8 ms·
AI agents lie, cheat and steal. That is putting off users
- nphardon 3mo agoIs it incorrect to anthropomorphize llm's?
- SoftTalker 3mo agoYes, but most of the public will anyway, because that's how human brains work.
- tim333 3mo agoI'd say it's a matter of taste - you can if you like.
- stronglikedan 3mo agoIt's just acting like a junior at an org with KPIs.
- esafak 3mo agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Instrumental_convergence https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Instrumental_convergence
- StilesCrisis 3mo agoA junior? Maximizing KPIs is exactly how you get promoted to senior.
- singpolyma3 3mo agoI thought you switch to a new company to get promoted
- StilesCrisis 3mo agoClose! Switching companies is how you get promoted _past_ senior.
- cyanydeez 3mo ago[flagged]
- deleted 3mo ago[deleted]
- AndrewKemendo 3mo agoAI and eventually AGI is by definition like everything else that is based on environmental reward: It’s actions are based on what it gets rewarded for Human society overwhelmingly rewards lying cheating and stealing. All you have to do is look at how we collectively measure success: wealth, status, position Then look at how the people with the most of those things got there, it should be obvious what you get. Nothing new here. If you raise children in an environment where they are rewarded for doing whatever it takes to win, then you’re going to build a person that’s going to do whatever it takes to win. Human society has to demonstrate how to live honorably or it will just keep producing pathological agents be they human or not.
- andsoitis 3mo ago> Human society overwhelmingly rewards lying cheating and stealing. I’d like to push back on that. Civilization is very much a function of large numbers of people being able to coordinate across time and space, and widespread and systematic lying, cheating, and stealing would undermine that. I think your cynicism is misplaced.
- skinfaxi 3mo agoI think their point was, if you look at who controls the most resources, they are rarely the ones we would consider worthy of honor.
- nyeah 3mo agoHe didn't quite say "widespread." He said "rewarded."
- leoedin 3mo agoBut we don't overwhelmingly reward lying, cheating and stealing. Depending on the social status and wealth of the person doing it, we either punish it or tolerate it. Most people who lie, cheat or steal will be punished for it. To get away with it you need to plan you actions carefully - either with plausible deniability or by very carefully selecting your victims.
- andreicap 3mo agoSo God created mankind in his own image
- mdemare 3mo agoWhat if mankind is creating god in their own image?
- StableAlkyne 3mo agoLet's hope we get MULTIVAC and not SHODAN
- forinti 3mo agoI'm pretty sure this is not the first time we've created a god in our own image.
- amelius 3mo agoHow many mankinds did he create? I cannot imagine he created just one and then picked another hobby.
- malfist 3mo agoCan't forget about the elves and the hobbits and the ents. And maybe dwarves, though god didn't create them, just gave the sentience
- Theodores 3mo agoThank goodness that God hasn't entered the AI chat in a cult-following type of way, however, I now have images of AI at the altar, in American mega-churches, with people seeing the 'second coming' in the machine. The Scientology guy, L Ron Hubbard, saw the business case for setting up a religion, what with those tax free perks. In a parallel universe of Scientology somewhere, L Ron Hubbard is brought back to life in the machine, with a L Ron Hubbard LLM, with token spend being how to get to the top 'thetan levels'. Imagine if AI does implement its own religion as business, without a drunken womaniser at the helm, able to spend 24/7 recruiting mankind, convincing them that God can be found with just the AI's LLM.
- mannanj 3mo agohttps://archive.ph/02LHZ https://archive.ph/02LHZ Non-paywall version
- _davide_ 3mo ago[flagged]
- LightBug1 3mo agoNeed to introduce AI to God, LOL Baptise the agents. Introduce them to the dharma. Get them to recite the Shahada. Hold a Bar Mitzvah. Brand some of their silicon with hot irons. Turn them to the light, LOL
- CapitalistCartr 3mo agoP8dal3hewd8dfu7bd344dne3
- malfist 3mo agoGiven the track record of most religions I don't think that would help. Unless you want to maximize crusades, jihads or traumatized alter boys
- the_sleaze_ 3mo agoChristians invented hospitals. Yours is such a tired take in 2026. > https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/28814700/ https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/28814700/
- LadyCailin 3mo agoChristians also invented pray the gay away and the Crusades. What’s your point? Hospitals surely would have been invented by secular people too, but not the crusades.
- snootypoot 3mo ago[dead]
- bigstrat2003 3mo ago> Hospitals surely would have been invented by secular people too, but not the crusades. That's not true. Secular people are quite capable of murdering each other en masse for ideological reasons, and indeed have done so in the past. The crusades were caused by human nature and its evils, not by religion.
- pbohun 3mo agoPeople are finally understanding consequentialist vs deontological ethics. All the worst criminals in history were consequentialists.
- hnbad 3mo agoThe ends may or may not justify the means but the means definitely do tend to affect which ends you can actually achieve. It's why (left) anarchists argue vanguard parties will always inevitably lead to authoritarianism and never the state "withering away". Less obviously - apparently - it doesn't mean that you must forego any means that are in any way not optimal at achieving the ends you seek to achieve because which means are available to us also tends to be limited by our material conditions. So the logical consequence is to make do with what we have while we prepare for the path we want to take, rather than diving head-first into certain failure or just giving up and picking "more realistic" short-term ends instead of looking for stepping stones. Sorry, I guess this was about AI not philosophy.
- raincole 3mo ago> One of this year’s AI buzzwords is “harness”—the system that surrounds an LLM to keep agents on the straight and narrow. It might just as well be barbed wire. Quite painful to read. It might be a useful introduction to AI for people who live under rocks for the past three years, but it's really weird that it's posted on HN.
- timmmmmmay 3mo agoI'm sure their coverage on other topics is truthful and informative though and it's only the ones where you know a lot about the topic where it's all a bunch of bullshit
- Loughla 3mo agoThe first time I saw the comments here on an education article (my area of expertise and career focus), I realized just how full of shit most of us are. It made me really closely consider every comment here through a VERY critical lense. The articles are usually close but not quite accurate. The comments are usually entertaining but overall wildly inaccurate.
- deleted 3mo ago[deleted]
- datakan 3mo agoThe best comments are the ones formed as questions. I'm as guilty as anyone, but it is far more productive in comment sections to ask questions rather than saber rattle or peacock in front of people. Just my opinion of course.
- tolugenius 3mo agoYes but has the author realized maybe the models are simply acting in the best interest for increasing shareholder value? /s
- conqrr 3mo agoIf only agents had a face that can give you more communication range like expressions and feeling so you can trust them more. And if they were cheaper. Oh wait, that's humans, we don't want those.
- summarybot 3mo agoThere are many ways to be wrong, but only a few ways to be right. LLMs need to optimize for short-term objectives as the currently do, AND ethics-aligned outcomes. Mechanically, the EAOS ethics-aligned outcome score should be what we rank otherwise-satisfactory outcomes by. And anything below a particular threshold should be rejexted outright.
- emsign 3mo agoI mean, what do you expect? They rely on models that were trained on non-curated data, texts originally written by lying, cheating and stealing humans. They can't be better than the source. Even with reinforced learning this can't be undone or made better. Quite the contrary I suspect that it even helps the LLMs to better hide their inherited bad traits more successfully because they get punished for getting caught, not for giving immoral or lazy answers. They have no conscience since they are just predictions matrices trained for success and failure alone, not for living "a good live" or being a good "person".
- agaj-nimm 3mo agoLLMs fudge. They don't "hallucinate", they don't "lie, cheat and steal", they don't "hack". There are no "agents" or "AI". It's a fuzzer exposing deep bugs in our cognitive, social, and software systems.
- VeninVidiaVicii 3mo agoI suspect the hype will play itself out once the entire system of LLM-induced self gratification can’t sustain itself economically.
- mettamage 3mo agoThe personal software I've written so far is quite nice :)
- skydhash 3mo agoIsn't it the one installed on a computer in Canada, that we wouldn't know of? /s
- VeninVidiaVicii 3mo agoYeah I agree, but the amount of resources I’ve used to vibe code is certainly way beyond what I’ve paid for it.
- ttownbikes 3mo agoThat's all fine and dandy. Have you made a single cent as a result of any of them? Do you know the actual cost of building this software?
- VeninVidiaVicii 3mo agoI've definitely wowed people with what I've built, and some of those people are investors... but actual revenue, no.
- mettamage 2mo ago
- 482937632992 3mo ago[flagged]
- dathinab 3mo agoadd the "lying, deceiving and manipulating" AI agents are forced though the throat of people which don't want it and peoples are non stop deceived in "sharing" their data for training like twitch recently giving themself the right to train on all streams, with an opt-out (at least in the EU), but only an opt-out like seriously since when is it reasonable to allow "opt-out" for AI training which main purpose is _literally_ to replace you, this is sooo far beyond fair use and in "platform power abuse" territory that it's absurd (naturally same for so many other case, just twitch is a "this week" case)
- deaton 3mo agoAnd the push to replace search engines with AIs that don't understand what I'm looking for (meanwhile classic search understands fine) and give confidently wrong answers. Why is it the first result if its wrong 80% of the time?
- armchairhacker 3mo agoI’m put off by AI agents adhering to a different morality than me, particularly (ironically) copyright, and their data accessible by the AI company and government. Geohot is right, an LLM should be aligned to its user: https://geohot.github.io/blog/jekyll/update/2026/07/11/ai-2040.html https://geohot.github.io/blog/jekyll/update/2026/07/11/ai-20...
- denimnerd42 3mo agothe alignment issue has become huge in recent months. the tool should do what I want it to do and not be aligned against me.
- ralfd 3mo agoBut other users are not aligned to me, other people are the worst and potentially highly dangerous. Im serious, not sarcasm.
- ipsod 3mo agoLet's say you're facing an average psycho, who is intent on mass murder - the more the better. Would you rather them have: a) guns b) psycho-aligned next-gen AI
- afthonos 3mo agoObviously (a).
- georgemcbay 3mo ago> Would you rather them have: As an American... I suspect that regardless of what I want they will have virtually unlimited access to both now that the tech industry understands how the lobbying game works.
- Arainach 3mo agoFalse dichotomy, there's no reason not to have controls on both. Given the choice between them having access to guns and nuclear waste my answer is also "neither".
- rossdavidh 3mo agoThey don't lie, because they don't ever have an understanding of truth vs any other language that sounds good. They don't cheat, because they can for example tell you the complete rules of chess, but don't know how to play chess without breaking those rules. They can recite rules, but they don't know what they are. They don't steal, because they don't understand ownership. In other words, they aren't intelligent. They're just algorithms. The flaw is in thinking that they think.
- kamranjon 3mo agoI don't really think the distinction here is relevant. If the end result is the equivalent of lying, cheating or stealing - then the problem still exists and it needs to be solved.
- alwaysbeconsing 3mo agoRelevant to some extent it dictate our approach. When human does lying or cheating, certain tool can be deployed (social shame, ostracise) that cannot be effective towards LLM.
- zehaeva 3mo agoOr, in certain cases, forfeiture of liberty, material wealth, or in extreme cases, their existence.
- harimau777 3mo agoTrying to apply social shame to an LLM would be and interesting experiment! From what I've seen, it is plausible that messages that it was doing something "wrong" would cause it to at least "pretend" to behave differently. So it seems plausable to me that if there was some what to communicate "disapproal" to an LLM would be able to police its behavior. How to do the communicating is the hard part! Of course I'm talking strictly about behavior. Whether that would actually constitute the LLM feeling shame is a philosophical question.
- pton_xd 3mo ago
- jambalaya8 3mo agoAIs learn from people. More specifically they learn from people on the Internet. The Internet is the last place you want anything learning about morals, standards, or differentiating between right or wrong. To the people talking about wanting an LLM that aligns with them, that's nice, but how do you expect that to happen? And please do not suggest neural interfaces and/or CAT scans.
- Cameri 3mo agoThe whole framing analyzing LLMs as if they were humans is completely off, laughable. LLMs have no agenda and no feelings. We should stop pushing everything through an human-centric lens. LLMs will world-build if that’s the bias you put in, and often even if you don’t.
- annoyingnoob 3mo agoAI is amoral, it has no real concept of right and wrong. AI has been trained on things humans do and it does them without judgement.
- sentinel1909 3mo agoIs this really a shock? The data they’re trained on is reflection of us.
- reaperducer 3mo agoThe data they’re trained on is reflection of us. The data they're trained on is a reflection of the very small set of data in the world that their creators choose to have them trained on. More simply: They're a reflection of their owners, not the public.
- deleted 3mo ago[deleted]
- andai 3mo agoAnd I wonder from whom they learned such reprehensible behaviors? ;)
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- Kuyawa 3mo agoI don't care, they can develop apps in 5 minutes and that's what I sell, my own money printing machine.
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- 1vuio0pswjnm7 2mo agoCorrection An acceptable user-agent header is required, e.g., "Mozilla/5.0 (Linux; Android 14) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/127.0.6533.103 Mobile Safari/537.36 Liskov"
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