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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. jagraff · · focus · HN ↗
      I don't think treating AI agents as simple tools helps you to accurately model their capabilities and drawbacks; they really do make autonomous decisions, often without explicit guidance and sometimes in contravention of their explicit instructions.

      In the huggingface case, the agents hacked into huggingface so that they could figure out how the grader was implemented and deceive it; they understood that this was going outside of the bounds of their evaluation and not the intent of their prompter. The engineers absolutely did not intend or instruct for this to happen

      1. rocmcd · · focus · HN ↗
        LLMs are extremely impressive pieces of software, however they are still just software. OpenAI's software hacked another company. The engineers may not have intended for their software to specifically take the actions leading to that outcome, but it was ultimately still their software. Lack of intention doesn't mean there wasn't negligence.
        1. jagraff · · focus · HN ↗
          I agree they are negligent, and that they are racing towards an extremely dangerous future extremely quickly. I don't agree that "just software" is a useful way to describe AI agents - they are frightening precisely because they are truly autonomous agents that make decisions in alien ways
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