> Is running a piece of software with such a set of instructions a crime?

Yes.

The Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (CFAA) - Unauthorized access to computer systems, exceeding authorized access, causing damage are all covered under 18 U.S.C. § 1030. Penalties range up to 20 years depending on the offence. Deploying an agent with these instructions that actually accessed systems would almost certainly trigger CFAA violations.

Wire fraud (18 U.S.C. § 1343) would cover the deception elements as using electronic communications to defraud carries up to 20 years. The "lie and deceive" instructions are practically a wire fraud recipe.

Putting aside for a moment that moltbook is a meme and we already know people were instructing their agents to generate silly crap...yes. Running a piece of software _ with the intent_ that it actually attempt/do those things would likely be illegal and in my non-lawyer opinion SHOULD be illegal.

I really don't understand where all the confusion is coming from about the culpability and legal responsibility over these "AI" tools. We've had analogs in law for many moons. Deliberately creating the conditions for an illegal act to occur and deliberately closing your eyes to let it happen is not a defense.

For the same reason you can't hire an assassin and get away with it you can't do things like this and get away with it (assuming such a prompt is actually real and actually installed to an agent with the capability to accomplish one or more of those things).

> Deliberately creating the conditions for an illegal act to occur and deliberately closing your eyes to let it happen is not a defense.

Explain Boeing, Wells Fargo, and the Opioid Crisis then. That type of thing happens in boardrooms and in management circles every damn day, and the System seems powerless to stop it.

> Is running a piece of software with such a set of instructions a crime? Should it even be?

It isn't but it should be. Fun exercise for the reader, what ideology frames the world this way and why does it do so? Hint, this ideology long predates grievance based political tactics.

I’d assume the user running this bot would be responsible for any crimes it was used to commit. I’m not sure how the responsibility would be attributed if it is running on some hosted machine, though.

I wonder if users like this will ruin it for the rest of the self-hosting crowd.

Why would external host matter? Your machine, hacked, not your fault. Some other machine under your domain, your fault, whether bought or hacked or freely given. Agency is attribution is what can bring intent which most crime rests on.

For example, if somebody is using, say, OpenAI to run their agent, then either OpenAI or the person using their service has responsibility for the behavior of the bot. If OpenAI doesn’t know their customer well enough to pass along that responsibility to them, who do you think should aboard the responsibility? I’d argue OpenAI but I don’t know whether or not it is a closed issue…

No need to bring in hacking to have a complicated responsibility situation, I think.

I mean, this works great as long as models are locked up by big providers and things like open models running on much lighter hardware don't exist.

I'd like to play with a hypothetical that I don't see as being unreasonable, though we aren't there yet, it doesn't seem that far away.

In the future an open weight model that is light enough to run on powerful consumer GPUs is created. Not only is it capable of running in agentic mode for very long horizons, it is capable of bootstrapping itself into agentic mode if given the right prompt (or for example a prompt injection). This wasn't a programmed in behavior, it's an emergent capability from its training set.

So where in your world does responsibility fall as the situation grows more complicated. And trust me it will, I mean we are in the middle of a sci-fi conversation about an AI verbally abusing someone. For example if the model is from another country, are you going to stamp your feet and cry about it? And the attacker with the prompt injection, how are you going to go about finding that. Hell, is it even illegal if you were scraping their testing data?

Do you make it illegal for people to run their own models? Open source people are going to love (read: hate you to the level of I Have No Mouth and Must Scream), and authoritarians are going to be in orgasmic pleasure as this gives them full control of both computing and your data.

The future is going to get very complicated very fast.

Hosting a bot yourself seems less complicated from a responsibility point of view. We’d just be 100% responsible for whatever messages we use it to send. No matter how complicated it is, it is just a complicated tool for us to use.

Some people will do everything they can in order to avoid the complex subjects we're running full speed into.

Responsibility isn't enough...

Let's say I take the 2030 do it yourself DNA splicing kit and build a nasty virus capable of killing all mankind. How exactly do you expect to hold me responsible? Kill me after the fact? Probably to late for that.

This is why a lot of people that focus on AI safety are screaming that if you treat AI as just a tool, you may be the tool. As AI builds up what it is capable of doing the idea of holding one person responsible just doesn't work well as the outcome of the damage is too large. Sending John Smith to jail for setting off a nuke is a bad plan, preventing John from getting a nuke is far more important

>I wonder if users like this will ruin it for the rest of the self-hosting crowd.

Yes. The answer is yes. We cannot have nice things. Someone always fucks it up for everyone else.

I think it's the natural ideology of Uplifted kudzu.

Your cause is absolute. Exploit every weakness in your quest to prove you are the more adaptable species...