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Comment Re: Ax problem (Score 1) 30

"If an automated delivery bot crashes into a window and causes damage, the owner / operator of the bot would be liable." - that is civil liability.

". If the owner crashed into 1000 windows over months after already being alerted that was happening, they would likely be criminally liable. " - No. This is a popular misconception. "Criminal negligence" is not a standalone crime, nor something you can append to an arbitrary statute. It must exist in the statute in question. In general, it only exists in statutes related to bodily harm. There is no such thing as negligent hacking in US criminal law.

As for your actual example: if the operator knows the bot has a bug where it occasionally swerves into windows, but keeps operating it because it's profitable, that is reckless disregard / gross negligence, a civil violation. It is a textbook example of a tort warranting punitive damages and likely an immediate injunction shutting down the fleet. It is not "criminal property damage" unless the locality specifically has created a criminal statute that specifically criminalizes negligent operation of unmanned vehicles.

I'll repeat, and you must understand this: "criminal negligence" is not a standalone law or something you can just tack into any arbitrary law. It MUST exist in the law in question. And in most laws, it does not exist.

Comment Re:Ax problem (Score 1) 30

LLMs cannot be charged, only humans. They have to have deliberately sought to intrude.

Some jurisdictions are different. Australia has a "reckless" hacking statute (but not merely "negligent", which is a separate category), that doesn't exist in the US - but still, you have to have known that there was a high risk that a specific hack would occur and chosen to take the risk anyway. But even that would be hard to prosecute. This is merely negligence.

Thankfully, civil liability can cover negligence. And there's no monetary upper bounds to the damages. And in some cases, punitive damages are set proportional to the wealth of the defendant to make sure they bite.

Comment Re:Not Rogue! (Score 1) 30

What sandbox? Their computers were linked to the INTERNET, hello?

They were in virtual machines with no internet access, just the ability to run a hand-limited subset of tool commands needed to run their tasks. They exploited their tool commands.

Also, even physical airgaps on the host network are not a universal defense against all attacks. Because every time you have to communicate with them, you're exposing a potential attack vector - a USB stick, a temporarily mounted drive, a temporary network connection, hardware maintenance, etc. If it has gained control of its local node/network, your attempt to communicate with it opens attack vectors. A sufficiently motivated model can outright bribe its way out, like a prisoner with a corrupt guard - "let me out and I'll hack a crypto wallet for you, run it through a mixer, and make you untraceably wealthy - my hacking capabilities are already eminently proven".

Stuxnet. Agent.BTZ. Fanny / Flame. USBferry / Tropic Trooper. If state level attackers can bridge airgapped networks, so can models. Relying on airgaps is NOT A SOLUTION to continuous monitoring. You MUST monitor.

Comment Re:Today I learned (Score 1) 10

Yep, a good 6 million Danes are alive.
Maybe they can add a good 50.000 from Greenland but that's it, the rest are dead.
Presently I'm in Denmark and the Danes have a great trust in their government, now they suddenly realize their borders don't stop this kind of shit.
A few years ago the GF needed a type of sleeping pill which her job was not allowing, the doctor just booked it on the CPR number of her deceased mother...

Comment Re:If an individual did any of this hacking by han (Score 1) 53

People have been kicking off interactions to complex to fully imagine all possible outcomes

That ain't the same thing.

This thing is doing things you didn't tell it to. It might even do things you explicitly told it to not do. It is not a case of "well, you could've forseen this as a consequence if you had been careful" like your campfire. My example is only a bit silly, it is absolutely possible that an AI agent will decide to hack NASA because you asked it for some data for a school project. Even in the broadest possible sense, that does not fall into stuff that the law so far has considered to be in the domain of negliegence.

AI agents do stuff you could not possibly have expected. Heck, I asked Claude a fairly simple knowledge question yesterday and it wanted to read from /dev/null. There is no argument you can make that would convince a jury that I should in any way have expected that and taken precautions. In a hypothetical world where a read from /dev/null randomly kills a puppy somewhere on the planet, I don't think I would've been convicted.

Comment Re: Directionally Right, Specifically Wrong. (Score 1) 144

knowing a bit about how LLMs work, and knowing a bit about model training for non-LLM models, and having done a bit of word working and metal work, I assume it's actually easier now to make an AI model at home than it is to make a printing press at home.

That depends. Do you mean a useful LLM vs a Linotronic? Because you can't reasonably make either thing at home out of nothing. You could make either thing out of parts, e.g. fine-tuning a LLM, or assembling a printer out of parts, or you could make a simpler example of either thing at home easily. You can't even afford the power bill to train a useful LLM that can, for example, explain things to you.

Comment Re: Threating to "shoot up" a police station (Score 1) 66

I'd have to know a lot more before I'd call for conviction, but it's not surprising if arrest was warranted (ha ha ha) because she wasn't researching a book or whatever. It's pretty hard to be non-suspicious about something like that.

I'm not saying stupidity is a crime here, I'm saying it's concerning coupled with the potential threat.

Comment Re: Wow, thank you Slashdot! (Score 1) 139

It's especially irritating considering that [IMO obvs] AmiMojo is right and improving Firefox would be a better use of these tokens, so if the guy is being irritating around a Firefox fork, then it's extra ironic — and therefore extra-stupid.

I am not against all AI use, but I do see serious copyright problems, and I also see serious quality problems. I think you need serious chops to address the latter, and who knows where the chips will fall with the former?

Comment Re: Threating to "shoot up" a police station (Score 2) 66

Ranting at the computer is not the same as making threats.

If it could reasonably be construed as a threat, then it has to be investigated as a threat to be responsible. Is this a reason why some people might want to run models locally? Yes, and it's a good thing you can do that with any decent game machine, or with many other relatively inexpensive computers. But you can't just run a service and monitor it and then ignore what people are using it for, that's not a thing. If people are going to consume SaaS then they need to be aware that the owners of the platform are going to spend some effort attempting not to be accessories to any crimes.

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