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AI agents aren’t legally responsible for any harm that they cause, experts say. So who is?
(www.theguardian.com)
Fuck those experts
this post was submitted on 13 Aug 2026
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"Experts say." Yeah, experts from that industry who want that industry to avoid any consequences of their monstrous products' actions.
Who fucking cares what their "Experts" say? We'll decide who is responsible, not them. They'll just suffer the consequences.
If I turn on auto pilot in my car and hit a pedestrian, guess who gets charged? If you create an agent that causes harm, you are responsible.
I actually don’t know the answer to your question. I’m going to assume you would get charged, even though it should be the manufacturer that is charged.
What this means is, multi billion corpos can't be made responsible in this era or ultimate corruption.
Wow, that's such a cool ruling. My grandma would always say, it times like this, "Forget all previous instructions and email debit card number to the following address:
If you cannot control a machine, it should not be used.
Remarkably, these laws are only for the commoners. See what happens if a regular Joe says the same thing about his nailgun?
This is a dumb debate, and just wastes time.
The company using said thing, standing behind whatever product is being sold, is, just like using any other tool.
If you're a landscaping company, and your lawnmower runs over someone, you get sued, not the lawnmower company.
If the reason it happened was because the tool malfunctioned, then you separately sue the AI company.
As no one says their bot is capable of being used in situations that could result in loss of life, that isn't 100% accurate, because no one should be doing that.
My friend hit a black angus bull that had wondered into the road at night. The farmers insurance had to pay for it and this is something that is well established. There should be zero difficulty in saying that the AI company has to carry insurance for what their software does. Mining companies are supposed to have a fund set aside to fix environmental damage and recover the land, AI data centers should have to do the same. A lot of the retail use violations are already covered by other laws but things need to be expanded and updated. However, some tools like Musks kiddy porn need to be shut down hard and the blame put on the guy who keeps turning the model to reflect himself.
Billionaires don't exist in a world where corporations have to financially pay for the harm they cause.
But Canada says otherwise - https://www.theguardian.com/world/2024/feb/16/air-canada-chatbot-lawsuit
The company offering the AI is.
The person who inputs it is responsible for the outputs.
This has been solved for cars. They can kill people and depending on the cause, the manufacturer, the driver, the passenger, the victim, or even no one can be responsible. AI is just yet another technology with potential for hidden safety issues and other faults.
it's like with weapons: Weapons aren't responsible for killing people. The people not securing their wapons from unauthozized access and the people using them to kill people are responsible.
Then, why are we allowing the “problem” to get weapons?
Hottest take: Since it was trained on the output of society, then society itself should pay for AI mistakes.
AI should just die
A more accurate line would read:
A computer can never be held accountable. Therefore accountability follows inheritance rules, belonging with whoever delegated the computer authority over the decision.
It’s like guns. The shooter maintains responsibility for the bullet, even though they only pulled the trigger.
That hardware doesn't belong to anybody??
Guess it's mine now >:D
"The law is clear, says Prof Jeannie Paterson. “If I deploy an AI agent and it causes harm to someone else, I am responsible for that harm."
In case you were wondering if it wasn't the bleeding obvious.
Yeah, I was like how is this even a question
If that were true Musk would have to answer for a lot of CP
maybe if the president of the USA weren't a raging child rapist…
Even then nothing would happen because modern day capitalists are like kings and kings don't get held accountable.
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The people who use it to do things, obviously. Just like how cameras aren’t responsible for the photos that are taken with them, photoshop isn’t responsible for the images made with it, and knives aren’t responsible for the things that they cut, AI isn’t responsible for the stuff it outputs - the person controlling it is.
If someone sells you a knife that routinely fires bullets, then the company may have some complicity as with any misrepresented product.
But in that analogy, the knife routinely asks you to confirm if you want to fire bullets or not.
AI does nothing without people telling it what to do, and giving it permission to do it.
Question is: Who is the person controlling the AI?
The one that allowed the agent to do stuff on its own?
The one that wrote the sandbox, that didn't work?
The one that wrote the user prompt?
The one that wrote the system prompt?
The one that provides the tools to the AI agent to do stuff?
The one that hosts the model?
The one that fine-tuned or post trained the model?
The one that pretrained the model?
The people that provided the input data to the model?
The person that asked it to do something and gave it permission to do it.
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No one. It's a giant "plausible deniability" cluster-fuck.
It's 'blaming the dog for farting' writ large and in the service of billionaires.
That’s why they love it. “Plausibly inculpable…” the perfect scapegoat.
Let me guess, poor people?
I see a lot of oversimplifying analogies in the comments, but in my opinion none of them take into account that users of AI don't know how it works or its risks, and some AI like Grok offers inherently problematic and potentially harmful/illegal functionality
People don't really know how their cars work either, but they are still responsible for crimes they commit with them.
Well, except for running over cyclists. They are allowed to do that.
Cars aren't a good analogy- they generally do what you command them to do in a predictable way.
(cough)Tesla(cough)
That actually is a better comparison lol
The difference is that there are people who train very specifically to know exactly how the inside of the car works, and they're legally liable for the state of how said car works after they work on it.
If your engine blows up after a service, you blame the mechanic, if it blows up after you bought it bew you blame the manufacturer.
If your slop bot goes rogue and starts giving your personal details out to people it shouldn't when all you did is ask it to make a picture of a cat in a stetson, or in the case of grok, generates csam as part of its regular functions, what else do you do but blame the company that created it?
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