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.)
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.