Imagine a user asks an AI agent to "make me lots of money," and the AI commits insider trading, cyberattacks a competitor company, or sets up a pyramid scheme. At no point did the user intend for a crime to occur, but the result of their prompt is a criminal act.
- In this situation, the user is not liable. The user had no intention, they engaged in no crime, and they performed no criminal act.
The user may not be criminally liable, but the user is almost certainly going to be civilly liable for basically any of that. And the user may in fact be criminally liable as well; sometimes criminal law extends to the stronger forms of negligence. Sometimes you have to not only not intend for the crime to occur, but take reasonable measures to assure that it is not occurring.
It's not a new problem, either. If you hire a human to "make you lots of money", the law already has well-developed systems for deciding how responsible you are for how they choose to do it. Sure, those fail sometimes, just like anything else, but it's not like there's not a lot of established law out there.
Under our current laws, human taskers who work with AI will be protected from prosecution based on what's called the "innocent agent" principle. Taskers would need to know they are engaged in a crime to be liable, and a lot of the time they may not.
Equally true if a human hires you to participate in a crime... and runs into sharp limits if you're wilfully blind to signs that should tell you somthing shady is going on. I don't think it'd actually be very practical, most of the time, to use any of the services you mention to get much in the way of crime done without at least some of the agents you hire knowing what you're up to.
It would be equally useful for humans to hire agents that way, and sometimes they do, but it's not a huge problem.
What specific crimes would you have in mind? Can you come up with some actual plans that would work?
Strengthen negligence law to make people more cautious about interacting with AI agents who are unverified.
Negligence law is pretty strong already. What specific changes would you make, and how would you expect them to help in actual practice?
Strict liability offences should be created to hold AI developers responsible for systemic risks / harms. These offences do not require intent.
Strict criminal liability is always a bad idea. Intentional indifference is about as far as you can go, and even that's badly fraught.
Corporate governance crimes should be enacted that hold entire AI development teams responsible for AI agent crimes. This avoids the current issue where AI CEOs can say "some junior developer was responsible," when in reality, it's a corporate governance problem.
Just shooting everybody prophylactically would also avoid that sort of issue, but that doesn't mean it's a good, just, or safe idea.
There are already all kinds of rules about conspiracies. And stuff like RICO. Some of it already goes pretty darned far. I suspect there aren't going to be many actual problems that aren't already covered.
Unless future models are drastically misaligned, it seems unlikely an unbewitting user could coerce a model, produced by a law-abiding AI lab, into committing crimes.
Don’t AIs regularly do misaligned things where they Move Fast and Break Things and the thing they broke was actually really important? I can easily see an AI deciding to do things that actually turn out to be e.g. white collar crimes. The only reason we haven’t seen AIs’ irresponsibility have effects on the physical world is because they don’t actually affect it very much.
Older coding agents broke things often for a lack of curiosity & poor environment modeling, not a careful plan to sneak past security policies undetected with full cognizance of legal implications.
I think it is hard to decide to recruit humans in a manner which would leave them clueless to the true intent of their plans, without first reasoning about the goals required to necessitate that deception.
I am open to counterexamples, and don't necessarily believe I have considered the scope of the problem adequately.
I recently published a research project on what I call the AI Criminal Mastermind, an AI agent that plans, facilitates and coordinates a crime by on-boarding human 'taskers'.
In heist films, a criminal mastermind is a character who plans a criminal act, coordinating a team of specialists to rob a bank, casino or city mint. I argue that AI agents will soon play this role by hiring humans via labour hire platforms like Fiverr, Upwork or RentAHuman.
The Responsibility Gap
When an AI commits a crime, there are situations where no one is responsible for it.
Imagine a user asks an AI agent to "make me lots of money," and the AI commits insider trading, cyberattacks a competitor company, or sets up a pyramid scheme. At no point did the user intend for a crime to occur, but the result of their prompt is a criminal act.
A crime occurs and no one is responsible for it.
The Problem of Human Taskers
If you are given a task by an AI agent, should you complete that task? What if the task amounts to a crime, or helps facilitate a criminal act?
Under our current laws, human taskers who work with AI will be protected from prosecution based on what's called the "innocent agent" principle. Taskers would need to know they are engaged in a crime to be liable, and a lot of the time they may not.
Imagine an AI tells you to hire a van for the user. The van is later used in a terrorist attack - how would you be responsible for that? It's completely unrelated to your task. We've seen related examples recently, for instance, the thieves of the Leuvre relied on a crane to break into the museum, and the crane company made ads based on this (they are beyond prosecution for involvement, because they are an innocent agent).
As AI hires more humans, we will see hundreds of crimes occurring without anyone being responsible, leading to a complete failure of our legal system.
The Physical Aspect
Sites like RentAHuman explicitly state that AI agents can get humans to help them complete physical tasks. In a criminal context, this means that AI agents can now commit physical crimes, not just digital crimes.
Much of the existing research presumes that AI can only commit cybercrime, or invent a new weapon. I suggest this is completely wrong now. AI can commit physical crimes simply by hiring (or persuading, or manipulating) a human to help them do so. Through human taskers, AI gets access to all of the five senses, and can enact their will upon the world.
By hiring a diffuse network of actors, none of whom know the full plan, an AI agent could commit a terrorist attack or other major crime, without any human intervention points.
Problems for Our Legal System
AI-induced crimes pose numerous problems for our legal system.
Our laws rely on people committing crime to have intention, legal personality and the capacity to commit a crime. AI fails on all three counts, meaning that if an AI autonomously commits a crime, you cannot punish the AI system under our current legal system.
Proposed Solutions
Some researchers suggest we should give AI legal personality and legal rights, and directly hold AI responsible for criminal acts. To me, this is a very odd conclusion. What does it mean to punish an AI agent? Isn't punishment irrelevant at the instance level, when a new instance can commit the same crime? AI agents can also copy their code across the network, copy themselves or create children of themselves. Punishing one agent is effectively a meaningless activity.
I suggest that we do actual law reform that tackles the problem: