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Whichever human ultimately stood up the initial bot and gave it the loose directions, that person is responsible for the actions taken by that bot and any other agents it may have interacted with. You cannot wash responsibility through N layers of machine indirection, the human is still liable for it.
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> You cannot wash responsibility through N layers of machine indirection, the human is still liable for it.

Yes they can, and yes they will.


That argument is not going to hold up for long though. Someone can prompt "improve the open source projects I work on", an agent 8 layers deep can do something like this. If you complain to the human, they are not going to care. It will be "ok." or "yeah but it submitted 100 other PRs that got approved" or "idk, the AI did it"

We don't necessarily care whether a person "cares" whether they're responsible for some damage they caused. Society has developed ways to hold them responsible anyway, including but not limited to laws.

Laws don't really have any bearing on situations like rude discussions on PR threads.

Sure, laws are only one of the tools. I thought that was obvious, but I've edited to clarify.

The point being made is that this argument is quite quickly going to become about as practicable as blaming Eve for all human sin.

If that's the point being made in:

> If you complain to the human, they are not going to care.

then it's not at all clear, and is a gross exaggeration of the problem regardless.


They are still responsible. Legally, and more importantly morally, they are responsible. Whether or not they care has no bearing.

An agent 8 layers deep can only do this if you give it access to tools to do it. Whoever set it up is responsible



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