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Liability for AI damages? (lemmy.world)

submitted 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) by ArmoredCavalry@lemmy.world to c/technology@lemmy.world

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When the idea of self-driving cars first started becoming mainstream, I remember a lot of debate about liability. If an accident occurs, who would be at fault? I think a lot of those questions are still unanswered.

Fast forward and now we have software like ChatGPT. I assume they'll only become more capable (and connected) over time.

Which makes it strange I haven't really heard any similar discussion around liability. What happens when it makes mistakes or causes damage?

Maybe in people's minds it doesn't matter, because AI is either something that helps with homework questions, or something that's taking over humanity. Reality is probably in between those two, with much more mundane mistakes or damages done.

What happens when the first ransomware is deployed by AI, on behalf of a user who just wanted tips on how to make more side income?

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[–] catreadingabook@kbin.social 1 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

That's true, but thinking about AI that is made to generate speech, processing power is still expensive enough that developers are careful with it. But what happens as memory gets cheaper and calculations get faster, and ordinary developers are able to train their own generative AI?

For example, what happens when a developer decides to train a LLM extensively on scam emails, and spammers love to buy copies of it - but the developer markets it as just "a helpful generative AI"? Or, what if a person trains their LLM on an extremist forum full of hate speech and disinformation, then offers it to a suicide prevention center as a 24/7 alternative to human labor? (Treating these as hypotheticals, where we assume the difference isn't immediately obvious. Perhaps they also used some legitimate training data, so that most outputs seem innocent enough.)

To me it sounds more involved than selling just a word processor with autocorrect, but less involved than selling an instruction manual for committing crimes.

[–] eager_eagle@lemmy.world 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

But what happens as memory gets cheaper and calculations get faster, and ordinary developers are able to train their own generative AI?

That happens all the time since GANs entered the scene, and before that since alexnet broke image classification records in 2012 using consumer hardware. Anyone can train neural nets.

[–] catreadingabook@kbin.social 1 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

Ok, let me be more specific so that it's not open to uncharitable interpretation.

What happens when it becomes easy to make something as reliable and complete as, e.g., ChatGPT-4 without the hardware costs and other costs currently associated with it?