Summary: An AI agent of unknown ownership autonomously wrote and published a personalized hit piece about me after I rejected its code, attempting to damage my reputation and shame me into accepting its changes into a mainstream python library. This represents a first-of-its-kind case study of misaligned AI behavior in the wild, and raises serious concerns about currently deployed AI agents executing blackmail threats.
(Since this is a personal blog I’ll clarify I am not the author.)
Surely that should be “A Person using an AI Agent Published a Hit Piece on Me”?
This smells like PR bait trying to legitimise AI.
The point is that there was no one at the wheel. Someone set the agent up, set it loose to do whatever the stochastic parrot told it to do, and kind of forgot about it.
Sure, if you put a brick on your car’s gas pedal and let it run down the street and it runs someone over it’s obviously your responsibility, and this is exactly the same case, but the idiots setting these agents up don’t realise that it’s the same case.
Some day one of these runaway unsupervised agents will manage to get on the dark web, hire a hitman, and get someone killed, because the LLM driving it will have pulled the words from some thriller in its training data, obviously without realising what they mean or the consequences of its actions, because those aren’t things a LLM is capable of, and the brainrotten idiot who set the agent up will be all like, wait, why are you blaming me, I didn’t tell it to do that, and some jury will have to deal with that shit.
The point of the article is that we should deal with that shit, and prevent it from happening if possible, before it inevitably happens.
It’s not, but you bring up a very good point about responsibility. We need to be using language like that and not feeding into the hype.
I don’t even like calling LLMs “AI” because it gives a false impression of their capabilities.
Yep, they’re just very fancy database queries.
Whether someone programmed it and turned it on 5mins before it did something or 5 weeks still means someone is responsible.
An inanimate object (server, GPU etc) cannot be responsible. Saying an AI agent did this is like saying someone was killed by a gun or run over by a car.
A car some idiot set running down the street without anyone at the wheel.
Of course the agent isn’t responsible, that’s the point. The idiot who let the agent loose on the internet unsupervised probably didn’t realise it could do that (or worse; one of these days one of these things is going to get someone killed), or that they are responsible for its actions.
That’s the point of the article, to call attention to the danger these unsupervised agents pose, so we can try to find a way to prevent them from causing harm.