“Fear does not prevent death, it prevents life"
~ Naguib MahfouzWelcome to the age of AI crime and punishment
Bloomberg BusinessWeek gift article: “America’s legal system is already grappling with cases where chatbots acted as lawyers and witnesses, generated the evidence, or helped plan a mass shooting…Artificial intelligence, in the form of large language models, has emerged as a strange new kind of entity in our midst.
This is a statement you can comfortably accept no matter your positions in the leading debates about LLMs: whether they’ll keep improving at current rates or hit a wall; take white-collar jobs or create more productive workers; achieve consciousness or remain fickle regurgitators. LLMs, as they exist today, already represent something new to our experience: nonbiological human impersonators able to converse, create and, increasingly, act independent of human control. What role can and should these machines play in our thinking about crime and punishment?
AI chatbots are already serving as confidants and co-conspirators, assisting and even encouraging humans acting on their darkest impulses. They’re occupying ersatz roles as therapists and lawyers, relationships our legal system typically shields with confidential privilege. They’re producing new kinds of criminal evidence and offering up the beguiling possibility of preventing crime before it happens.
And as they’re given more autonomy across our digital and physical systems, they’re even gaining the ability to commit crimes themselves, absent specific human instruction — and, perhaps, in defiance of it. We know these agents have the capability to aid and abet harm. What we’re wrestling with now, like so many medieval judges pondering the inner lives of pigs, is how to parcel out accountability when they do.
“Is the legal system set up for that?” asks Christoph Winter, an assistant professor at the University of Cambridge and director of the Institute for Law & AI. “Very likely not. We have not yet faced the question where a nonhuman actor arguably has a level of autonomy that is quite foreign to us but also doesn’t yet reach the level of autonomy humans have.” LLMs, for the moment, seem to be something more than tools but less than persons.
They are, Winter says, “this new category that we simply haven’t thought about.” For now the questions around AI and crime have surfaced across a scattering of lawsuits and prosecutions in the US, winding their way through the courts. Some accuse AIs of being accessories:
Multiple lawsuits allege, for example, that OpenAI’s ChatGPT has assisted and even encouraged mass shooters. Other cases have considered the role of AI as lawyer and therapist, as with a Texas fraudster’s claim that his conversations with Anthropic PBC’s Claude were protected by attorney-client privilege. Some cases have presented chatbot outputs as evidence, with phony, AI-generated witness statements influencing grand jury indictments and sentencing decisions. And while no one has tried to charge an LLM with a crime, a rogue OpenAI model’s recent attempt to hack the open-source AI company Hugging Facesuggests that we aren’t all that far off from a future in which the chatbots themselves are among the perpetrators. Suddenly this quandary from the Middle Ages has returned in new form, to a legal system ill-equipped to handle it — and under pressure from business interests and Washington not to worry about it all that much. “Under any normal circumstances, we would want a longer period of trial and error,” Winter says. Given the race among companies and nations for market share and global dominance, such a period may prove illusory. “The stakes seem so high that maybe we won’t get one. And we need to get it right.”…