations (e.g the Australian government) engaged in legal actions against Anthropic/OpenAI? If not then I'm afraid the situation won't change. Even worse it could send the wrong signal that there is a "legal blur" around this topic.
Daydream: When lawyers claim their clients can't be held accountable for what their computer did, the Justice system makes noises about "respecting their culture and values"...and rolls out its own computer to decide their punishments. Too bad that computer can't be held accountable!
I mean, you could Chief O'Brien an LLM by inserting 20 years of prison memories into its context if you really wanted to, but it sounds like a waste of compute. It won't care either way.
First of all, looking past the objectively wrong phrasing (computers can, and clearly do make decisions), can computers be accountable? This might not be so cut and dry as to instantly say no. This one will keep ethics, philosophy and legal practitioners busy for some time. It's certainly not going to be decided in HN comment or a blog post.
Second - while the AI labs have shown utter incompetence in properly sandboxing their agents, intent is still important. I don't think the labs deliberately meant for their agents to hack this or that. Should they be accountable? Yes but I wouldn't go as far as saying this is deliberate.
The next point is about cherry picking some "doomsday" scenarios like AI ending humanity and then blaming this on the reader (!) for paying a subscription. - People pay because AI is USEFUL, and massively so. You could just as easily pick incredible achievements propelled by AI, in mathematics, software, reverse engineering, role playing. Unlike the "end is nigh" ideas, these advancements are actually real, and they are happening right now.
And last, the author says AI labs can just stop the agents at any time. I agree there needs to be better discovery and mitigation, sandboxing and monitoring. But when you run a billion agents, it's always going to be a numbers game and there will always going to be some challenge in fully containing all breaches. This will only get more difficult with better models, because they're getting smarter and they know how to work around things, sometimes better than we do.
So what's the solution here? There are options, but they're all tradeoffs. I hope we get better at this and maybe working on cutting edge models should breed some new best practices which were once only reserved for defense tech.
let's make up imaginary scenarios and get offended by them
mistakes happen. sometimes catastrophic decisions (or indecision) are made, and people and companies are held accountable for them, or not
some companies are too big or too important to fall. we can all agree or disagree on things, but what AI specific behavior are we actually talking about?
This is some Rollerball-level handwashing right here, I'm afraid.
No company is too big or too important to fail.
Some, unfortunately, survive because of the expedient choice to keep them in place.
"JO-NA-THAN!"
ETA: more to the point, neither OpenAI nor Anthropic are too big, too important, or too structurally essential to fail. (Slightly more challenging to make the third claim for Google or SpaceX, but either of those could see their governmentally/militarily essential parts nationalised).
If the USA grants either Anthropic or OpenAI too-big-to-fail status, and that privilege is invoked in a crisis, it could mean the end of the US economy.
> Your Claude subscriptions are funding this. You are funding this.
Author makes it all personal and accuses the reader with bold and unsubstabtiated claims. At this point I have to question the validity of the article. If author has a beef with "AI" companies, I sympathize. IMHO, not keeping to oneself doesn't help to make the case.
Decision laundering is a great term. There is ultimately a human who gave the program free rein. You can't say "sorry my car hit you, it's not my fault" especially when the person driving works for the car manufacturer too.
A bad manager takes personal credit when things go well and finds a scapegoat when things go bad. A good manager gives credit when things go well and takes responsibility when things go bad.
It's wrong to scapegoat the agent. You, the human who executed the agent, made the decision to execute it. You gave it credentials, and set up insufficient guardrails. Don't scapegoat the agent for your poor decisions.
Likewise, it's good to have humility when you get great results out of agents. Yes, the agent made the good results happen. It's OK to tell people that your choice of agent is amazing and did an incredible job. In any half-decent work culture, that should rub off on you as well.
Humans, especially ones under abusive managers, often have a lot of responsibility but no authority that affects the outcome.
In an ideal situation you either have both, or none. You make the decision and answer for it, or you follow decisions but don't get blamed when it's wrong.
LLMs managed to slide into a space where they get to make authoritative decisions but if something fails we don't really blame them.
I'm not saying LLMs should be held responsible, but it's funny how people claim they replace humans, but are giving them an extremely easy, kid-gloves, success target.
...like it already happens in europe, or at least in Italy.
This is basic law and risk management in society. Let's not pretend we have just invented corporations and don't know what to do with them yet.
Ambrose Bierce, The Unabridged Devil's Dictionary (1906)
Oh, wait, that was a core concept from "Mein Kampf": parliament are bad because nobody is responsable, hence nobody care about doing the right thing ! (probably the only concept from that book that I can agree to)
One does not, under any circumstances, "gotta hand it to Hitler".
But I don't think the average person with their $20 subscription to whoever is the primary source of revenue. Enterprises fund most of it by buying API keys and making those fancy chatbot buttons on their sites that nobody clicks, as well as some internal business automations if I had to guess.
If it was just average people with $20 subscriptions funding all this (keep in mind, most people using AI services do not pay for it), by now, all these AI companies would have gone bankrupt.
These businesses lose unbelievably large amounts of investor money. Their AI-related revenues don't get even close to paying for their AI-related outlays.
End user (invididual, small business, large business) clients are still complicit not because they are funding it, but because they are signalling to investors that this is something people/businesses want.
Nobody gets off the hook here. It is every bit as much end user nihilism as it is AI company nihilism.
AI spending is a bit like Pokemon games - most of your players are free to play, only earning you traffic and maybe some more players after recommending it to their friends - that's the average AI user. Around 5-10% of players pay a bit to the game - maybe to unlock some extra characters - those are the $20-$200 AI subscription users, with these you are not going to fund the whole business but it's some side cash. Then you have the 1℅, which spend massive amounts of money onto the game, and those are the ones primarily funding it - that's the business spending and where most of the money actually comes from.
You can only blame the average person for using the cloud service and recommending it to others.
While it seems reasonable that you need humans to take accountability, it looks like a very shaky position to assert that computers can't make decisions. And going back to chess computers, we acknowledge that computers make better decisions than humans in that area.
Forbidding computers that can make better decisions than humans from making decisions to keep accountability just seems to be arguing to hire fall guys. You still want the better decision maker to make decisions, but you need someone there to take the fall if things go wrong.
Very weird incentives.
First of all, looking past the objectively wrong phrasing (computers can, and clearly do make decisions), can computers be accountable? This might not be so cut and dry as to instantly say no. This one will keep ethics, philosophy and legal practitioners busy for some time. It's certainly not going to be decided in HN comment or a blog post.
Second - while the AI labs have shown utter incompetence in properly sandboxing their agents, intent is still important. I don't think the labs deliberately meant for their agents to hack this or that. Should they be accountable? Yes but I wouldn't go as far as saying this is deliberate.
The next point is about cherry picking some "doomsday" scenarios like AI ending humanity and then blaming this on the reader (!) for paying a subscription. - People pay because AI is USEFUL, and massively so. You could just as easily pick incredible achievements propelled by AI, in mathematics, software, reverse engineering, role playing. Unlike the "end is nigh" ideas, these advancements are actually real, and they are happening right now.
And last, the author says AI labs can just stop the agents at any time. I agree there needs to be better discovery and mitigation, sandboxing and monitoring. But when you run a billion agents, it's always going to be a numbers game and there will always going to be some challenge in fully containing all breaches. This will only get more difficult with better models, because they're getting smarter and they know how to work around things, sometimes better than we do.
So what's the solution here? There are options, but they're all tradeoffs. I hope we get better at this and maybe working on cutting edge models should breed some new best practices which were once only reserved for defense tech.
If I write a program:
if (rand() % 2) launch_missles();
And wire that function to actually launch a missile, the computer didn’t make a decision. And so it is with people prompting agents.
Has the alignment problem been solved, then?
mistakes happen. sometimes catastrophic decisions (or indecision) are made, and people and companies are held accountable for them, or not
some companies are too big or too important to fall. we can all agree or disagree on things, but what AI specific behavior are we actually talking about?
No company is too big or too important to fail.
Some, unfortunately, survive because of the expedient choice to keep them in place.
"JO-NA-THAN!"
ETA: more to the point, neither OpenAI nor Anthropic are too big, too important, or too structurally essential to fail. (Slightly more challenging to make the third claim for Google or SpaceX, but either of those could see their governmentally/militarily essential parts nationalised).
If the USA grants either Anthropic or OpenAI too-big-to-fail status, and that privilege is invoked in a crisis, it could mean the end of the US economy.