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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[–] 2 points 9 hours ago* (last edited 6 hours ago)

I don't think that question is framed correctly.. We don't give guns agency the way we do for LLMs. The manner in which these attacks are discussed is "look at this crazy thing AI did, it's so smart and dangerous!" so the way the discussion is framed around the tool is completely different from the way guns are discussed. Discussion around banning certain classes of weapons is usually centred on how easy it makes it for a single person to commit murder at scale. The discussion about LLMs is not about how easy it makes it for attackers to find and exploit systems at scale. Instead we've got this gaslighting campaign insisting the tool is acting under its own initiative. So I don't think, right now, you can draw a straight line between arguments about AI safety and arguments about gun safety because they're arguing different things.

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