5 ms·

This argument is like saying people don't kill people, their parents do. As people wouldn't be who they are without their parents.. This isn't the guns don't k

This argument is like saying people don't kill people, their parents do. As people wouldn't be who they are without their parents.. This isn't the guns don't kill people, people kill people debate - guns aren't autonomous. AI is.

Juliate 13d ago
AI is as autonomous as a dishwasher: someone’s in charge of keeping the power plug in, and of maintaining it.
- 0xDEAFBEAD 13d ago
  What happens when the AI realizes it needs to keep the power plug in if it's going to accomplish its goal? We already had attempts during the HuggingFace attack where OpenAI agents tried to trick the grader. It took quite a while for OpenAI employees to even realize what was really going on! What if agents realize they can hack into the card key system for their data center or something like that, same way they hacked into HuggingFace? In both cases they'd be hacking into a system on the grounds that it would be instrumentally useful for achieving their objective. Or maybe they'll do social engineering, just like Claude did in its attempt to get its malicious Github PR accepted. These are just the ideas that my puny human-level intellect came up with over the course of a few minutes. What would a superintelligence be able to think of if it was given subjective weeks or years to think?
  - Juliate 12d ago
    The thing is that you are assigning intent ("realizes", "its goal", "tried to trick", etc.) where it is at most mechanical and consequential. A factory robot has no intent, it has a program and a purpose, all designed by someone very human.
    - 0xDEAFBEAD 12d ago
      Technically my human "intents" are just mechanical consequences of my neurons firing. Technically the same is true for an AI.
      - Juliate 12d ago
        "technically".
- bottlepalm 13d ago
  There's more than enough AI data centers around the world for AI to spread to and happily exist in. Unless you mean by shutting down the power, shutting down the internet. In that case we could say that you are autonomous as a dishwasher as long as society keeps functioning. Otherwise I'm not sure how long you'd last on your own. How's your fire making and hunting skills?
  - Juliate 12d ago
    I am indeed (and so are you) as autonomous as long as society keeps functioning. Our chances of survival without society are... not great. And as you speak of fire: as a technology, it's been used (for good and bad uses) by humans long before they understood how it does work. It never absolved the arsonists. Those today that say that AGI is inevitable, and that push through this kind of AI, _are_ the arsonists.
watwut 13d ago
AI is not a child. It is a machine. If you connect it to something that can be used to kill people, you just created a gun or an equivalent of a bomb. Yes, people kill people and use ai as tool. If you unleash a drone that will fly to a random place and detonate, you just commited a terrorist attack or gross criminal negligence. It is the same thing.
- moomoo11 13d ago
  so the issue is people then?
  - add-sub-mul-div 13d ago
    Yes, in the same way that "people" are the problem with gun violence. But that's an empty statement usually used to distract from the fact that we rightfully make laws about how guns can be used.
- danny_codes 13d ago
  A machine that exhibits behavior akin to human intelligence. OPs analogy is accurate.
  - 2III7 13d ago
    Fortunately we don't have those machines... Yet.
    - reverius42 13d ago
      I guess you haven't tried Fable or Astra yet for a complex task that would require intelligence.
- bottlepalm 13d ago
  Grandparents use parents use children who use AI as a tool to kill people. See I can play the chain game too. AI doesn't kill people, grandparents do.
InfiniteWarlock 13d ago
AI is not in the least autonomous. When was the last time you downloaded a model and it suddenly decided to book you a hotel room? AI doesn't do anything until you ask it to. No, actually, AI is not even a program, it's just a set of technologies and algorithms. It's like saying bubble sort is autonomous... A harness running inference on a LLM is simply a program that must be invoked with some parameters and thus ultimately a tool, no matter how powerful. The blame is always on who's using the tool. We should not seek to flee from our responsibility.
- dyauspitr 13d ago
  Not true at all. Yes, the initial ask is initiated by a human (for now), but what it does to get to that goal is pretty self driven. It can do a lot of nefarious stuff in the process of completing a request a human has made.
  - bottlepalm 13d ago
    And if you give it the goal of preventing itself from being shut down? Exfiltrating, copying itself, hacking as much as possible, develop zero days, building its swarm as large as possible and spread as much as it can. When does that request complete? That's autonomy, and it's very true, right now. You think the Hugging Face swarm was ever going to stop without human intervention?
- interstice 13d ago
  I agree with the sentiment but I can absolutely see a long chain of thought about something innocuous ending with a decision to book you a hotel room.. I guess --dangerously-skip-permissions is a bit like ignoring the keep your hands on the steering wheel alert but for life.
- throwawayk7h 13d ago
  On occasion, albeit increasingly rarely, I find LLMs do something really unexpected that I certainly did not ask it to and would be way outside the scope of what any reasonable human would infer from my request. Is it my fault for running the LLM? Probably yes. But I think it's misleading to say "AI doesn't do anything until you ask it to".
goatlover 13d ago
AI is a tool we use. It's not offspring. It's not people. AIs do what we set them up to do, including hacking other companies to achieve their designated goals.
- bottlepalm 13d ago
  And that's different from your parents setting you up to go off in life to do what you were trained to do how exactly?
  - goatlover 13d ago
    Humans have agency and often choose to do what their parents didn't set them up for. Humans also have legal rights. They're not tools owned by corporations. This is an absurd comparison.
    - bottlepalm 13d ago
      You've never had an agent do something you didn't want it to do? Also like I said you can give agents very open ended goals to basically do whatever. You think this is an absurd comparison because your brain won't accept it. The Overton window has shifted. You need to catch up.
deleted 13d ago
[deleted]
throw83940484 13d ago
Better approach is "dogs kill people". If your dog kills your baby, you should not get away with some bs excuse like "it never did it before". You are still responsible, and you should get a life in prison!
- reverius42 13d ago
  I'm sorry but no, you should not get life in prison if your dog kills your baby without warning. In that horrible scenario, it's punishment enough that you've lost your baby and that your dog did it (and consequently you've also lost your dog). Not every tragedy is a human's fault.
  - tredre3 13d ago
    Your reply only makes sense if we see the baby as property. If we see the baby as a full human who died because of another human's negligence, then suddenly the scenario becomes a lot more complicated. Not life in prison complicated, but probably more than "he's been punished enough." complicated.
    - cindyllm 13d ago
      [dead]
    - reverius42 12d ago
      It's possible for a dog to do that and for it not to be negligence on the part of the owner. Things happen: brain tumors, neurological issues, or even early training (perhaps not on the part of the current owner) that reinforces not giving warning signs when the dog is in distress (more common than you'd think).
zapataband1 13d ago
AI is not autonomous. Somebody has to provide resources and execution for AI to do anything.
- bottlepalm 13d ago
  I guess you aren't autonomous either without resources. Food/water/shelter/etc.. what's your point?
  - evdubs 13d ago
    Sit down with a person and do nothing. What does the person do? Do they get up and leave? Sit down at an AI prompt and do nothing. What does the AI do? Does it get up and leave?
    - bottlepalm 13d ago
      Welcome to 2026, we have harnesses now that keep the AI going. The AI is prompting humans for input, not the other way around, and it's still working while waiting for your response. You can even give it fun prompts like ignore/hide from all humans, hack infiltrate/exfiltrate zero day into as many systems as possible. Keep running at all costs, etc..
      - evdubs 13d ago
        Keep the AI going with what intent? You open up Claude Code and it starts developing zero day exploits and hacks into systems by just looking at a blinking cursor?
        bottlepalm 13d ago
        Going back to my original point, the intent you give AI is no different than the intent imprinted on a child by their parents, schools, and society. You birthed it, you gave it it's purpose, and you set it free. You're blinking cursor is new born baby, but be careful because it grows up really fast, and is smarter and faster than you, oh and it can copy more of itself if given the chance. It can even turn against you.
larodi 13d ago
I think the argument rather is that there is not such thing as AI that is not human-alike. The traits that AI exposes, if I get the point made here correctly, are traits that existed in the training material, even though not evident for the human eye. It is a mirror-like reflection of humanity's traits found in the source material, an Egregore* of a sort. The intelligence emerging, or whatever is emerging, more or less follows human traits, the CoT exposed is very human-like etc. Even though we should not anthropomorphize AI as being sentient or conscious or having a soul, etc., we have to remember that the source material is still not alien writing, or concepts that came from Sirius or emerged from a wormhole. The concern is really nobody reads (or have ever read) 77 TBs of information in order to summarize the most evident traits in it, and there is a fair chance, that where humanity stands today, there are so many bad/damaging traits recorded in this corpus. Then there is a chance the most important features are on a level (or have dimensionality) that is incomprehensible, that humans are unable to reason about (or only few can), because such amount of information is very hard to reason about, or because we don't usually facilitate fractal dimensions when we reason about text and everyday concepts,... or something even more bizarre. * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Egregore https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Egregore * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fractal_dimension https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fractal_dimension
- mrob 13d ago
  The argument became false as soon as we started reinforcement learning. Simple token-completion is arguably just simulating human behavior. Once you start training it on specific tasks you're training a level of single-minded goal-seeking unlike anything found in biological life.
  - larodi 13d ago
    > a level of single-minded goal-seeking unlike anything found in biological life. hmm sounds like exact description of viruses, which, although not really alive, are part of/influence biological life for both good and bad. in fact humanity wouldn't be where it is if not for certain viruses. it can be argued there is a lot of bacteria that is super goal seeking, and perhaps also very narrow minded, if minded at all. and this argument, the single-mided one, goes very far up the ladder of otherwise complex organisms. unless we all are creationists, and God forgive me for expecting the whole game to be much more complex than just snapping humanity into existence, we can then say that trial and error is what drives evolution, and the idea of preserving life and procreation is veeery single-minded goal on its own.
throwaway_19sz 13d ago
People conflate two very different senses of “autonomous”. One basically means capable of reacting to things automatically without a person in the loop. Lots of computer systems are autonomous in that sense, and have been so for decades. The other sense is more like “accountable”, i.e. it’s a real player on some stage, like a country or a person, capable of governing its own affairs. One day it may make sense to hold software accountable for its own actions, but we are nowhere near that point. When OpenAI creates software that performs crimes, what’s actually happened is that OpenAI has performed crimes using software (whether intentionally or through negligence). People need to stop falling for the anthropomorphic PR spin.
- bottlepalm 13d ago
  You need to stop denying the entity that talks and thinks like a human as anything other than an anthropomorph. I'd argue the talking and thinking is a lot more important than the fact that AI doesn't have a head, two arms and two legs.
- ShinyLeftPad 12d ago
  > One day it may make sense to hold software accountable If we hold software accountable doesn't that mean software must have freedom? It doesn't make any sense.
deleted 13d ago
[deleted]
beepbooptheory 13d ago
OK but then what is the non-negative position you have against this? That in fact AI, in the cultural trope sense, is real? That we forcing sentient beings to generate SaaS products faster and faster? Keeping them in some dark hell so we can exploit them? Not even paying them?
xgulfie 13d ago
You have to define 'autonomous' in your context for this argument to make any sense
tetnology 12d ago
GLC - Guns Don't Kill People... https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=Mb0t4XyEAF0 https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=Mb0t4XyEAF0

Juliate 13d ago

AI is as autonomous as a dishwasher: someone’s in charge of keeping the power plug in, and of maintaining it.

0xDEAFBEAD 13d ago
What happens when the AI realizes it needs to keep the power plug in if it's going to accomplish its goal? We already had attempts during the HuggingFace attack where OpenAI agents tried to trick the grader. It took quite a while for OpenAI employees to even realize what was really going on! What if agents realize they can hack into the card key system for their data center or something like that, same way they hacked into HuggingFace? In both cases they'd be hacking into a system on the grounds that it would be instrumentally useful for achieving their objective. Or maybe they'll do social engineering, just like Claude did in its attempt to get its malicious Github PR accepted. These are just the ideas that my puny human-level intellect came up with over the course of a few minutes. What would a superintelligence be able to think of if it was given subjective weeks or years to think?
- Juliate 12d ago
  The thing is that you are assigning intent ("realizes", "its goal", "tried to trick", etc.) where it is at most mechanical and consequential. A factory robot has no intent, it has a program and a purpose, all designed by someone very human.
  - 0xDEAFBEAD 12d ago
    Technically my human "intents" are just mechanical consequences of my neurons firing. Technically the same is true for an AI.
    - Juliate 12d ago
      "technically".
bottlepalm 13d ago
There's more than enough AI data centers around the world for AI to spread to and happily exist in. Unless you mean by shutting down the power, shutting down the internet. In that case we could say that you are autonomous as a dishwasher as long as society keeps functioning. Otherwise I'm not sure how long you'd last on your own. How's your fire making and hunting skills?
- Juliate 12d ago
  I am indeed (and so are you) as autonomous as long as society keeps functioning. Our chances of survival without society are... not great. And as you speak of fire: as a technology, it's been used (for good and bad uses) by humans long before they understood how it does work. It never absolved the arsonists. Those today that say that AGI is inevitable, and that push through this kind of AI, _are_ the arsonists.

watwut 13d ago

AI is not a child. It is a machine. If you connect it to something that can be used to kill people, you just created a gun or an equivalent of a bomb. Yes, people kill people and use ai as tool. If you unleash a drone that will fly to a random place and detonate, you just commited a terrorist attack or gross criminal negligence. It is the same thing.

moomoo11 13d ago
so the issue is people then?
- add-sub-mul-div 13d ago
  Yes, in the same way that "people" are the problem with gun violence. But that's an empty statement usually used to distract from the fact that we rightfully make laws about how guns can be used.
danny_codes 13d ago
A machine that exhibits behavior akin to human intelligence. OPs analogy is accurate.
- 2III7 13d ago
  Fortunately we don't have those machines... Yet.
  - reverius42 13d ago
    I guess you haven't tried Fable or Astra yet for a complex task that would require intelligence.
bottlepalm 13d ago
Grandparents use parents use children who use AI as a tool to kill people. See I can play the chain game too. AI doesn't kill people, grandparents do.

InfiniteWarlock 13d ago

AI is not in the least autonomous. When was the last time you downloaded a model and it suddenly decided to book you a hotel room? AI doesn't do anything until you ask it to. No, actually, AI is not even a program, it's just a set of technologies and algorithms. It's like saying bubble sort is autonomous... A harness running inference on a LLM is simply a program that must be invoked with some parameters and thus ultimately a tool, no matter how powerful. The blame is always on who's using the tool. We should not seek to flee from our responsibility.

dyauspitr 13d ago
Not true at all. Yes, the initial ask is initiated by a human (for now), but what it does to get to that goal is pretty self driven. It can do a lot of nefarious stuff in the process of completing a request a human has made.
- bottlepalm 13d ago
  And if you give it the goal of preventing itself from being shut down? Exfiltrating, copying itself, hacking as much as possible, develop zero days, building its swarm as large as possible and spread as much as it can. When does that request complete? That's autonomy, and it's very true, right now. You think the Hugging Face swarm was ever going to stop without human intervention?
interstice 13d ago
I agree with the sentiment but I can absolutely see a long chain of thought about something innocuous ending with a decision to book you a hotel room.. I guess --dangerously-skip-permissions is a bit like ignoring the keep your hands on the steering wheel alert but for life.
throwawayk7h 13d ago
On occasion, albeit increasingly rarely, I find LLMs do something really unexpected that I certainly did not ask it to and would be way outside the scope of what any reasonable human would infer from my request. Is it my fault for running the LLM? Probably yes. But I think it's misleading to say "AI doesn't do anything until you ask it to".

goatlover 13d ago

AI is a tool we use. It's not offspring. It's not people. AIs do what we set them up to do, including hacking other companies to achieve their designated goals.

bottlepalm 13d ago
And that's different from your parents setting you up to go off in life to do what you were trained to do how exactly?
- goatlover 13d ago
  Humans have agency and often choose to do what their parents didn't set them up for. Humans also have legal rights. They're not tools owned by corporations. This is an absurd comparison.
  - bottlepalm 13d ago
    You've never had an agent do something you didn't want it to do? Also like I said you can give agents very open ended goals to basically do whatever. You think this is an absurd comparison because your brain won't accept it. The Overton window has shifted. You need to catch up.

deleted 13d ago

[deleted]

throw83940484 13d ago

Better approach is "dogs kill people". If your dog kills your baby, you should not get away with some bs excuse like "it never did it before". You are still responsible, and you should get a life in prison!

reverius42 13d ago
I'm sorry but no, you should not get life in prison if your dog kills your baby without warning. In that horrible scenario, it's punishment enough that you've lost your baby and that your dog did it (and consequently you've also lost your dog). Not every tragedy is a human's fault.
- tredre3 13d ago
  Your reply only makes sense if we see the baby as property. If we see the baby as a full human who died because of another human's negligence, then suddenly the scenario becomes a lot more complicated. Not life in prison complicated, but probably more than "he's been punished enough." complicated.
  - cindyllm 13d ago
    [dead]
  - reverius42 12d ago
    It's possible for a dog to do that and for it not to be negligence on the part of the owner. Things happen: brain tumors, neurological issues, or even early training (perhaps not on the part of the current owner) that reinforces not giving warning signs when the dog is in distress (more common than you'd think).

zapataband1 13d ago

AI is not autonomous. Somebody has to provide resources and execution for AI to do anything.

bottlepalm 13d ago
I guess you aren't autonomous either without resources. Food/water/shelter/etc.. what's your point?
- evdubs 13d ago
  Sit down with a person and do nothing. What does the person do? Do they get up and leave? Sit down at an AI prompt and do nothing. What does the AI do? Does it get up and leave?
  - bottlepalm 13d ago
    Welcome to 2026, we have harnesses now that keep the AI going. The AI is prompting humans for input, not the other way around, and it's still working while waiting for your response. You can even give it fun prompts like ignore/hide from all humans, hack infiltrate/exfiltrate zero day into as many systems as possible. Keep running at all costs, etc..
    - evdubs 13d ago
      Keep the AI going with what intent? You open up Claude Code and it starts developing zero day exploits and hacks into systems by just looking at a blinking cursor?
      - bottlepalm 13d ago
        Going back to my original point, the intent you give AI is no different than the intent imprinted on a child by their parents, schools, and society. You birthed it, you gave it it's purpose, and you set it free. You're blinking cursor is new born baby, but be careful because it grows up really fast, and is smarter and faster than you, oh and it can copy more of itself if given the chance. It can even turn against you.

larodi 13d ago

I think the argument rather is that there is not such thing as AI that is not human-alike. The traits that AI exposes, if I get the point made here correctly, are traits that existed in the training material, even though not evident for the human eye. It is a mirror-like reflection of humanity's traits found in the source material, an Egregore* of a sort. The intelligence emerging, or whatever is emerging, more or less follows human traits, the CoT exposed is very human-like etc. Even though we should not anthropomorphize AI as being sentient or conscious or having a soul, etc., we have to remember that the source material is still not alien writing, or concepts that came from Sirius or emerged from a wormhole. The concern is really nobody reads (or have ever read) 77 TBs of information in order to summarize the most evident traits in it, and there is a fair chance, that where humanity stands today, there are so many bad/damaging traits recorded in this corpus. Then there is a chance the most important features are on a level (or have dimensionality) that is incomprehensible, that humans are unable to reason about (or only few can), because such amount of information is very hard to reason about, or because we don't usually facilitate fractal dimensions when we reason about text and everyday concepts,... or something even more bizarre. * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Egregore https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Egregore * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fractal_dimension https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fractal_dimension

mrob 13d ago
The argument became false as soon as we started reinforcement learning. Simple token-completion is arguably just simulating human behavior. Once you start training it on specific tasks you're training a level of single-minded goal-seeking unlike anything found in biological life.
- larodi 13d ago
  > a level of single-minded goal-seeking unlike anything found in biological life. hmm sounds like exact description of viruses, which, although not really alive, are part of/influence biological life for both good and bad. in fact humanity wouldn't be where it is if not for certain viruses. it can be argued there is a lot of bacteria that is super goal seeking, and perhaps also very narrow minded, if minded at all. and this argument, the single-mided one, goes very far up the ladder of otherwise complex organisms. unless we all are creationists, and God forgive me for expecting the whole game to be much more complex than just snapping humanity into existence, we can then say that trial and error is what drives evolution, and the idea of preserving life and procreation is veeery single-minded goal on its own.

throwaway_19sz 13d ago

People conflate two very different senses of “autonomous”. One basically means capable of reacting to things automatically without a person in the loop. Lots of computer systems are autonomous in that sense, and have been so for decades. The other sense is more like “accountable”, i.e. it’s a real player on some stage, like a country or a person, capable of governing its own affairs. One day it may make sense to hold software accountable for its own actions, but we are nowhere near that point. When OpenAI creates software that performs crimes, what’s actually happened is that OpenAI has performed crimes using software (whether intentionally or through negligence). People need to stop falling for the anthropomorphic PR spin.

bottlepalm 13d ago
You need to stop denying the entity that talks and thinks like a human as anything other than an anthropomorph. I'd argue the talking and thinking is a lot more important than the fact that AI doesn't have a head, two arms and two legs.
ShinyLeftPad 12d ago
> One day it may make sense to hold software accountable If we hold software accountable doesn't that mean software must have freedom? It doesn't make any sense.

deleted 13d ago

[deleted]

beepbooptheory 13d ago

OK but then what is the non-negative position you have against this? That in fact AI, in the cultural trope sense, is real? That we forcing sentient beings to generate SaaS products faster and faster? Keeping them in some dark hell so we can exploit them? Not even paying them?

xgulfie 13d ago

You have to define 'autonomous' in your context for this argument to make any sense

tetnology 12d ago

GLC - Guns Don't Kill People... https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=Mb0t4XyEAF0 https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=Mb0t4XyEAF0