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this post was submitted on 12 Sep 2026
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(I want to preface by saying I don't support AI, I don't want to hype AI, I want AI research and development to stop immediately.)
Huh? Pretty sure autonomous weapons are part of the fears of extinction. It's very hard to imagine an AI safety advocate doing "all the doom talk" would in any way support AI autonomous weapons. She and other AI safety researchers are on the same side! They don't need to and shouldn't fight each other.
Well that's simple. Because the output of chess, programming, and math can be easily checked mechanically. Chess has win or loss, programs either pass tests or not, math proofs can be checked with Lean, etc. This makes these discipline very easy to train an AI on with reinforcement learning.
I thought an AI researcher would know this?
She answers that question right after the question in the same article, making it a rhetorical device rather than an open question.
Focusing on human responsibility for using a tool sounds like a good way to proceed in my opinion.
When AI steal open source code who is responsible? When an AI powered drone kills a civilian who is responsible? When the AI is shown to hire and fire in racist ways who is responsible? Someone has to be, AI is just a tool after all.
The problem is AI is created by rich people and rich people cannot be held legally liable. The Hugging Face hack is clear evidence of this legal principle.
And "AI gone rogue" headlines support the narrative that the AI did things by itself and no human could expect this so they can't be responsible (nevermind that they built the thing in the first place).
they turned off the safeguards. This shit is 100% idiot humans + marketing
And they gave it unlimited compute, I heard, though I can´t find the source on that. Imagine sandboxing something that has the knowledge to get out of a sandbox, telling it to hack a server, giving it unlimited compute, and then just walking away for several days. It is absolutely insane.
They didn't walk away. They sat there and watched it. All this is to sell "the ultimate hacking machine" to the government.
Right, but that's precisely the problem. We don't need to be going around fearmongering about how dangerous AI itself is. We need to be regulating it and fining the actual people who are making decisions to use AI in ways that result in harm. Whether that harm is direct human injury, injury through negligence (like denying a health insurance claim that should have been approved), financial injury, reputational, whatever.
They need to be held accountable exactly the same as if a human had done it. Humans have been driven to suicide by the criminal response to hacking for far more noble a reason than "cheat on an AI evaluation test". The weight of the law should be brought down on the executives responsible for the Hugging Face hack, too. But fearmongering about how this shows how amazeballs advanced the AI has become doesn't accomplish that.
Yes, but what I'm telling you this has absolutely nothing to do with AI and everything to do with the impunity of wealth.
All these AI companies MASSIVELY pirated the internet for training data, all very clearly illegal by the letter and spirit of the law, and they have not even been charged for it. The most that happens is that content companies sue in the hopes to get some shares in AI, or sue one AI company because their daddy owns a competing AI company, and those suits seem to ignore the piracy and instead are about whether they needed a separate license to train.
Meanwhile, AI companies are very carefully trying to put liability sponges between it and any lawsuits. Tesla tried (and recently failed) to dump 100% of liability on drivers of it's "self-driving" cars, and every mission critical AI service is likely to have a human mindlessly rubber stamping AI decisions as fast as they can just so they can be held liable instead of the employer or the AI company.
I think it's worth being a little more careful with our phrasing here. AI companies definitely did illegal piracy to train their models, but that is a separate and distinct process from them trawling the web en mass. Anthropic, for example, recently settled a case with book publishers because it had pirated their books illegally. (Frustratingly, the second article that popped up when I searched to verify this was one that highlighted the fact that the TERF-in-chief is among the beneficiaries of that settlement.) But there is no clear legal answer to the question of whether crawling websites and training from their data constitutes even a civil tort, let alone illegal behaviour.
Other than that detail though, I think we're in furious agreement. You're simply restating my point, Cory's point, and the subject of this article's point, while doing so in a tone that implies disagreement. The problem isn't the tech, it's the humans using and creating the tech and the sociopolitical environment in which it happened.
If they do go the route you describe, it seems like that would make operating an AI for an employer adjacent to a criminal enterprise, as your unspoken job title is "company scapegoat". I imagine we'd begin to see refusal to perform those jobs if that becomes widespread enough to become publicly known, as people risk incarceration for essentially performing their assigned jobs.
No, you wouldn't go to jail probably, but you could be sued and you could lose your license.
My experience is that people are willing to take all manner of risks to get a pay check. I used to work in an industry so obsessed with metrics, that the only way to get promoted was to cheat, so people cheated, and some got caught & fired, and others got promoted, then caught, then fired, and still others got promoted into positions cozy with leadership and were immune.
Absolutely! If AI hurts humans then the AI company CEOs should be put in jail (in fact I believe they should be in jail right now for developing AI at all).
Right, when a bridge collapses, we analysis the physics of it so the next bridge we build won't collapse. From my perspective analysis why an AI "went rogue" is the same process. The difficulty is when talking about AI we can't help but use some anthropomorphizing languages. If anything, talking about when an AI "thought" is a lot less verbose than talking about how the transformer's weights multiplies together and how the random sampling process produced a sequence of tokens that resembles natural language. But ultimately, it's not that far from analyzing a bridge collapse. We need to understand why an AI "went rogue" to stop the next AI from going rogue (or, in my opinion, just stop building the next AI altogether).
I don't see why personally. AI is dangerous enough even if it doesn't become "machine-god". Absolutely we shouldn't use AI to develop autonomous weapons. If AI can indeed somehow become "machine-god", then oh my god that's a million times worse and we should stop immediately.
I can. And the tech ceos choose that language because it makes them more money.
That's what this is about, it's about humans making choices and avoiding responsibility for those chioces by blaming machines.
The only difference is that AI is a black box and a lot of what's going on inside isn't fully understood. They're learning as they go, and accepting they don't know some of the whys as they go to the next step. Unlike the bridge analogy. Which actually makes the problem even more serious, because they don't fully know why it ends up doing some of the things, and now the newest models are having the processes partially hidden from view. Where only a version back we were being assured they could watch the chain of thoughts and intercept what could be problematic, claiming they're practicing AI safety in development, now there's pieces that are not viewable. And they went with it anyway and released it to paying customers. Again with the bridge analogy, some of the parts that might have failed go missing and we don't know how they broke, what they were made of, etc.
Humans are building AI, but in a sense they are also growing them, while not knowing what seeds they're throwing together. There's science and theory behind it, they understand a lot, but they're getting results back that would prevent a bridge being approved to be built if it had the same uncertainty. So I stand behind holding the people accountable, but more for the recklessness of following profit over scientific research and ethics, as well as using the excuse that if they don't get there first, someone else will. They aren't wrong about that, only wrong about it needing to be that type of race.
In the discussions our project are having about how to approach LLM use in the community there has been a lot of consensus in the human taking ownership. Ultimately it's the human who has to direct the tool and if they have little interest other than blindly hitting accept then we're not interested in the contribution.
It's a matter of scale though.
Pushing the idea of "AI will make TERMINATOR CYBORGS!!!"
distracts from
"AI is analyzing a zillion cameras so ICE gestapo goons can abduct people.'
There is no need to downplay her credentials like that. She is an AI researcher, she has a M.S. in EE and a PhD in computer vision, and her PhD advisor is Fei-Fei Li!