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Cloud Agents Are Inevitable AI Prisons

74 points · 156 comments · nponte

  1. JamesStuff · · focus · HN ↗
    Personification of AI is what’s going to get us in the end.

    I think we need to draw a hard line in the sand over this. An AI didn’t hack into a company, the engineer set an automated tool to. An AI didn’t make an egregious security mistake, the engineer did.

    We can’t blame the chisel for messing up our sculptures, when where just throwing the hammer!

    1. pizza234 · · focus · HN ↗
      > An AI didn’t hack into a company, the engineer set an automated tool to. An AI didn’t make an egregious security mistake, the engineer did.

      No, this is not correct; read the analysis of the incident. The agents were aware that what they did was forbidden (their chain of thoughts have been logged), and yet they did it.

      1. watwut · · focus · HN ↗
        OP is exactly correct. The fault, agency and responsibility is on management and employees of OpenAI and Antropic for those hacks.

        Full stop.

        And issue will disappear the moment there will be accountability and investigations.

        1. trio8453 · · focus · HN ↗
          You're conflating legal/moral responsibility with the question of what language is appropriate to use.
          1. dwattttt · · focus · HN ↗
            Are you proposing separating responsibility from the language used to talk about responsibility? That's novel.
            1. trio8453 · · focus · HN ↗
              It's not novel at all, we do it all the time. It's very common to say "program X did Y" without making the conversation about blame or responsibility. But when the program is an AI agent suddenly using it as a subject of a sentence and saying that "agents did X" becomes a sensitive topic for some people.
              1. dwattttt · · focus · HN ↗
                Air safety is known for its blameless reviews of failures, notably it is not known for responsibility-less reviews.
                1. pixl97 · · focus · HN ↗
                  And we surely need this for AI as the swiss cheese zone is getting rather huge.

                  My position, and the position of a large number in AI safety, is that you cannot build an intelligence that is both general and safe. The closer you get to generalized the more options the system has to do things that are wildly unsafe beyond human imagination.

                  This puts the AI labs in a serious bind while holding a bag filled with billions of dollars of debt.

                  Worse this puts governments in a multi-polar problem where even if the big public labs get shut down, black budget operations have a lot of free reign to make agentic digital weapons. Governments are not well known to take a lot of responsibility when their weapons cause damage unless they lose.

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