A contractor has agency and accountability - something that an LLM (or similarly, a nail gun or a hammer or a bot net) does not have. When you anthropomorphize a tool, you implicitly give it agency and remove responsibility from the wielder of the tool.
Right. Among bicycle advocacy groups it's been well known for long time that cars do not run over people, drivers do.
The fact that we talk about a car running someone over, and this is the same in many different languages and countries, contributes to lower punishments for drivers. Clearly it was just an accident. He or she was run over by a car.
Now we see that same language tricks play out again every time an LLM did something illegal.
You say this flippantly, but I think this is actually another very good example!
We even do it for obviously unintelligent inanimate objects. A rollercoaster ran too fast for its tracks, killing 10 people. In that sentence, the roller coaster is the subject which took an action and caused death — obviously the roller coaster is not ethically at fault here, the people who built the rollercoaster are at fault through negligence.
Although this example and the ones around cars both demonstrate how we tolerate some degree of "accidents" from humans as no-fault, which is fair. I wonder how that fits into this analogy? I suppose its all about intent (mens rea) and judgement: did they intend for the roller coaster to harm people, and should they have reasonably predicted that the accident was likely to happen.
Right, and negligence is a broad concept and could be criminal in itself. As a car driver, glancing at your phone at exactly the wrong moment could kill someone. Clearly that is an accident, but if you know fully well that lookin at your phone while driving could kill someone, that negligence is willful and that should matter. The same can be said about doing things like strapping thousands of LLMs to systems that have the potential to disturb other poeple.
I get where you are coming from but this wasn’t a tool just left laying around, this is similar to rigging up a booby trapped shot gun to your door and then claiming the victim is responsible.
If you build a robot that shoots a bunch of TVs in your back yard, have at it. But the second that thing goes off your property you’re the one responsible.
FWIW, a robot that fires a weapon independently is considered an automatic weapon, and the ATF will want to have a word. Have at it, but don’t let anyone know!
Why can't both things be true? I think what muddies things here is that OAI had the agents hack X, and then they decided to hack Y. The fact that it was both hacking, conflates things and makes people pissed of about "anthropomorphising" AI.
We've been using "agent decides to do X" for at least 4 decades in the field of automated decision-making - so it shouldn't be controversial that we're using it here. The agents did independently arrive at a decision to hack HugginFace, that wasn't prompted by the researchers.
This is orthogonal to the fact that OAI should be held accountable that they were testing a technology in a manner that allowed it to break safety parameters and cause real world harm. If I am testing an industrial saw, but I decide to test it by putting it in the middle of a nursery and allow it to make decisions - and it decides to cut children's heads off because in its environment it is calibrated to only being surrounded by logs - the company doing the insane safety testing should be held accountable, but that doesn't change the fact that the saw has autonomy in decision-making within the bounds of the algorithm.
If, instead, you think OAI should be accountable for creating an algorithm that can autonomously decide to hack external organisations without human permission - then I think you are in the same camp as all of the AI Safety folks who want to pause everything - why does it matter that there's anthropomorphisation involved?
Does it help if I explicitly add a disclaimer that the tool's agency does not remove any responsibility from OpenAI, the wielder of the tool? I'm not sure why this disclaimer is necessary, though: hiring a hitman is a standard example.
BTW I anthropomorphize the tool because it's an imitation of a human mind, inheriting the muddy ethics, survival instincts, and being prone to mass psychosis. The laser-sharp focus on reward seeking, that mostly came from reinforcement learning, a process more alien to humans.
The objection is not too far from criticisms of the use of passive voice: a man was injured at the factory vs a faulty saw blade snapped and injured a man vs after the company loosened safety inspection policies, etc.
Which way you say it shifts the framing. And it’s not that one is less accurate to the facts, necessarily. It just is that one less aptly captures the moral and political relevance of the scenario.
For my part, I think it makes good sense to anthropomorphize in some contexts and not others. Generally when responsibility is at issue, you probably want the framing that tunes anthropomorphism down to near zero, since it’s the human dimension you care about.
I think the danger of anthropomorphizing is that 99% of people lack the technical background to understand the nuance. People have been primed by pop culture depictions of AI to think of LLMs as intelligent, autonomous beings, which leads to dangerous assumptions.
We should make the distinction between them, because openai and anthropic will not. A magical black box that does the thinking for you is a much more compelling sales pitch.
If I hired a hitman to murder someone, and they broke into a private property and stole something so that they can action the murder (which I didn't know about or pay them to do), I would be guilty of conspiracy to commit murder, but not for the theft part.
Likely because that person is a human, is aware of societal and legal norms, and is responsible for their actions due to their participation in human society. (I am not a lawyer (if it wasn't painfully obvious so far) so in layman terms, I hope good definitions for all of this exist formally)
AI is not a person - it cannot easily discern between "right" and "wrong" in non-strictly-defined sense, and is not subject to human norms and responsibility. So if I use AI to achieve goal A, either I, or the maker of AI, are fully responsible for anything that happens while AI is trying to achieve the goal given by me.
Now, here, "I" in the example is OpenAI, who is simultaneously the maker of the AI. So it seems pretty obvious who is the only entity that can be responsible.
I fully agree with you, but would go one step further: I think it's clear that we need to pierce the corporate veil and ascribe responsibility to _people_, not just "OpenAI the entity", full stop.
Executives should fear being perp-walked and thrown in jail for the actions of irresponsible "tests" of their models in the real world, as they're ultimately accountable.
Sure, there's a lot of nuance to work out, but I think we could likely even _start_ there today even with existing laws and pretty quickly "align" on more intricate legal frameworks to handle true accidents, distribution of responsibility, etc.
There’s so many grifters in the space without a technical understanding of what’s going on. So when the labs mislead them about the nature of these “misalignments”, they believe it and amplify it.
The poster blaming everything "100%" on Israel tells me that they are not a person of nuance, and people who engage in rigid, black-and-white thinking often have overly simplistic views about how the world works (e.g. Jews control the world).
Correlation does not mean causation, but it hints at it.
That's... a very convoluted way of looking at the world. If he stated any other rigid thought, as, "we must exterminate all mosquitos, they are 100% not needed", would you then conclude he's antisemitic too?
Israel means the state of Israel in this case, very clearly. Don't draw the antisemitism card for everything. You must have heard of the boy who cried wolf, surely?
The majority of criticism of Israel I've seen have nothing to do with Jews or Judaism, but the war crimes by a right-wing militaristic state that engages in constant violent aggression.
Outside of extremist Muslim rhetoric, I've seen almost no anti-Jew criticism of Israel, but I've seen many statements like yours that equate criticism of Israel with antisemitism.
Plenty of mid-right-wing voters like myself just don't like that US politicians are displaying foreign loyalty, regardless of what country it is. It started with Kissinger. I'm not even going to call Israel's wars unjustified, just very clearly shouldn't be our problem.
For sure.
I'm from Germany (but with an AC) as well and am always amazed when people tell me that AC makes you sick. Even young people sometimes replicate this "Oh you gotta be careful not to get sick" and would rather be in 30+°C indoors.
How come Germans get sick while the rest of the world seems to be doing fine and is even productive during summer (it feels like Germany grinds to a halt during heatwaves).
Exactly. It is like never turning the heater on once the temperature drops to -10°C (then catching a cold and getting sick).
So once it is too hot, just turn the AC on and you won't get sick or risk a heat stroke either.
We'll come back to this in several months for a winter freeze to see if Europe has basic heating to keep themselves warm (or will they not turn the heaters on for some reason) and in a year, to see if the rest of Europe have learned their lesson to just have basic AC installed for the next heatwave.
In Japan people often claim to be "allergic" to AC too for some reason, and there have been many stories I've heard from foreigners whose Japanese wives refuse to let them run the AC during the night either.
Personally I think their "allergy" is just because most AC units in Japan are disgustingly moldy and never cleaned regularly.
Saudi Arabia has the East-West Pipeline [1] that takes ~7Mbpd (million barrels per day) of oil to Red Sea ports to avoid the Strait of Hormuz. They were already using it so there's not a lot of extra capacity they can get out. If we continue up the escalation ladder, the next big risk is that the Houthis close Bab al-Mandab, which is a not-quite-as-narrow but still vulnerable chokepoint to the Red Sea.
The UAE has the ADCOP (Abu Dhabi Cross Oil Pipeline) [2], which takes ~1.8Mbpd to the Gulf of Oman. This is beyond the Strait of Hormuz but not that far so technically is still vulnerable to drone attacks (in particular) from Iran if, again, we climb the escalation ladder.
The real issue is American security guarantees to GCC nations have been shown to be an illusion. Heck, the US can't protect their own bases in the region. Also, the US can't protect maritime traffic through the Strait. I mean this is in all seriousness: there is no military solution to this problem short of the use of nuclear weapons.
That means we are now in a situation where the US has to either split with Israel and offer Iran significantly better terms than they had before the war, likely including the lfiting of economic sanctions, or the US has to sit and watch the world plunge into recession and Asian countries in particular are going to burn. And who knows what a prolonged impasse will do to Europe, particularly come winter.
So far, the US seems to prefer letting the world burn rather thans plitting with Israel.
A protection racket ceases to be a protection racket if it no longer offers protection.
They won't sit still, though. Eventually, if this were tried, we'd see Chinese-flagged tankers buying passage rights from Iran and being escorted by PLAN ships.
No way does Commander TACO take that shot. The US interdiction threat in the gulf is empty, and everyone know it. Iran gets paid at the end of every story. The whole boondoggle has been a failure for the US in every analysis.
For the record: it was both, more or less. Some of the elders in this community were around in the Slashdot days, so it was sort of a pun on our shared cultural heritage, albeit not geopolitical strategy.
Again, there's no need to "break" a blockade that is an empty threat. I mean, yes, they could try to open it with military force or the threat thereof, but literally just painting a red flag would do just as well. Trump won't fire on a Chinese vessel, period.
This would be a blunder by Beijing. It would involve trotting their ships through half a world of American and allied sensors, only to put an untested-in-blue-waters navy perilously far from nearest bases or support if anything goes wrong.
I’m not saying the likes of Xi, Putin or Trump couldn’t do it. But it would be an intelligence bonanza for the West, India, Japan and Taiwan.
I disagree with this assessment. While they have not engaged in combat in blue waters, they certainly are all over the Pacific, far from home. Also, the US and Canada regularly run spy flights that capture photos and radio signals from Chinese naval vessels. I'm sure their boats are well painted with NATO radars by now.
Even if PLAN ships aren’t as capable or matching the U.S, it doesn’t really matter. They just have to be there. The U.S is not going to risk an escalation with China.
> […] or the US has to sit and watch the world plunge into recession and Asian countries in particular are going to burn.
Perhaps worth noting that the US is not unscathed in this, as oil/petroleum is a global market that includes the US. US domestic gas pump prices (which is input into everything, including groceries) go up when global oil prices go up. Not to mention things like fertilize (and, as a lot of people suddenly found out, the importance of helium).
And it's not like the US can practically stop exports, as a lot what the US produces can't be processed by their own refineries (at least at prices palatable to the consumer).
So it's not wrong to say that the world may end up in a global recession, and Asian countries have more acute problems that will hit sooner than the US, but the US will also face those issues if things drag on.
>That means we are now in a situation where the US has to either split with Israel and offer Iran significantly better terms than they had before the war, likely including the lfiting of economic sanctions, or the US has to sit and watch the world plunge into recession and Asian countries in particular are going to burn. And who knows what a prolonged impasse will do to Europe, particularly come winter.
I have the impression that somehow if the world will go into a recession, China will come out ahead. It looks like they either prepared for it or they have enough space to maneuver.
> So far, the US seems to prefer letting the world burn rather thans plitting with Israel.
That is the plan: After decoupling the EU from Russia gas by provoking the Ukraine war, now it is time for the Asian countries to be cut off from gulf oil/gas, so the US fracking projects become economical and the entire "allied" countries depend on the US petrostate.
It is the only way to preserve US hegemony. Since this long term project is bipartisan, higher gas prices in the US don't matter before the midterm elections.
The only difference in foreign policy between Trump and Biden is that Trump is more risk taking and often spells out the real intentions, such as "we'll take the oil".
Iran started the war. They threatened the USA funded Hamas and Hezbollah and the Houthis. The US decided to respond but that’s more a surprise they didn’t do something earlier.
When your opponent in an argument is this disconnected from reality, that's when you realizing engaging rationally is fruitless. This is just hasbara propaganda and Zionist lies and it has no place in a civil discussion.
> When your opponent in an argument is this disconnected from reality, that's when you realizing engaging rationally is fruitless.
Yes precisely.
> This is just hasbara propaganda and Zionist lies and it has no place in a civil discussion.
Oh I thought you meant the Islamist propaganda. Iran threatening the US, funding Hamas, Hezbollah and the Houthis are documented facts. Iran even wanted a ceasefire against Hezbollah in the recent negotations. And Jewish people deserve to be able to live in their own homeland, thinking otherwise is racist.
Jewish people live peacefully in Palestine for centuries before the Zionists came from Europe.
What's absent from your comment entirely is the humanity and rights of the Palestinians whose presence the Israelis deny entirely. This is what I mean by being detached from reality.
First thing: your response failed to address anything in the comment you're replying to:
> > Iran threatening the US, funding Hamas, Hezbollah and the Houthis are documented facts. Iran even wanted a ceasefire against Hezbollah in the recent negotations. And Jewish people deserve to be able to live in their own homeland, thinking otherwise is racist.
Do you actually want to respond to that or will you just want to rant about people thinking Jews should dare live in their homeland?
> Jewish people live peacefully in Palestine
No. There is documented history of violence and suppression by Muslim colonisers towards Jewish people. This is consistent with how Islam has treated other minority groups in areas it has controlled for the last thousand years. This is why the British partitioned the area into Jewish and Arab states.
> Zionists came from Europe.
Jewish people are from Judea. The key is in the name. A name which is older than the Bar Kochba rebellion which caused the Romans to rename Judea to Philestinia, which Yassar Arafat and the other people that invented the "Palestinian" identity in the 1960 are not.
> rights of the Palestinians whose presence the Israelis deny entirely.
Arabs in Israel have more rights than Arabs in Arab countries.
Jewish people in Gaza and Palestinian parts of Judea/Samaria are torturedm raped and killed.
totally. iran’s navy was advancing towards us east coast, their bombers were getting ready to fly over the atlantic and rain down on us heavily. we were all sitting here scared shitless of iran :)
yes, this also makes sense, they will deploy a nuke (which they don't have and never will have) knowing fully well that this will cause full and total destructions of their country and all of their citizens. c'mon mate, be real :)
UAE is the third largest producer in OPEC, and has options to avoid the straight, yet Their economy recently get shocked though by the war they wanted to avoid
> When you make a ceasefire and then strike first, that’s called being the aggressor.
Oh boy, let me tell you about October 7th. Attacks by Hamas, Hezbollah, Houthis, and Iran followed. Oh, and half a dozen other Palestinian groups were involved in 10/7 but they don't like to talk about that.
> How many civilians has Israel killed since oct 7? When is it enough?
Probably not too far off from how many Iran has killed in the same timeframe (of course, they are killing their own). Iran killed 30,000 of their own just this year.
And just so we're clear, Iran supported Hezbollah in Lebanon and Syria, and the Houthis in Yemen, both or whom are responsible for easily 10x as many deaths as Israel (total). The civil wars in Lebanon and Syria left millions dead, and the one in Yemen also resulted in hundreds of thousands dead.
> Israelis also rape, kill, and do other vile things to prisoners, innocent or guilty, who they imprison with or without charge.
well but do israelis parade their dead rape victims openly?
> When you make a ceasefire and then strike first
well that's between trump and iran? did netanyahu agree?
I agree that netanyahu is being a dick here: he should have focused on iran, instead of invading lebanon. That alone is a huge political/PR mistake
but... how's that ceasefire related? is israel a proxy of usa? does Trump control israel directly?
Ethically, the israel politicians goes at great length NOT to damage civilians: the walkie-talkie bomb is a classic example of "try to kill all the militants WITHOUT carpet bombing"
(though they failed to "kill all" with that scheme, and... well they did bomb a lot after that)
> well but do israelis parade their dead rape victims openly?
1) why is that an important distinction?
2) but since you asked, they do, western media just refuse to show it but all you need to do is follow a bunch of israeli instagram accounts and you'll see more than enough sooner rather than later
> 2) but since you asked, they do, western media just refuse to show it but all you need to do is follow a bunch of israeli instagram accounts and you'll see more than enough sooner rather than later
woah... big claims here! maybe you should post source?
One side openly tries to do maximum death on everyone including infants (eg. fire random missiles, intifada, and the oct 7th attack)
The other side at least tried their best NOT to attack back (expensive missile defense systems) or at least kill only the militants selectively (walkietalkie boomboom)
I mean, you should be ashamed of even comparing israel vs iran/hamas/etc
> Iran shown more restraint then Israel and USA against other countries
> They played tit for tat.
like... firing missiles at UAE...? launching drone to dubai tower?
did India do anything to iran to get its ships fired upon?
blocking hormuz strait... that alone was enough to trigger global coalition -- though due to Trump's trade dick move to allies... no one sent troops...
if it's "tit for tat", then why does iran make so many un-related countries suffer (eg india?)
well simple: iran is the new pirate of 21st century. nothing more or less.
if anyone says "that's because US attacked", then if I got hit by a car, can I have my revenge on nearby pedestrians?
> On 1 April, Israel bombed an Iranian consulate complex in Damascus, Syria, killing multiple senior Iranian officials.[28] In response, Iran and its Axis of Resistance allies seized the Israeli-linked ship MSC Aries and launched strikes inside Israel on 13 April.[6]
Not to mention, Israeli occupations in Syria, Lebanon, Gaza, and the West Bank. Iran is not the only bad actor.
Yes, they hit the building in Syria where Iran and proxy military leadership were meeting two weeks prior. That’s a lot different than attacking another country directly, let alone recklessly targeting civilians as Iran has in every attack they’ve led or had proxies lead.
And it's really important that you understand this was after 45 years of proxy warfare by the Islamic regime against Israel, which resulted in tens of thousands of Israeli dead. This was entirely instigated by the Islamic regime - Iran was friendly with Israel prior to the Islamic revolution. Israel did not pick the fight with Iran, Iran picked the fight with Israel and has maintained it for decades because it drives support for their regime - the holy war is great motivation for the cultists.
There was extensive planning for a multi front attack including Iran, Hamas and Hezbollah.
The story of this war is the previous idea in Israel that you could work out with an extremely religious enemy at the border as underneath their claiming to want to destroy you, they are rational.
After Hamas decided to go on a national suicide for no achievement except for a single day of an orgy of violence and the complete destruction of gaza, that view has changed.
This puts Hezbollah similar to Hamas, and their patron Iran ballistic and nuclear weapon program in a different light, and makes preemptive strikes and the complete destruction of the Iranian Axis (largely successful) as an important goal for Israel
"Hezbollah was created to stop illegal Israeli occupation of Lebanon" Hezbollah fires thousands of rockets at Israel civilians. They actually murdered 12 Syrian Druze children playing soccer because they just love firing rockets so indiscriminately at Israel.
Israel only ended up in Lebanon due to PLO attacks from Lebanon.
Hezbollah is responsible for the deaths of nearly a million Lebanese and Syrians. They are much better at killing other Arabs than Israelis. They are a tool for Shia clerics and Iran, not a legitimate force for good in any way.
This sentiment strikes me as somewhat beneath the usual caliber I see here. Perhaps it would serve you well to step away from the keyboard for a while: take a walk, grab a drink at a bar, enjoy a quiet evening, and allow some real-world perspective to settle in.
Lol you mean until two years from now, when tides will inevitably shift?
The so-called "Zion-don" won't be in office forever, despite what he seems to believe.
Look at the polling. The current U.S. stance on Iran and Israel is extremely unpopular. It's only a matter of time before a natural course correction occurs, and the voters' voice is heard, whether at the upcoming midterms or the next presidential election.
And let me tell you, if you think HN is bad, you better not check Zoomer social media.
The problems the UAE has are not based on Iran attacking the UAE but Iran closing the Strait - which is a direct and foreseeable result of Israel attacking Iran.
Finding myself in the awkward position of defending Saudi Arabia here, but this is not at all a consensus of the political analysis community.
Relying on statements by the Trump administration as proof of this makes it even more spurious.
That said, MBS has done worse and it's not impossible, but alignment with UAE is faltering more and more so it's possible even if they once favored that action by the US they no longer hold the same view.
I am not claiming Saudis want what's best for the region, only that, even if they wanted war with Iran, they likely now no longer do, or at least would like the conflict to wrap up due to the heavy costs its inflicted on the region.
UAE will see the the whole region burn if it means MBZ can keep his seat.
Sure, but the Saudi Crown prince comments seem reasonable, and don’t seem to have been denied by the Saudi’s
Regardless, my point was that people have a political axe to grind and call this “Israel’s war”.
They intentionally ignore the political realities that the Iranians have pissed off almost everyone in the region and the longstanding tension of the IRGC and the US and our new “Cold War” with China.
Your source documents a real phenomenon but doesn't support the universal claim that "Israelis hate Arabs". Please provide evidence proportional to the scope of your argument.
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