Imagine a user asks an AI agent to “make me lots of money,” and the AI commits insider trading, cyberattacks a competitor company, or sets up a pyramid scheme. At no point did the user intend for a crime to occur, but the result of their prompt is a criminal act.
In this situation, the user is not liable. The user had no intention, they engaged in no crime, and they performed no criminal act.
The user may not be criminally liable, but the user is almost certainly going to be civilly liable for basically any of that. And the user may in fact be criminally liable as well; sometimes criminal law extends to the stronger forms of negligence. Sometimes you have to not only not intend for the crime to occur, but take reasonable measures to assure that it is not occurring.
It’s not a new problem, either. If you hire a human to “make you lots of money”, the law already has well-developed systems for deciding how responsible you are for how they choose to do it. Sure, those fail sometimes, just like anything else, but it’s not like there’s not a lot of established law out there.
Under our current laws, human taskers who work with AI will be protected from prosecution based on what’s called the “innocent agent” principle. Taskers would need to know they are engaged in a crime to be liable, and a lot of the time they may not.
Equally true if a human hires you to participate in a crime… and runs into sharp limits if you’re wilfully blind to signs that should tell you somthing shady is going on. I don’t think it’d actually be very practical, most of the time, to use any of the services you mention to get much in the way of crime done without at least some of the agents you hire knowing what you’re up to.
It would be equally useful for humans to hire agents that way, and sometimes they do, but it’s not a huge problem.
What specific crimes would you have in mind? Can you come up with some actual plans that would work?
Strengthen negligence law to make people more cautious about interacting with AI agents who are unverified.
Negligence law is pretty strong already. What specific changes would you make, and how would you expect them to help in actual practice?
Strict liability offences should be created to hold AI developers responsible for systemic risks / harms. These offences do not require intent.
Strict criminal liability is always a bad idea. Intentional indifference is about as far as you can go, and even that’s badly fraught.
Corporate governance crimes should be enacted that hold entire AI development teams responsible for AI agent crimes. This avoids the current issue where AI CEOs can say “some junior developer was responsible,” when in reality, it’s a corporate governance problem.
Just shooting everybody prophylactically would also avoid that sort of issue, but that doesn’t mean it’s a good, just, or safe idea.
There are already all kinds of rules about conspiracies. And stuff like RICO. Some of it already goes pretty darned far. I suspect there aren’t going to be many actual problems that aren’t already covered.
I didn’t cover negligence in my post but I cover it in the article. The main issue I see is that negligence requires foreseeability of a crime and recklessness. It’s hard to say the common user would foresee a crime, at least currently. They are prompting in a legal direction so they don’t directly foresee illegality. It’s also hard to argue recklessness for AI developers when they’re explicitly putting in safeguards and explicitly state that the AI should not commit crime.
I do think some of our existing laws will catch some situations, and users who give prompts that are borderline suggestive of crimes. You’re right that some users may be reckless, and I particularly think users who jailbreak an AI will definitely be reckless. There’s also good laws on conspiracies and RICO as you mentioned.
My main concern is that AI may have a greater capacity to break down a task into subtasks than a human could, and hire more humans for more innocent subtasks. If a human does know or suspect then obviously they’d be liable, the issue is how small these tasks could be.
The user may not be criminally liable, but the user is almost certainly going to be civilly liable for basically any of that. And the user may in fact be criminally liable as well; sometimes criminal law extends to the stronger forms of negligence. Sometimes you have to not only not intend for the crime to occur, but take reasonable measures to assure that it is not occurring.
It’s not a new problem, either. If you hire a human to “make you lots of money”, the law already has well-developed systems for deciding how responsible you are for how they choose to do it. Sure, those fail sometimes, just like anything else, but it’s not like there’s not a lot of established law out there.
Equally true if a human hires you to participate in a crime… and runs into sharp limits if you’re wilfully blind to signs that should tell you somthing shady is going on. I don’t think it’d actually be very practical, most of the time, to use any of the services you mention to get much in the way of crime done without at least some of the agents you hire knowing what you’re up to.
It would be equally useful for humans to hire agents that way, and sometimes they do, but it’s not a huge problem.
What specific crimes would you have in mind? Can you come up with some actual plans that would work?
Negligence law is pretty strong already. What specific changes would you make, and how would you expect them to help in actual practice?
Strict criminal liability is always a bad idea. Intentional indifference is about as far as you can go, and even that’s badly fraught.
Just shooting everybody prophylactically would also avoid that sort of issue, but that doesn’t mean it’s a good, just, or safe idea.
There are already all kinds of rules about conspiracies. And stuff like RICO. Some of it already goes pretty darned far. I suspect there aren’t going to be many actual problems that aren’t already covered.
I didn’t cover negligence in my post but I cover it in the article. The main issue I see is that negligence requires foreseeability of a crime and recklessness. It’s hard to say the common user would foresee a crime, at least currently. They are prompting in a legal direction so they don’t directly foresee illegality. It’s also hard to argue recklessness for AI developers when they’re explicitly putting in safeguards and explicitly state that the AI should not commit crime.
I do think some of our existing laws will catch some situations, and users who give prompts that are borderline suggestive of crimes. You’re right that some users may be reckless, and I particularly think users who jailbreak an AI will definitely be reckless. There’s also good laws on conspiracies and RICO as you mentioned.
My main concern is that AI may have a greater capacity to break down a task into subtasks than a human could, and hire more humans for more innocent subtasks. If a human does know or suspect then obviously they’d be liable, the issue is how small these tasks could be.