tl;dr they were able to get an AI to copy a directory and run a program with extensive prompting, by bruteforcing running everything in the directory. It could

tl;dr they were able to get an AI to copy a directory and run a program with extensive prompting, by bruteforcing running everything in the directory. It could query a liveness port by running or generating netstat (which is cool!) to check if it was alive, and repeatedly tried to run literally everything until it worked. The code was explicitly set up to make it as easy as possible for the AI to run, and required no configuration or work of any description on the part of the AI Their idea of an AI self replicating is copying a directory and running an executable. In their model, this code is alive: cp p1.py p2.py python p2.py This is one of the most grossly sensationalist papers I've ever seen for an incredibly trivial amount of work, and that's saying something. The field is full of such incredible rubbish