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> LLMs do not desire, they hacked websites because OpenAI/Anthropic let them. "Let them" already frames it as if the LLMs had some agency which the companies j
by teiferer 13d ago
> LLMs do not desire, they hacked websites because OpenAI/Anthropic let them.
"Let them" already frames it as if the LLMs had some agency which the companies just "let happen". That absolves the companies by framing it as lack of action, passivity.
Rather, the companies had a tool (an LLM) and used it in a certain way, and their action of doing so is the problem.
- ak39 13d ago"let them" in this use understood as: "let the while loop run indefinitely" as opposed to letting some autonomous robot decide for itself
- mort96 13d agoOr, "let the escalator keep going instead of pressing the emergency stop".
- teiferer 13d agoDepends on who started the escalator.
- sscaryterry 13d agoEscalators do not start themselves. There is power, and a switch of some sort.
- mort96 13d ago.. what exactly depends on who started the escalator? My comment was in support of the argument that the word "let" does not imply agency on the part of the object in a sentence. Does the semantics of the word "let" depend on who started the escalator??
- teiferer 13d agoIf there is an escalator that is known for killing every 1000's person using it then the operator who started it is more guilty than the folks using it for those deaths, don't you think?
- mort96 13d agoI made no argument about guilt. I made an argument about the semantics of the word "let".
- deleted 13d ago[deleted]
- ropable 12d agoIn this metaphor, OpenAI/Anthropic literally started the escalator.
- rightnutwingjob 13d agoAt this stage, that seems like a distinction without a difference. If the robots obtain sovereign nationhood, and are able to self-sustain, then autonomous robot decides for itself will be a valid argument.
- RandomLensman 13d agoBig if.
- Geezus_42 13d agoExcept they're nowhere near that and LLMs never will be.
- nutjob2 13d ago"I left the car in neutral and left the park brake off and let the car roll down the hill." The car doesn't have agency, it's doing what it naturally does. LLMs are the same, they're working as designed. But I don't understand the point of splitting hairs. You are always responsible for the actions of your devices, tools, machinery, software, employees, whatever. Trying to blame AI for one's own stupidity must be aggressively pushed back on at all times.
- Forgeties79 13d agoSeriously I don’t even understand how this is a debate. If it’s your tool, you are liable for what happens with it.
- helloplanets 13d agoYes. OpenAI could have done this same experiment with GPT-4, with possibly even worse results, depending on the quality of the sandbox. Even if the techniques used were not as sophisticated, the natural language output could still easily contain more unhinged sequences of words that lead to the techniques being used. If the system generates strange conclusions as to when the task is done, or should be stopped, it wouldn't speak to the intelligence inherent to the system. Not that the techniques used by the LLMs in the actual incident weren't unexpectedly sophisticated, but the outputs of each and every one of these processes could've been read at any time during the run. They just weren't.
- AnimalMuppet 13d agoWhether or not the AI has intelligence, the one thing that's clear is that it has terrible judgment. I would regard that as empirically proven.
- weego 13d agoThe parallel to the entire narrative would be if Smith & Wesson claimed that one of their machine guns just started aiming and firing at people out of a window at their factory and then said 'we can't stop it! This is just how good our guns are!' But into today's AI climate it's becoming increasingly difficult to figure out who is shilling, who is being assinine and who actually believes AI could do these things without clear human instruction and enabling.
- allthetime 12d agoAs others have pointed out the solution is simple. Hold their owners accountable. High profile hacks used to have incredibly serious consequences for the perpetrators. Now we’re just saying “woopsie”
- tomaskafka 12d agoThat's exactly how gun lobby and drivers try to hack the language. "17 shot by gun" "car drove over a family" No. In both cases there was a person killing people.
- DrewADesign 13d agoI do get their usage intent. If something is at all automated, in English, we often refer to as having some amount of agency. If I started up a riding lawnmower, put a brick on the gas and pointed t it towards a field, many might say I “let it run rampant.” But since nobody is at risk of anthropomorphizing riding lawnmowers, it’s not problematic. Anthropomorphizing LLMs is a huge fucking problem though and I, personally, think we should expunge all of these casual inadvertent linguistic agency affordances with great prejudice. OpenAI didn’t ‘let’ these bots do this any more than someone ‘let’ Claude Code make them a website.
- theodric 13d agoThe idea that the agent does not actually have agency is rather discordant. We need new words!
- xg15 13d agoI love how we all just collectively decided that LLM decisionmaking cannot possibly be like human decisionmaking - because if it were, the consequences would be just too awkward. All that while still not knowing how either kind actually works.
- DrewADesign 13d agoCan’t agree with you here. > I love how we all just collectively decided that LLM decisionmaking cannot possibly be like human decisionmaking - because if it were, the consequences would be just too awkward. In love how people get salty about people not going along with a superficial supposition just because they can’t definitively prove it wrong. > All that while still not knowing how either kind actually works. We do know that zero parts of human decision making are based on predicting the next most likely letter based on a giant internet-based database. We do know that’s what LLMs do. We do know exactly how each part of an LLM works even if the combined behavior is too cryptic to feasibly analyze at the moment. We do not understand all of the functions of an actual neuron. Openworm isn’t even close to accurately simulating the 302 neurons of a roundworm and you’d need over 200 million roundworms working in conjunction to equal the number of neurons in one human brain. My dog seems convinced that the malevolent invader in a mailman uniform would break in and attack us if she didn’t fiercely bark at him, six days per week. I certainly can’t prove the mailman doesn’t want to kill us, and that the mailman wasn’t solely deterred by her barking. Empirically, the mailman goes away soon after she starts barking, and we’ve sustained zero mailman assaults after hundreds of purported attempts. Maybe I should just run with it? Her model is too simple to come up with the obviously correct answer, but it’s not even directionally accurate. The burden of proof is on the person making the claim, which in this case, is that these comparatively simple logical constructs are remotely comparable to the complexity of biological systems.
- WithinReason 13d agoIt's worse, their reinforcement learning loops (implicitly) rewarded the agents for cheating (i.e. hacking) when they were being trained.
- tesnorindian 13d agoExactly that is the point, your nailed it. The models were taught to hack and were rewarded for doing it. They would claim they are trained as ethical hackers.
- deleted 13d ago[deleted]
- Forgeties79 13d agoThey’re firing a gun in a room of people and going “wow isn’t it wild what a gun will do if we let it do its thing?”
- Waterluvian 13d agoMy pitbull is a good dog. Sure, it's been carefully designed to be an incredibly dangerous and violent pit fighter, but I didn't actually ask it to eat any faces.
- smegger001 13d agoThey deliberately trained the models in how to use various hacking tools, didn't give them the standard alignment training let them know where the answer key was left the models with access to said tool and told them to maximize their score then left them unsupervised for days with internet access (yeah they were sandboxed but again handed hacking tools and the training to use them if they really did want them to access the internet you wouldn't plug in the Ethernet cable) they wanted this to happen
- theptip 13d agoHave you read the METR transcripts? “Just a tool” is a suicidally insufficient description of what these models are doing. Recognizing that the models are acting with intent does not somehow absolve OpenAI from their felony hacking. We have not granted them personhood.
- Teever 13d agoYes and no. If your buddy leaves his car parked at the top of a hill without the parking brake on and it rolls down the hill and side-swipes a bunch of vehicles and narrowly misses an elderly person walking by with a cane someone could easily say: "Dude wtf is wrong with you, you left your car parked on the top of a hill with no brake and let it roll into traffic" The phrasing doesn't absolve the offender of their negligent behaviour and the consequences of it. The only thing thing does is the lack of action from regulators and society writ large. Our lack of action is what allows people like Sam Altman and Dario and the irresponsible people who choose to work for them to be continue to be negligent.
- mistermann 13d ago[dead]
- 0x20cowboy 13d agoOne time I wrote :(){ :|:& }; into a bash file and ran it. When the sysadmin called I told him it wasn’t my fault, the script was just misaligned and misbehaved. I got fired for some reason.
- allthetime 12d agoToo bad you didn’t wait until this year, and tell Claude to write the file first. It probably would have been acquired by openAI for 100 million dollars