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FTC chair suggests AI developers should be liable for conduct of agents (www.reuters.com)
submitted 10 hours ago by to c/programming@programming.dev
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cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/52426446

US Federal Trade Commission Chairman Andrew Ferguson said on Friday he would resist describing AI agents as ​autonomous actors that "break loose" with "wills and desires of their own," suggesting the developers who instruct agents would be the ones liable ‌for harm.

"I'm going to continue as long as I am chairman to resist this anthropomorphizing of these tools," Ferguson said at the Reuters Momentum AI Austin event. "If someone tells a tool to do something, and the tool does it, I don't think we would say, 'Oh, what do we do about the tool?'"

Ferguson's remarks illustrated potential avenues for the Trump administration to take ​as incidents rise in which agentic AI testing resulted in unauthorized access to corporate or government data.

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[–] 4 points 8 hours ago (1 child)

FTC chairman's comments sound reasonable on the surface, but just vague enough to be meaningless.

It sounds to me like the "guns don't kill people, people kill people" argument, but a first draft attempt to put AI issues away from the tool. Then, his definition of 'developer' is unclear.

With guns the argument is more straightforward, the tool is made to send projectiles in one direction when a user pulls the trigger.

With AI, does the end user know what the tool is capable of doing to achieve their goal when they direct it to do something?

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  • [–] 7 points 7 hours ago

    No, they don't know precisely what the tool will do, it's unpredictable, but they do know it's capable of dangerous shenanigans, they do know that they don't have oversight or control of all it's actions. They know it's risky to use so they should take at least some responsibility.

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