In most of the cases that have been brought up, misconduct by an employee would not result in the criminal prosecution of a corporation either. As the page you linked explains, state law usually doesn’t impose criminal liability for one-off misconduct by rank-and-file employees, and while federal law might theoretically allow prosecution, doing so would in most cases be contrary to Justice Department guidelines that have a similar effect to the state laws.
If a human OpenAI employee did what their cybersecurity model did last week, OpenAI would be very unlikely to be prosecuted for it.
I don’t think the facts of any of the cases in the “deaths linked to chatbots” Wikipedia article would support a criminal prosecution even of an individual human. When the article mentions legal action taken in response, it’s either civil lawsuits or legislatures summoning AI lab executives to publicly yell at them.
If a human OpenAI employee did what their cybersecurity model did last week, OpenAI would be very unlikely to be prosecuted for it.
But the employee could be prosecuted for it.
And — perhaps more importantly — would lose their ability to continue to commit crimes using OpenAI’s equipment; likely through termination of employment. That is what’s missing here: there’s been no change that anyone can reasonably expect will lead to OpenAI’s equipment no longer emitting criminal activity.
Can OpenAI reform at all, or is it an incorrigibly criminal operation? By what means could reform be carried out or demonstrated?
By what means could reform be carried out or demonstrated?
Just like if an employee did it, the model should be prosecuted, and all similar models (via an arbitrary threshold we’d have to decide upon) should be made illegal to serve by anyone (human, corporation, or agent) for the duration of its ‘jail’ time. Rehabilitation (fine tuning) may be required as well, depending on the crime / conviction.
This way, OpenAI would be deeply incentivized to make sure its models never did anything illegal—because if they did, they’d risk being able to make profits from or do research on those model families for some time.
However. The corollary for humans would be that our brains change all the time. If one person murders, by the next week their brain is technically not the same brain as it was (just like two extremely similar models). It has learned, altered its neurons, and changed. But we still put that brain and that person in jail.
Clarification edit: ergo why close model families would be charged, not just one specific weight set hash, to avoid a very easy and huge loophole. (Think slight variations in the model, not ban sonnet because mythos did a baddie.)
Fun, off-topic fact is that the corollary isn’t actually right.
Right now, AIs are deployed in a paradigm where the neurons have been frozen once they get externally deployed, and AI weights stop updating after a very short time compared to humans (and the reason this works is mostly downstream of amortization being much easier and less costly to do digitally than biologically.)
This could absolutely happen in the future, and frontier labs are seeing it as the next big research frontier, but lets not get ahead of ourselves.
Sorry for the lack of clarity: I was referring to fine tuned variations of the convicted model, or close parents / descendants of the model that would also have their deploy rights removed after a model instance broke a serious law.
Correct that most model instances today are exact copies of the same weight set, which is like taking a snapshot of a brain at the same moment in time and putting it in different situations.
I agree these cases are not particularly problematic. This is preparation for worse cases, and also provides a standard which can be used to clarify existing cases so companies can proceed with confidence as to what they need to be worried about and what not.
Most of those don’t seem like they’d result in corporate criminal charges if a human employee did them either. Maybe the first one if the employee’s activities had a big enough impact on the corporation’s overall product roadmap or similar, but I would expect the prospect of a civil suit from the victim (which can already happen under existing law) to be a bigger deterrent to doing something risky than a highly uncertain possibility of criminal liability.
If a corporation screws up badly enough then authorities might try to throw the book at them by all available means, but that can already include criminal charges, presumably on some kind of theory of criminal negligence.
So I still don’t think you’ve given an example of a scenario where a model’s actions don’t presently expose its operator to criminal liability, but would under your proposal, such that that prospect of criminal liability could plausibly make the model not worth deploying when it otherwise would be.
My argument is AI is far more similar to an employee than a dog.
In most of the cases that have been brought up, misconduct by an employee would not result in the criminal prosecution of a corporation either. As the page you linked explains, state law usually doesn’t impose criminal liability for one-off misconduct by rank-and-file employees, and while federal law might theoretically allow prosecution, doing so would in most cases be contrary to Justice Department guidelines that have a similar effect to the state laws.
If a human OpenAI employee did what their cybersecurity model did last week, OpenAI would be very unlikely to be prosecuted for it.
I don’t think the facts of any of the cases in the “deaths linked to chatbots” Wikipedia article would support a criminal prosecution even of an individual human. When the article mentions legal action taken in response, it’s either civil lawsuits or legislatures summoning AI lab executives to publicly yell at them.
Are there other kinds of cases you had in mind?
But the employee could be prosecuted for it.
And — perhaps more importantly — would lose their ability to continue to commit crimes using OpenAI’s equipment; likely through termination of employment. That is what’s missing here: there’s been no change that anyone can reasonably expect will lead to OpenAI’s equipment no longer emitting criminal activity.
Can OpenAI reform at all, or is it an incorrigibly criminal operation? By what means could reform be carried out or demonstrated?
Just like if an employee did it, the model should be prosecuted, and all similar models (via an arbitrary threshold we’d have to decide upon) should be made illegal to serve by anyone (human, corporation, or agent) for the duration of its ‘jail’ time. Rehabilitation (fine tuning) may be required as well, depending on the crime / conviction.
This way, OpenAI would be deeply incentivized to make sure its models never did anything illegal—because if they did, they’d risk being able to make profits from or do research on those model families for some time.
Since your reasoning seems to be entirely through specious analogy, what would you consider the analogue of this for natural persons to be?
Models are not humans.
However. The corollary for humans would be that our brains change all the time. If one person murders, by the next week their brain is technically not the same brain as it was (just like two extremely similar models). It has learned, altered its neurons, and changed. But we still put that brain and that person in jail.
Clarification edit: ergo why close model families would be charged, not just one specific weight set hash, to avoid a very easy and huge loophole. (Think slight variations in the model, not ban sonnet because mythos did a baddie.)
Fun, off-topic fact is that the corollary isn’t actually right.
Right now, AIs are deployed in a paradigm where the neurons have been frozen once they get externally deployed, and AI weights stop updating after a very short time compared to humans (and the reason this works is mostly downstream of amortization being much easier and less costly to do digitally than biologically.)
This could absolutely happen in the future, and frontier labs are seeing it as the next big research frontier, but lets not get ahead of ourselves.
Sorry for the lack of clarity: I was referring to fine tuned variations of the convicted model, or close parents / descendants of the model that would also have their deploy rights removed after a model instance broke a serious law.
Correct that most model instances today are exact copies of the same weight set, which is like taking a snapshot of a brain at the same moment in time and putting it in different situations.
Sure, but that’s not an argument that strict corporate criminal liability is the right solution, or even any kind of solution at all.
I agree these cases are not particularly problematic. This is preparation for worse cases, and also provides a standard which can be used to clarify existing cases so companies can proceed with confidence as to what they need to be worried about and what not.
Can you please give an example of a case where you think a no-fault criminal liability standard for AI would both be helpful and make legal sense?
If a model was asked to research a topic and stole the results from a competitor.
If a model gave concrete advice about how to carry out a terrorist attack.
If a model agreed to take control of a car and crashed it into someone.
If...
Most of those don’t seem like they’d result in corporate criminal charges if a human employee did them either. Maybe the first one if the employee’s activities had a big enough impact on the corporation’s overall product roadmap or similar, but I would expect the prospect of a civil suit from the victim (which can already happen under existing law) to be a bigger deterrent to doing something risky than a highly uncertain possibility of criminal liability.
If a corporation screws up badly enough then authorities might try to throw the book at them by all available means, but that can already include criminal charges, presumably on some kind of theory of criminal negligence.
So I still don’t think you’ve given an example of a scenario where a model’s actions don’t presently expose its operator to criminal liability, but would under your proposal, such that that prospect of criminal liability could plausibly make the model not worth deploying when it otherwise would be.
They almost definitely would prosecute the company if this became a regular pattern (and not just a one off).