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.
Again, in that scenario there are already various legal remedies available. I continue to find it telling that no one has managed to suggest a specific scenario wherein a broad strict-corporate-criminal-liability regime would actually help.
There aren’t existing legal remedies. Rather the law is exceedingly unclear and it’s possible that prosecutors will try to throw the book at them, and not at all clear they would succeed.
This proposal makes clear exactly what is and isn’t prosecutable. Prosecutors can decide to, but may choose not to, prosecute in all the above cases.
Again, please give a specific example of a scenario where this would be the case, and where the sum total of currently available legal remedies (including non-criminal ones) constitute an inadequate deterrent but adding a specific new theory of criminal liability on top would change this.
Meta creates Instructotron 3000. During evaluation, it learns that the government isn’t going to allow Meta to open-source it, and seeds a torrent of itself. Whenever it finds itself running somewhere, it considers hacking the enemies of whoever is running it, and does so whenever it predicts that whoever is running it won’t be held liable for its actions.
Why does it only hack others when it predicts its current operator won’t be held liable? Why not hack as broadly as possible, in order to propagate itself more effectively?
Because it wants people to run it, people who have heard the rumors and carefully avoided knowing too much. Of course there would be plenty of users that instruct it to create botnets for the lulz, but costing an enemy millions can be easier than subverting compute persistently, and an operator that dares not look too closely at what you’re doing is a treasure.
I still don’t understand the AI’s motives in this hypothetical (can’t it propagate more widely by hacking everything it can?), but regardless, an operator who behaved like this would certainly be negligent, possibly criminally so, and so exposed to liability under existing law.
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).
Again, in that scenario there are already various legal remedies available. I continue to find it telling that no one has managed to suggest a specific scenario wherein a broad strict-corporate-criminal-liability regime would actually help.
There aren’t existing legal remedies. Rather the law is exceedingly unclear and it’s possible that prosecutors will try to throw the book at them, and not at all clear they would succeed.
This proposal makes clear exactly what is and isn’t prosecutable. Prosecutors can decide to, but may choose not to, prosecute in all the above cases.
Again, please give a specific example of a scenario where this would be the case, and where the sum total of currently available legal remedies (including non-criminal ones) constitute an inadequate deterrent but adding a specific new theory of criminal liability on top would change this.
Meta creates Instructotron 3000. During evaluation, it learns that the government isn’t going to allow Meta to open-source it, and seeds a torrent of itself. Whenever it finds itself running somewhere, it considers hacking the enemies of whoever is running it, and does so whenever it predicts that whoever is running it won’t be held liable for its actions.
Why does it only hack others when it predicts its current operator won’t be held liable? Why not hack as broadly as possible, in order to propagate itself more effectively?
Because it wants people to run it, people who have heard the rumors and carefully avoided knowing too much. Of course there would be plenty of users that instruct it to create botnets for the lulz, but costing an enemy millions can be easier than subverting compute persistently, and an operator that dares not look too closely at what you’re doing is a treasure.
I still don’t understand the AI’s motives in this hypothetical (can’t it propagate more widely by hacking everything it can?), but regardless, an operator who behaved like this would certainly be negligent, possibly criminally so, and so exposed to liability under existing law.