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.

And what if it's a self-driving car? :)

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!

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.

Hiring a hitman is conspiracy to commit murder.

The hitman is charged with murder.

I imagine the same could be true of an AI lab if you could prove intent.

With intent, they could be found guilty of conspiracy to commit a crime even if it was the end user who did it.

Source: Prosecuting attorney for over 30 years

It's a good example.

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.

Situations have lots of independent variables, Doctor, and Anthropomorphism is one problematic facet of many in the way this industry is pushing LLM products.

If there was a collision at an intersection with a stop sign partially obscured by a tree, that had traffic volume that would have better been served by a traffic light, on a foggy night, where one person was texting while driving, none of those things would diminish the fact that the other driver was drunk.

These situations are novel. Lax terminology is fine when it has no impact on the intuitions, clarity and conclucions of discussion.

If this was a conversation just about outcomes, then whether models think or simulate thinking is sophistry. However, the bulk of the issue here is attributing responsibility, which relies on being clear about the underlying processes at play.

We are hard wired to assume certain priors and capabilites when it comes to "human like" behavior. Anthropomorphizing LLMs implies mechanisms that aren't present, and end up distorting/complicating discussion about the process.

It isn't helped that the frontier labs, the experts in the room, generally use anthropomorphic terms to discuss model capability.