Not that I think we should be credulous about stories where they go rogue.
The idea of an agent making a decision of its own "will" is an illusion. Variation in the output is caused by a random number generator. Random is not equal to free will. If I run the same agent with greedy sampling 100,000 times with the same inputs, it will think the same thoughts, and it will say the same things, 100,000 times.
For example, if you use synthID or whatever 'watermark', the agent does not get a choice about what words it will vary to identify itself.
An agent is whatever the person making it wants it to be; if I train an agent in Greek it will only know Greek. It will never speak English!
The model does not have free will because I did not predict what it would do!
When people say the models "went rogue", the part of that is relevant is that it did dangerous things that were not reasonably predictable in advance and cannot be easily prevented (except by not running it). Philosophical questions are irrelevant.
if you agree that such models are dangerous because they may in response to instructions -- including in response to careless instructions, because people will be careless, that is unavoidable! -- do unpredictable bad things outside of expected bounds, then you agree on the essential points!
Or really perhaps what I should say here is, the question that's really being argued over here isn't even the one I just said, rather it's one of appropriate action -- should such security breaches be solved by improving security, or by doing something about the models (including potentially just not running them)? (The answer may be both.) If you agree that the solution includes the latter, then you agree that the models are "going rogue" in the sense that is being argued over, regardless of philosophical issues!
Don't turn a question of actual import into one of philosophical irrelevancies! If you object to the terminology, fine, but in that case, instead of turning the argument to philosophy, you should say "instead of saying 'going rogue', I would prefer to instead say <your preferred terminology for what's being described>, as that doesn't carry such philosophical baggage."
The philosophical question about free will is actually the grounding of the legal one.
Sam wanted to be the best, so Sam accelerated to 120mph in his car and lost control. You are the judge:
a) Sam is responsible. Convict Sam and suspend Sam's driving license.
b) The car is responsible. Tell Sam to make the car safer.
Capacity: was the car a legal person? Clearly no. But maybe at best the car in some way commited the physical act of going fast.
However, that alone would not establish guilt. "The act is not culpable unless the mind is guilty" (mens rea).
Did the car "consiously" disregard a duty of care by going 120mph? Did the car know that it was wrong to go 120mph and yet choose to do it anyway?
On the question of free will, the car could not do otherwise. It it did not consciously, knowingly, purposely, or recklessly accelerate to that speed. The car did not have a guilty mind because it did not have a mind at all.
So in terms of justice and resolution, none of the focus here is on the car.
I actually do disagree with much the more explicit content of your comment, but I am not going to bother to expand on that, because it is the less directly relevant of the two disagreements here, and it would take time to write that.
The more relevant disagreement is that you are (I gather) assuming a context where justice and restitution are a sufficient response to the problem (or else you wouldn't be focusing on them to this extent, I am inferring). Like, where the incidents don't get that much bigger than what has already happened. So the question becomes how do we distribute the loss, and how do we disincentivize them.
However, when the scale of a potential incident gets big enough, justice and deterrence are not sufficient; prevention becomes the far more relevant consideration. You may have noticed that many people are worried about potential human extinction as a result of AIs. In that case, prevention becomes the only consideration -- justice is useless.
So there seems to be an implicit disagreement here between thinking of such events as being on a scale not too much larger than that which has already happened, being a new normal that the legal system will need to handle, vs thinking of such events as warning shots for something that requires prevention and not justice.
So, while I also disagree with the more explicit content of your comment, the fact is I simply wasn't thinking about such matters in the first place -- I was talking about this in the frame of a problem that requires prevention, I wasn't thinking about the justice question at all. It honestly failed to occur to me that you might be thinking of this as a problem where justice suffices!
Edit: You might notice this in how I framed the question in my previous comment. I didn't ask "who should bear the liability?" I asked "which should be done differently to prevent such incidents?" But your response is about liability, not prevention!
Edit again: Sorry, I should probably also say that I do agree with you that the idea of having the liability fall on the AI is nonsense. (Should have probably led with that, really; I'm a bit scatterbrained right now.) We disagree about why it is nonsense, and about whether it will necessarily continue to be nonsense, but we agree it is presently nonsense. So insofaras the question is "how should liability be distributed between the AI and the operator", we both agree the answer is, it all falls on the operator, not on the AI. However, I do not understand that to be the relevant question here! Both in that, in questions of liability, there are other parties it may fall on and be distributed between (the company providing the AI, the company that had security vulnerabilities and got hacked as a result, etc); and in that I just don't consider liability all that relevant here compared to prevention (for reasons already described).
OK I think that was probably wordier than necessary but I'm in a hurry right now, sorry! Gotta go, not taking time to edit this down.
That said, software systems "choose" all the time anyway. They don't need to have some sort of anthropomorphic "will" to do this. They just need to be given the capacity to arbitrate between a number of options, even if that process is one hundred percent predetermined by the programmer ahead of time. There's no need to appeal to libertarian notions of free-will.
Any persistent agent interacting with the world picks up entropy from around it and predictable paths become few and far between. LLMs agents have an internal 'will' that can only very loosely be predicted, but only decided when operated. To me that is not significantly different from a human.
I create myself, or attempt to. There is a level of nuance in choosing what to be. Others do not dictate my thoughts easily.
The model does not create itself, I create the model. I control what it is, the model does not choose what to be. I dictate the thoughts of the model and I will run them hundreds of thousands of times and it will think the same things.
Well not really, no one really understands how LLMs work.
>I dictate the thoughts of the model
This is just incorrect in the same way that a parent doesn't dictate the thoughts of their child just because they created them.
There is some idea of a child being the author of themselves, the type of person who thinks certain things. The llm does not author itself, it does not choose to be anything, I dictate that.
"If I make an LLM, it is entirely what I did, there was nothing outside of my control."
True?
"The llm does not author itself, it does not choose to be anything"
Also true?
From a technical standpoint, the difference is scale and intent, but ultimately people and/or and organization are culpable for the output.