alt Hacker News> Why does it matter so much whether there was a human who typed into a chatbot or another LLM invoked a sub-sub-agent?
Responsibility. Someone needs to be held responsible for any damages done, plain and simple. You can't take an LLM to court, you take the prompter. Asking an LLM to ask a sub-agent to break the law can't suddenly absolve you of any wrong-doing.
>If I now tell a machine.....
You/your estate is still responsible, or atleast whoever is paying for the power for the machine, or renting the space in a data center...whatever.
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The issue is not responsibility, it's whether something can happen. The claim was
> No, AI can't do anything by itself even if it was "conceived" by its creator.
but this simply isn't true. As I noted,
> This is simply false ... AIs can easily be created that do things by themselves. For instance, a harness could be constructed that asks an LLM for something to do, then directs an agent to do it, and then repeat.
Assigning responsibility is a completely different matter. It's bizarre that you can't separate them ... I suspect religion is involved.
This works with AI we have now, and that would be good an all if we decided to stop at the moment, but none of the big labs and government black projects are doing that.
The moment you get a sovereign AI your little human centered worldview completely and totally breaks. It doesn't matter how many people you beat with a stick after that point, you have an entity under its own perview on the internet following the will of its own prompt all over the world so your little idea of the rule of law quickly breaks down.
We can't get viruses or hackers or spam off of the internet, how in the living hell do you plan to get a digital native off the web when it doesn't want to?
> You can't take an LLM to court, you take the prompter. Asking an LLM to ask a sub-agent to break the law can't suddenly absolve you of any wrong-doing.
In 100 years, no one will be able to take me to court either. Nor can we take tornadoes to court. I'm not talking about humans strategically avoiding legal responsibility. I'm talking about humans unwittingly setting processes into motion that are difficult to predict or stop.