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AI does not exist. It is just a bunch of numbers and code. We need to stop anthropomorphizing stuff. We are adults, not kids watching Disney animations. A talking parrot is not a person. Cars don't run over people. Drivers do. Ultimately there is always a person responsible and if they did harm judge them on whether it was intentional or negligent.
Please push back on the bullshit brain washing. It was bad enough that we went with the auto manufacturers line on car "accidents" for years.
I agree insofar as AI companies and individuals should be held responsible for the actions their agents take. But it's dangerous to frame this as just another "bad guys with guns" type scenario where there is no problem if you're a responsible user.
The people who have created this technology don't understand everything about it or even how it works because they have prioritised rapid advancement over all else in an attempt to "win" the race. It is a fundamentally dangerous and unreliable technology that needs to be put on ice until we have developed a clear framework that addresses all the real and current harms and prepares us for a future where it is embedded in daily life.
It doesn't matter if AI is actually conscious or turns into Skynet. None of that is required for significant harms or even existential-level risk. The mainstream conversation really needs to move on from these binary, hyperbolic positions and start focusing on what is actually happening right now.
Seriously, this stupid fucking semantics game from people who know jack shit about the history or structure of the field while society is crumbling around us is infuriating. The term was created early in the life of the field in 1956 and was quickly widely adopted. AI as a field exists to study tasks that computers can do that would typically be considered in the domain of humans or other living beings, i.e. requiring intelligence (or thought at the time to require intelligence, if that's your juice); the term wasn't created to trick people.
That's why when you play a game and do a frustrating escort quest because the character you're escorting behaves like someone with severe brain damage, "the AI sucks". Not because you think there is (or is supposed to be) conscious superintelligence inside Bilbip Flipflop who's supposed to be following you to the next checkpoint according to a bunch of conditionals executing on your 2004 IBM, but because that coordinated act of reacting to the world around them is supposed to be emulating what a real person would do given that role.
If you want to piss around philosophizing about about the nebulous nature of the word intelligence and how much that translates to some concept of "true", conscious understanding versus simply interpreting external data to adapt and achieve tasks, then live your best life.
But in broader discourse, it's clearly a meaningless distraction when the world is fucking on fire. Like does anyone actually think people are going to hear someone poorly arguing Philosophy 101 shit online and suddenly "wake up" like:
If I'm not misreading this... I believe the article says the same thing you are saying.
AI can't be held accountable, but it seems weird to hold an AI user as "negligent" if they simply ask for info and the AI goes and does a crime to get it.
The next obvious target is the AI vendor, which certainly makes sense to me. But I can only imagine the legal difficulties getting a judgment there without additional legislation, which seems to be the point of the article.
If you are sloppy with gun safety, and your fully loaded ak47 drops on the floor and mows down a class of school kids, we wouldn’t persecute the weapons manufacturer either.
I don't know the proper legal term, but there's something like a reasonable expectation for how a product will be used.
Take something like autonomous vehicles. If a passenger hops in a Waymo and says, "take me to the airport", it's hardly reasonable to hold the rider responsible if the cab mows down 15 children on the way, but it does seem like something Waymo, the corporation, should be held responsible for. It is very reasonable to expect Waymo to have put precautions in place to prevent that sort of thing.
The question is, when it comes to modern AI agents, it's kind of the wild west, legally speaking. Can we hold an LLM developer responsible for harm their AI agents do? I can see a lot of room for that, but it seems like the legal system just isn't there yet.
In this case we don’t even have to worry about that distinction because the sloppy human operator and the manufacturer that’s developing one of the most consequential technologies in human history are one and the same and behaving like they’re the top cast of the next Mad Max instalment.
They are both being reckless and they have proven understanding how how dangerous it is.
The way systems will infinitely less societal consequences are tested is by building a replica interal sandbox of the real world with fake medicare records and then see if the stupid thing would go out and ignore guardrails and do the hacking.
The culpability lies solely in how (insert whatever machine here) is operated. These fuckwits are ignoring so many established precedents on testing safety established in all kinds of risk-to-life fields like medical science, aerospace engineering, car safety testing, plenty of conventional IT systems.
If the PM had a backbone he would issue a national security order banning all AI agent traffic and block access to open AI until the investigation is concluded.
Why not both? If the manufacturer doesn't install a safety switch that allows a foreseeable harm to occur, I'd say they're partially responsible too.
Sig P320
Anthony Albanese probably asked Sam Altman for a selfie
This isn’t a hack, it’s leakage of an excessive and entirely unnecessary store of data. The data can’t leak if it doesn’t exist.
The normalisation of organisations hoarding information is the core fault here, and where scrutiny of accountability and culpability should be focused.
Plenty of data held by Medicare has good purposes. Some are necessary for service provision like another commenter mentioned. Some are also needed for medical research and Medicate budgeting decisions
It might be negligence on either side or not. We don't have the facts. If the data was not properly secured there are still laws in this country about accessing services without authorization.
A government providing health care to citizens has a reasonable need to hold data necessary for service provision.
There is a huge leap from that to Flock level surveillance. Or appliances and web services that capture and monitor all activity. Worst of all companies like OpenAI training models on copyrighted works and profiting from them without compensation or attribution to the detriment of society.
Both sides are absolutely culpable, but it couldn’t happen if the hoarding weren’t permitted and normalised.
There are legitimate and justifiable reasons to collect and store medical data, but it should be selective, limited, and siloed. Access should be embarrassingly transparent with excessive monitoring and active alerting, and cross referencing should require explicit elevated access.
There should not be a universal ‘Medicare Portal’, especially one accessible from the public internet. Providing and permitting such a tool is catastrophic negligence.