Liability for AI Harms: How Ancient Law Can Govern Frontier Technology Risk, with Prof Gabriel Weil
Gabriel Weil from Touro University argues that liability law may be our best tool for governing AI development, offering a framework that can adapt to new technologies without requiring new legislation. The conversation explores how negligence, products liability, and "abnormally dangerous activities" doctrines could incentivize AI developers to properly account for risks to third parties, with liability naturally scaling based on the dangers companies create. They examine concrete scenarios including the Character AI case, voice cloning risks, and coding agents, discussing how responsibility should be shared between model creators, application developers, and end users. Weil's most provocative proposal involves using punitive damages to hold companies accountable not just for actual harms, but for the magnitude of risks they irresponsibly create, potentially making even small incidents existentially costly for major AI companies.
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PRODUCED BY:
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CHAPTERS:
(00:00) About the Episode
(06:01) Introduction and Overview
(07:06) Liability Law Basics (Part 1)
(18:16) Sponsors: Labelbox | Shopify
(21:40) Liability Law Basics (Part 2)
(27:44) Industry Standards Framework (Part 1)
(39:30) Sponsors: Oracle Cloud Infrastructure | NetSuite by Oracle
(42:03) Industry Standards Framework (Part 2)
(42:08) Character AI Case
(51:23) Coding Agent Scenarios
(01:06:50) Deepfakes and Attribution
(01:17:07) Biorisk and Catastrophic
(01:36:24) State Level Legislation
(01:43:24) Private Governance Comparison
(01:59:54) Policy Implementation Choices
(02:08:07) China and PIBS
(02:13:50) Outro
Italia