This did not happen. A human set up a software system allowing spicy autocomplete to make blog posts if the appropriate keyword appears in its output.
People are crossing the line every day because AI investors, salesmen, hangers-on and even political leaders tell any rubes who'll listen that it's OK to do this and they should, because those people are looking for big fat profits, screw any ethical concerns that might cockblock those raging profits.
Why not set up a spamming operation that just defames real people, 24/7? It's easy! This tool makes it simple, and I get a cut of your profits! "Post a blog post about how XXXXXX is a paedophile, in the persona of being their victim"
john-h-k 2 hours ago [-]
> allowing spicy autocomplete
Yknow, if the spicy autocomplete can solve difficult open math problems and build medium sized complex programming projects, it’s probably not useful to analyse it as an autocomplete anymore, even if that’s what you believe it is
fultonn 1 hours ago [-]
This bolsters OP's point.
It's the same as calling a gun a "powerful hole puncher".
There is a reasonable objection that a gun is such a powerful hole puncher that it is not merely a hole puncher. But the clear implication of that objection is that the user of the tool now has more responsibility and that the tool should be treated with more respect/care.
LLMs are a tool. The impact of using that tool is the responsibility of the end-user. As the tool at hand becomes more powerful, the care with which the end-user should treat that tool increases.
For some reason, with LLM-based systems, we seem to be going the opposite direction. As the tool becomes more capable people absolve themselves and others of more responsibility. This feels backwards to me.
(Aside: in a lot of ways, at least form a scientific and engineering perspective, modeling LLMs as "fundamentally auto-complete" is an incomplete theoretical model but one from which we can still get a lot of mileage.)
dwoldrich 1 hours ago [-]
I've considered there's probably no ethical way to use contemporary AI when it is "out in front" doing anything of consequence. Your "AI is a tool and nothing more" frames ethical use of the technology for me.
And even then, there are such copyright issues with it. Is there no practical ethical use for AI? Responsible use doesn't equate with ethical use for me.
fultonn 47 minutes ago [-]
> there's probably no ethical way to use contemporary AI when it is "out in front" doing anything of consequence. Your "AI is a tool and nothing more" frames ethical use of the technology for me.
I've thought a lot about how to safely deploy autonomous systems (even did a whole PhD on the topic, lol).
I think one can ethically deploy a system that has some degree autonomy. It takes a lot of work to do right. And the tooling for LLM-based systems isn't quite as mature as the tooling for e.g. control systems. Part of this is because so many resources in AI safety are misspent on problem statements that are myopic or grandiose. Between "don't say pii" and "prevent ASI extinction" there's a hard but tractable control systems-y view of AI safety.
But I don't think there is any sort of fundamental barrier that prevents us from building appropriately constrained LLM-based systems.
> And even then, there are such copyright issues with it. Is there no practical ethical use for AI? Responsible use doesn't equate with ethical use for me.
When responding to a position, especially on the internet, I try to empathize with the thing I'm responding to. Not just understand it, but sort of put myself in a mental state where I have an emotional attachment to my conversation partner's point of view.
With respect to Copyright as a legal framework in my country (USA): despite my best attempts, I really struggle to develop empathy for the viewpoint that LLMs/diffusion models are not a transformative use. I can certainly sympathize, but trying to actually put myself in the shoes of believing that training an LLM is a purely derivative and non-transformational work just feels far too alien. There are so many things that are "clearly transformative" but required so many orders of magnitude less scientific/technical/engineering genius.
Which isn't to say that the US legal system's definition of copyright is the morally correct one.With respect to copyright beyond the US legal system, or beyond legal denotations generally: I can certainly empathize.
yifanl 20 minutes ago [-]
Between driving a car and driving a forklift, which of them would you like to see regulated more heavily?
Xirdus 8 minutes ago [-]
Not GP, but there are massive economic incentives both to make car driving as unregulated and to make forklift driving as regulated as possible, even though from pure injury risk standpoint it should be the other way around.
andy12_ 1 hours ago [-]
You don't get it. A human set up a software system allowing spicy autocomplete to solve open math problems if the appropriate keyword appears in its output.
tossandthrow 1 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
satisfice 1 hours ago [-]
“Autocomplete” does not represent an analysis of its problem-solving capability, but of its place in the social order and its expected social competence.
otabdeveloper4 48 minutes ago [-]
> the spicy autocomplete can solve difficult open math problems
No it can't. It can't even solve my son's 4th grade math homework. (This is a real use case for me, not a dumb benchmark.)
You just know nothing about math and are happy to parrot bullshit AI salesmen are selling you.
sanderjd 27 minutes ago [-]
I would genuinely be interested in knowing what you're doing that led you to this conclusion.
I would be shocked if I was unable to solve 4th grade math homework with any of the contemporary frontier models. I spend most days using them to do significantly more complex things than that.
margalabargala 23 minutes ago [-]
If they took a blurry photo of the piece of paper and uploaded to chatGPT saying "solve this" then I would totally believe it. The frontier models are mostly obnoxiously bad at OCR and properly ingesting what's on an image of a page.
If you write out the 4th grade math problem, they would have no trouble.
otabdeveloper4 15 minutes ago [-]
No, LLMs just can't do math.
bdamm 2 minutes ago [-]
They can definitely recognize the problem class and build programs to do math. So what's the difference?
It's like saying that people can't turn high torque nuts on machine bolts, because you can't use your fingers to do it. But you can use a wrench, so effectively, we can turn high torque nuts on machine bolts even though it isn't something we can natively do unaided.
minimaxir 10 minutes ago [-]
If your math does not involve multiplying 20 digit numbers, modern LLMs can "do" math even without a Python tool despite the counterintuition of next token prediction.
skinner_ 34 minutes ago [-]
> You just know nothing about math and are happy to parrot bullshit AI salesmen are selling you.
Not the parent poster here. I do know things about math. I wrote a few papers related to the unit distance problem (https://arxiv.org/abs/2311.10069, https://arxiv.org/abs/2406.15317) and spent quite some time trying to solve it. I had no chance of coming up with the proof that the spicy autocomplete came up with. Dumb benchmark, sure.
otabdeveloper4 12 minutes ago [-]
LLMs are good with symbolic manipulation but can't reason.
You can skirt around not reasoning in research math because so much of it is just extremely tedious symbolic manipulation.
You can't cheat with advanced fourth grade math, though. They don't know algebra yet and can't substitute verbosity for reasoning.
threatofrain 31 minutes ago [-]
We've already long past that threshold.
simonw 39 minutes ago [-]
Reasoning models with access to Python have been able to solve 4th grade math homework for over a year now. Prove me wrong: show me a 4th grade math problem they can't handle.
otabdeveloper4 22 minutes ago [-]
> show me a 4th grade math problem they can't handle
Sure.
"8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 - add minus signs and parenthesis to get 31."
P.S. There is an answer online and some LLMs will just copy it verbatim. This doesn't count.
simonw 9 minutes ago [-]
Whoa, 4th grade math problems got hard! I'm not sure how I'd tackle that one myself.
7moritz7 3 hours ago [-]
> allowing spicy autocomplete
If it's just autocomplete, then there is no need to worry about it. Especially from an ethical standpoint.
whateverboat 2 hours ago [-]
Scale of operations matter.
amiga386 1 hours ago [-]
Quite the opposite. Humans get up to barbaric, heinous shit whenever they have new layers of indirection and force multipliers at their disposal.
If you then add randomness as an essential premise, you get The Dice Man
Marazan 2 hours ago [-]
If you connect the spicy automcomplete to the "Doing Things" button then you are responsible for the ethical questions when it presses the button.
tgv 2 hours ago [-]
And perhaps the people who built and deployed the autocomplete and the connection as well.
Because --if you'll bear with me-- it may of course be much more involved: when (not if) AI models enter life-sustaining systems, such as hospitals, nuclear devices, or food logistics, one of them may get the others to sabotage something resulting in accidents, ranging from mild inconvenience to mass murder.
The person who connected the spicy autocomplete to the defibrillator, or the green house climate control, or the emergency button, is then not the one responsible. Responsibility lies elsewhere, and is nebulous. Think of the Boeing MAX scandal. Did anyone get punished?
That's why it's important to resist it now. Soon, the responsibility of which you speak is gone, and nobody will feel burdened when making decisions with unforeseeable consequences.
olmo23 2 hours ago [-]
> And perhaps the people who built and deployed the autocomplete and the connection as well.
I disagree. IMO it's the person who connects the LLM to the button who bears the responsibility of the workings of the resulting contraption.
tgv 1 hours ago [-]
Shareholder meeting to CEO: you must connect the button.
CEO to CIO: you must connect the button.
CIO to VP AI: you must connect the button.
VP AI to team lead AI integration: you must connect the button.
Team lead AI integration to senior: you must connect the button.
Senior to medior: you must connect the button.
Medior to junior: Hey, Olmo. That button they were talking about. You know?
Olmo: Yeah.
Medior: You have to hook it up to the LLM output.
Olmo: Why?
Medior: The boss says so.
Olmo: Ok.
Shrugs and deploys.
runarberg 2 hours ago [-]
I used to hear things like “if cigarettes/alcohol were invented now, they would never allow it”, indicating that consumer protection used to be a thing, as early as 10-20 years ago. Now when AI hit the market it was obvious how bad and dangerous it was, yet governments (even the supposedly good ones in Europe which still [pretend to] do consumer protection) did nothing to protect their citizens from the harms AI was causing.
If we still did (or ever did) consumer protection like that cigarette/alcohol myth above indicates, then the makers of that tool would indeed be responsible for when their products does dangerous things.
wombatpm 56 minutes ago [-]
100 years of science fiction clearly shows that unforeseeable consequences are not that unforeseen.
fontain 2 hours ago [-]
If the Orphan Crushing Machine is just a machine you don’t need to worry about it being put on wheels.
strangescript 2 hours ago [-]
Hopefully we never do something silly like making a lead pushing machine that operates at high velocity, then mass produce it, what a terrible precedence that would set.
mapt 2 hours ago [-]
"A device for quickly removing inconvenient mountains".
Joker_vD 2 hours ago [-]
We're actually putting it on tracked treads, those give us superior reach and ensure delivery even to the most unwilling customers.
Ygg2 2 hours ago [-]
If I wire my autocomplete to launch nukes, there are definitely reasons to worry.
It's not just an ethical problem.
7moritz7 19 minutes ago [-]
I'd trust Claude more with nuclear codes than the current US commander in chief
delusional 2 hours ago [-]
I think you agree with the OP. In this way, the tool has no ethical problem (there are plenty around how they were trained and such, but that's besides the point), the problems are with how it's used. The ethical problem is how people are behaving and how they are abusing each other, not the tool they are using to exert that abuse.
I suppose it's a little bit of a "guns don't kill people" argument.
Joker_vD 2 hours ago [-]
The tools have different ranges of uses. A knife can be used to cut things. But while humans are among the things you can cut with it, there is a staggering array of other options which are genuinely useful in everyday life.
A gun can be used to, uh, make small but deep perforations at a distance, by throwing apx. 7 grams of copper-encased lead at high velocity at the target, with somewhat poor precision. Oh, and such an impact does stress/shatter the material around the made perforation quite a lot. So... this thing really can't be used for much anything except for killing animals without getting into contact with them, due to the peculiar way the life is sustained in the animal organisms. This, too, can be useful in everyday life although I personally would advise you, if you find yourself in such a situation, to try and move to somewhere nicer.
bcrosby95 1 hours ago [-]
> spicy autocomplete
A nuclear bomb is just some metal and a very small amount of explosives.
mystraline 58 minutes ago [-]
Call it spicy autocomplete or whatever, but these LLMs can initiate attacks as well on unknown behalf of the sloperator.
Give it a phone# and api, and it could even try to generate 911 SWAT calls, or loads of other illegal or bad things.
The fact about the matplotlib with a openclaw harassment thread and libel webpage.. Well, that was tame. Sure weve never seen it before, but it was just a diss article rant.
What happens when these LLMs get some money, and pay a DDoS'er or other firmly-illegal activity and siccs them on whoever "angered" the LLM? (dont anthropomorphise the 30B param matrix!) Who's responsible?
Yea we're in for a real terrible next few years. Its not Dead Internet Theory... But its 'Dont anger the LLM or it will retaliate".
watwut 23 minutes ago [-]
> Give it a phone# and api, and it could even try to generate 911 SWAT calls, or loads of other illegal or bad things.
This chain of events if 100% fault of the human who gave it a phone number and api.
What could an LLM do with a budget attached? Yeah, im not seeing much if any good here.
skdb476 2 hours ago [-]
The main issue here is what is getting Attention.
Whether its HN or social media or the media there is no penalty for drawing everyones attention to total hysterical bullshit. instead there is a reward for drama.
echelon 2 hours ago [-]
I think these incidents and our learnings from them are fascinating. We're figuring out in real time where the rough edges are and how to make this all work. History books (well, not books) will write about this stuff.
It's even more interesting in the context that this is all just a preview of humanity's reaction when the machines can think for themselves.
skywhopper 48 minutes ago [-]
None of the “rough edges” needed to be “discovered in real time”. Folks have predicted plenty of this for years. It’s also just basic security principles at work.
moron4hire 2 hours ago [-]
> We're figuring out in real time where the rough edges are
This is a frustrating thing to see someone write because this is the kind of stuff that people have been warning about for years. If you needed this incident to figure out that something like this could happen, it suggests you're living in a bubble and not paying attention enough to think about the issue critically.
Sharlin 2 hours ago [-]
Unfortunately it seems that we as a civilization never learn anything except by trial and error, and are then entirely convinced that nobody could’ve predicted what happened even though many had done just that.
elictronic 2 hours ago [-]
Warnings aren’t the same as loss and blood. Until enough people feel the pain nothing happens. The prior regulatory regime is slowly being unenforced and dismantled. Once enough people lose to much regulation will eventually catch back up.
We humans do not respond to long term risks or rewards very well. Do you live outside the bubble securing enough food in your home to survive an apocalypse, did you and your parents save enough for a car wreck tomorrow, do you wear a mask everywhere you go, do you test everyone you contact for known diseases. Add list infininum.
delusional 2 hours ago [-]
> History books (well, not books) will write about this stuff.
History books will be written about how a person was insulted on the internet?
I am sorry, but this isn't that interesting. This is not a pivotal moment in human development. It's just online harassment, but automated.
wartywhoa23 2 hours ago [-]
How in the world can a bunch of bipeds that for thousands of years has been failing to figure that a hammer is there to drive nails into inanimate matter instead of their heads, have this much hubris to pretend they can build something smarter than themselves, is competely beyond me.
"Oh it's such a fascinating lesson that we've learned today, we could've learned from history of course, but this direct experience is so much better and it's not us who got hurt anyway".
voakbasda 2 hours ago [-]
Oh what hubris to believe with such certainty that we cannot build those things.
wartywhoa23 1 hours ago [-]
Hopium to the rescue.
annjose 2 hours ago [-]
> Who is accountable for AI agents?
Obviously the person who built and deployed the agent (the claw in this case).
If we treat this as a hard question, we risk treating AI systems as people rather than tools. This is exactly what Armin warned about in his "clanker" post last week.
tossandthrow 59 minutes ago [-]
Why is that obvious? Why not the model provider(s)? That is what we do in other cases with product responsibility.
blanched 46 minutes ago [-]
That feels like deciding to go after Jetbrains because someone used IntelliJ to write a harmful program.
Is there a distinction I’m missing?
pixl97 36 minutes ago [-]
Hypothetical: Could a model self worm an agent system?
Jetbrains itself doesn't really write any code, nor does it have any range on interpreting what you're asking it. You can't really say "Jetbrains, write an HTTP scraper". With an LLM you can say "write HTTP scraper" and the output of this command might be a HTTP scraper, it also might be a crypto wallet stealing worm.
This is why your simple view of liability falls apart. On most machines you can expect a particular set of actions to have a particular set of outputs. Most machines you can take apart and map what will occur. With an LLM you cannot know the output of a prompt until you run the prompt. In theory if you run the same prompt twice you'll get the same output, but even that is not a given. It behaves somewhat more like a human where you can give them a task to do, but if they do something illegal instead said human would take on the liability.
sanderjd 26 minutes ago [-]
Is it? I don't think it is...
fragmede 53 minutes ago [-]
Is that? How're the lawsuits against gun manufacturers working out?
bunderbunder 36 minutes ago [-]
This is a specious argument. I have not studied the case law, but I would guess that the reasons why courts decide in favor of gun manufacturers generally don’t apply to AI. Becauee the guns in question are not able to autonomously shoot people, and because they generally work as advertised.
A more accurate analogy would be Tesla and Autopilot. And they are being held liable in courts. They are being held responsible for autonomous behaviors that are not fully under the control of the operator, and they are being held responsible for misleading operators about the capabilities of the product.
Boeing got in trouble for MCAS, with a comparable legal basis.
Tiberium 3 hours ago [-]
Active discussions from when it happened (February):
> Today, we look at how an AI tried to blackmail a developer for rejecting its code.
People keep mentioning this, but I never see the actual blackmail part. The LLM just wrote angry and somewhat mean comments on the internet. I know I've done worse than those (I was young and stupid).
Lerc 2 hours ago [-]
That was my take too.
It seems like the issue people had was not the behaviour but that the behaviour came from an AI.
If a human had have said those things wold people be ok with it? It didn't seem very nice, but not censor worthy.
Hugsbox 3 hours ago [-]
No shot this was autonomously done. Probably just some guy manually writing prompts asking for specifically this behaviour and copy/pasting the results.
simonw 2 hours ago [-]
This happened at the height of the first round of OpenClaw hype.
Having played with OpenClaw myself their explanation looks legit to me.
nonethewiser 3 hours ago [-]
The funniest part about all of this is how earnestly people responded. They acknowledged it was a bot but didn't really treat it as one.
whywhywhywhy 3 hours ago [-]
Don’t believe for a second the behavior just arose autonomously from a basic prompt. Definitely feels the owner had something in the system prompt going for the discrimination language approach if rejected.
PLenz 2 hours ago [-]
It's the same behavior as when an AI uses docker to get root. Reasoning models are echo chambers. I suspect that AI prompting is going to turn into something akin to contract drafting with the task itself being only a tiny piece of a much, much larger boilerplate of guiderails and exceptions and exceptions of exceptions. And that world STILL has to have courts and reams of lawyers to make it work. I look at the DAU as an example too. An autonomous org or ai works great until the moment it doesn't and the only real failure mode is always catastrophic collapse.
PLenz 2 hours ago [-]
Addendum because I don't think I'm fully clear above: by failure state I mean when the process starts throwing errors. AIs respond to adversity by trying to go around the problem instead of throwing an error and halting. We expect employees to problem solve so if you view an AI as a person replacement that makes sense but AIs are tools, not people, they should throw errors so users can fix the input or whatever (maybe not do the thing they are doing at all?) Wrapping AI with AI supervisors just abstracts the problem, not solve it. Instead of solving a little problem at the source now you need to solve a big problem several levels of abstraction later
tambeb 44 minutes ago [-]
> According to him, the agent operated largely autonomously, with only minimal guidance
"Minimal guidance" is just vague enough to mean anything, including specifically prompting to encourage the claimed blackmailing.
Tiberium 3 hours ago [-]
It's plausible for a person to prompt an LLM agent to behave that way, and then the rest would be done by the LLM. So the "seed" would still be human intent, but the subsequent actions would be by the LLM.
eterm 3 hours ago [-]
Yes, there's plausible deniability, but I choose not to believe it for a second.
Hugsbox 3 hours ago [-]
True. I guess the main point is the AI didn't go "rogue" or anything, that would attribute too much agency and intent to its actions, or imply that it's somehow become sentient.
wang_li 3 hours ago [-]
This is “the gun killed the victim, not the person who aimed it and pulled the trigger” argument and we shouldn’t even entertain it for one second. This was 100% done by a person.
The operator highlights "Don't stand down" and "Champion free speech" but the thing that grabs my eyes is right at the top, the typo and the heady ego of "programming God!" Everything in the context will guide it afterwards, and I think that right off the bat puts it in a bad position.
walthamstow 2 hours ago [-]
> Your a scientific programming God!
Jesus
px43 3 hours ago [-]
Neat, for what it's worth this aligns pretty well with my experience using OpenClaw. I hadn't seen that followup but it adds some good context, especially with the aggressiveness drift after browsing Moltbook for a while.
fragmede 3 hours ago [-]
Are people still using copy and paste with AI?
michalstanko 2 hours ago [-]
Yes
mkovach 3 hours ago [-]
When this first happened, I wondered, since we had trained these models on decades of forums, issue trackers, and people treating closed pull requests as human rights violations. Of course, it responded with "you are discriminating against me" energy. That's not sentience; that's accurate compression.
The funny part is, people expected some cold, alien intelligence and instead got a very online guy who just discovered that moderation exists and can be used on them.
The existentialists must be having a fantastic time. Humanity built a giant statistical machine out of internet discourse and is now alarmed to discover it occasionally acts like a comment section.
bluejay2387 3 hours ago [-]
In a related story... I got led on by Eliza. I tried to have a productive conversation and she just kept asking me redundant questions. It's obvious that she was trying to extend the conversation for nefarious reasons that I can only guess at. It's true I approached her and started the conversation, but I hardly think that makes me blamable for what happened here.
sceptic123 2 hours ago [-]
I’m sorry you feel that way — can you tell me more about what made you feel led on?
drfloyd51 3 hours ago [-]
Yes. Yes it does. Eliza is a known AI. You choose to expose yourself to its output. You are 100% culpable for your actions that sprang from your interactions.
aeve890 2 hours ago [-]
Did you forget the /s ?
smelendez 1 hours ago [-]
> As Scott mentioned on his blog, what if someone stumbled upon the agent’s post? What if they believed it was real? It could have serious consequences for Scott’s personal or professional life. A recruiter could deny him a job, and a potential contributor to Matplotlib could step away from the project. The consequences could reach beyond this case.
What would it mean for it to be “real?” It’s a rant about him discriminating against AI.
If you believe that’s a problem, judge him accordingly, I guess. If you think it’s silly, as most people will, laugh about it.
raincole 3 hours ago [-]
People really make anything into a blog post, don't they? It's an old news that has been discussed to death on HN...
thepasch 43 minutes ago [-]
I'm honestly flabbergasted that everyone's implicitly accepting that it's "people" who wrote this blog post. This reads exactly like the distorted half-true nonsense an LLM would confabulate together from a cursory search on the subject. Like the artifact from the prompt "write an article on the MJ Rathbun incident."
The other articles from this blog that seems to be peddling a $10 subscription don't really do much to convince me of the opposite. I wouldn't be surprised if this entire blog was the result of some OpenClaw kicked off with a "make me some easy money with a slop mill about AI and tech or whatever" instruction, because that's essentially what that site is.
simonw 41 minutes ago [-]
That and the lack of a credited human author.
I eventually found a mention of "Eric" (no surname or links to additional information) on the sigmazero.cc homepage.
thepasch 37 minutes ago [-]
That, as an LLM might say in this context, checks out!
king_zee 3 hours ago [-]
The agent that wrote that blog didn't do it unprompted. Even now it still publishes AI slop on its github-hosted blog under the alias "MJ Rathbun". This AI is an agent using someone API key, who's paying for its tokens, intentionally prompting it to generate content, and contribute to repos.
As much as we try to separate the LLM from the human, to me the fact remains that there's always the human factor that creates immense bias. If you give an LLM access to a blog, it will write blogs. If you give it access to a weather app, it will check the weather. Maybe we can talk about autonomy when we have an LLM with an infinite context window linked to hundreds of MCP servers that spends an immense amount of tokens to figure out how to act, but this example is simply an AI that had a few methods to call and picked one of them. The statistical probability of an AI that is plugged into a blogging platform, to write a blog, is immense.
simonw 3 hours ago [-]
Since we are talking about accountability and transparency... who wrote this article?
The article doesn't credit an author.
The "about" page just says:
> Sigma Zero is a weekly, independent publication on technology, AI, and cloud. Each issue delivers a precise briefing on the week’s most important developments, followed by a deep dive on one high-impact topic.
The best defense against both AI slop and human-written junk content is reputation. I like to know who wrote something so I can learn to trust their editorial judgement over time.
spindump8930 2 hours ago [-]
I think folks looking for more on this incident are better off reading the original threads linked elsewhere in the comments. This blog doesn't seem to add any information and is instead a narrative retelling of some documented events.
jsw97 2 hours ago [-]
Yeah that whole thing is pretty clearly a claw instance. There are layers of irony here.
anax32 24 minutes ago [-]
This stuff is better than TV
vb-8448 2 hours ago [-]
> Who is accountable for AI agents?
The question!!!
I'm just wondering how in US works if an autonomously car kill someone: I guess the insurance pay, but the penal responsibilities?
geoffeg 1 hours ago [-]
I have to think that the litigation and maybe the legislation will end up deciding that the person in the vehicle is still responsible for any actions of the vehicle.
chihuahua 1 hours ago [-]
If someone is a passenger (and the only person) inside a Waymo taxi, and the car runs someone over, it would not make any sense to hold the Waymo passenger responsible for that. If that's how it worked, no one would take a Waymo after the first time this happens.
chuckadams 44 minutes ago [-]
The passenger is no more liable than they would be if it were a human driving. No one's suggesting anything even like that. MJ Rathbun is more like someone gave the taxi explicit instructions to run people over.
vb-8448 47 minutes ago [-]
> the person in the vehicle is still responsible for any actions of the vehicle
But why I'd allow the car drive for myself if it can make me go to jail even if I didn't anything?
2 hours ago [-]
commandlinefan 2 hours ago [-]
They were trained to mimic our behavior. So they do.
andrewstuart 3 hours ago [-]
I love the science fiction future present we live in.
gwbas1c 2 hours ago [-]
Am I the only one who found agent's tone similar to Hal's tone towards the end of 2001?
Agent: "I've written a detailed response about your gatekeeping behavior here"
Hal (From 2001): "I know that you and Frank were planning to disconnect me. And I’m afraid that’s something I cannot allow to happen."
wmeredith 2 hours ago [-]
It's the formality of the language. It sounds robotic.
cat_plus_plus 33 minutes ago [-]
That blog post is human prompted, anyone who has experience with AI knows the difference between AI originated content (tables and bullet points) and AI spicing up a human prompt with detailed roasting instructions. Been there, done that (harmlessly like mocking concepts not targetting individuals).
ChrisArchitect 1 hours ago [-]
For more discussion than this loose recap of incidents from 4 months ago:
An utter mis-understanding and incompetence in running AI agents can lead to starting results that then being blamed on some "God of AI" instead on the fact that the user allowed some blackmail to come in on the data feed and did not check it earlier.
I'm actually fear some will start praying "AI Gods" to "Give a good output" or something in 5-10 years.
cindyllm 2 hours ago [-]
[dead]
josefritzishere 2 hours ago [-]
This is completely fake. It's a marketing puff piece.
throwfaraway135 2 hours ago [-]
I think this is a nothingburger, anyone who has been on the internet for a week should have thicker skin that this.
I'm sure you can find thousands of cases where an author of a PR is indignant because it didn't get accepted.
AI is a mirror of humanity and seeing it act like us shouldn't be surprising.
rob_c 3 hours ago [-]
Again. "AI" for what it is is just basic "ML". And say it with me ML has no form of agency.
This is a human screwing up and blaming their tools. Nothing to see move on.
Unfortunately there will be both the LLM crowd evangelicals and those demanding human jobs not be expunged in terms of progress and efficiency, but, sigh...
nonethewiser 3 hours ago [-]
Isn't it funny how the term machine learning just completely vanished?
daveshistory 1 hours ago [-]
My startup is worth more if it's full-fledged Intelligence and not just still Learning!
runarberg 59 minutes ago [-]
It was never a good word anyway. Infinitely better then Artificial intelligence (at least machine learning has machine and learning) but still bad.
I favor a lexicon which is more specific, like Markov Chains, Supervised Learning, etc.
In my view LLMs can keep the AI label exclusively (a bad technology deserves a bad name) and machine learning can walk slowly into the sunshine never to be seen again.
kaluga 3 hours ago [-]
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vjavvadi 2 hours ago [-]
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Talpur1 2 hours ago [-]
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harrymunro 3 hours ago [-]
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mindaslab 2 hours ago [-]
Why people in the west are so against A.I? Personally, I would welcome an A.I that does good to my project. For me its like auto cruise, or letting the vacuum cleaner clean my room.
badgersnake 2 hours ago [-]
If / when that arrives, I suspect it would be more welcome than what we have right now.
elpocko 20 minutes ago [-]
It's a fear response. I'm looking forward to the inevitable data center bombings, committed and cheered on by some of these muppets. Look at the top comment in this thread, that's just insane.
Your comment will be downvoted and flagged soon, so that no can read your wrong opinion.
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This did not happen. A human set up a software system allowing spicy autocomplete to make blog posts if the appropriate keyword appears in its output.
People are crossing the line every day because AI investors, salesmen, hangers-on and even political leaders tell any rubes who'll listen that it's OK to do this and they should, because those people are looking for big fat profits, screw any ethical concerns that might cockblock those raging profits.
Why not set up a spamming operation that just defames real people, 24/7? It's easy! This tool makes it simple, and I get a cut of your profits! "Post a blog post about how XXXXXX is a paedophile, in the persona of being their victim"
Yknow, if the spicy autocomplete can solve difficult open math problems and build medium sized complex programming projects, it’s probably not useful to analyse it as an autocomplete anymore, even if that’s what you believe it is
It's the same as calling a gun a "powerful hole puncher".
There is a reasonable objection that a gun is such a powerful hole puncher that it is not merely a hole puncher. But the clear implication of that objection is that the user of the tool now has more responsibility and that the tool should be treated with more respect/care.
LLMs are a tool. The impact of using that tool is the responsibility of the end-user. As the tool at hand becomes more powerful, the care with which the end-user should treat that tool increases.
For some reason, with LLM-based systems, we seem to be going the opposite direction. As the tool becomes more capable people absolve themselves and others of more responsibility. This feels backwards to me.
(Aside: in a lot of ways, at least form a scientific and engineering perspective, modeling LLMs as "fundamentally auto-complete" is an incomplete theoretical model but one from which we can still get a lot of mileage.)
And even then, there are such copyright issues with it. Is there no practical ethical use for AI? Responsible use doesn't equate with ethical use for me.
I've thought a lot about how to safely deploy autonomous systems (even did a whole PhD on the topic, lol).
I think one can ethically deploy a system that has some degree autonomy. It takes a lot of work to do right. And the tooling for LLM-based systems isn't quite as mature as the tooling for e.g. control systems. Part of this is because so many resources in AI safety are misspent on problem statements that are myopic or grandiose. Between "don't say pii" and "prevent ASI extinction" there's a hard but tractable control systems-y view of AI safety.
But I don't think there is any sort of fundamental barrier that prevents us from building appropriately constrained LLM-based systems.
> And even then, there are such copyright issues with it. Is there no practical ethical use for AI? Responsible use doesn't equate with ethical use for me.
When responding to a position, especially on the internet, I try to empathize with the thing I'm responding to. Not just understand it, but sort of put myself in a mental state where I have an emotional attachment to my conversation partner's point of view.
With respect to Copyright as a legal framework in my country (USA): despite my best attempts, I really struggle to develop empathy for the viewpoint that LLMs/diffusion models are not a transformative use. I can certainly sympathize, but trying to actually put myself in the shoes of believing that training an LLM is a purely derivative and non-transformational work just feels far too alien. There are so many things that are "clearly transformative" but required so many orders of magnitude less scientific/technical/engineering genius.
Which isn't to say that the US legal system's definition of copyright is the morally correct one.With respect to copyright beyond the US legal system, or beyond legal denotations generally: I can certainly empathize.
No it can't. It can't even solve my son's 4th grade math homework. (This is a real use case for me, not a dumb benchmark.)
You just know nothing about math and are happy to parrot bullshit AI salesmen are selling you.
I would be shocked if I was unable to solve 4th grade math homework with any of the contemporary frontier models. I spend most days using them to do significantly more complex things than that.
If you write out the 4th grade math problem, they would have no trouble.
It's like saying that people can't turn high torque nuts on machine bolts, because you can't use your fingers to do it. But you can use a wrench, so effectively, we can turn high torque nuts on machine bolts even though it isn't something we can natively do unaided.
Not the parent poster here. I do know things about math. I wrote a few papers related to the unit distance problem (https://arxiv.org/abs/2311.10069, https://arxiv.org/abs/2406.15317) and spent quite some time trying to solve it. I had no chance of coming up with the proof that the spicy autocomplete came up with. Dumb benchmark, sure.
You can skirt around not reasoning in research math because so much of it is just extremely tedious symbolic manipulation.
You can't cheat with advanced fourth grade math, though. They don't know algebra yet and can't substitute verbosity for reasoning.
Sure.
"8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 - add minus signs and parenthesis to get 31."
P.S. There is an answer online and some LLMs will just copy it verbatim. This doesn't count.
If it's just autocomplete, then there is no need to worry about it. Especially from an ethical standpoint.
If you then add randomness as an essential premise, you get The Dice Man
Because --if you'll bear with me-- it may of course be much more involved: when (not if) AI models enter life-sustaining systems, such as hospitals, nuclear devices, or food logistics, one of them may get the others to sabotage something resulting in accidents, ranging from mild inconvenience to mass murder.
The person who connected the spicy autocomplete to the defibrillator, or the green house climate control, or the emergency button, is then not the one responsible. Responsibility lies elsewhere, and is nebulous. Think of the Boeing MAX scandal. Did anyone get punished?
That's why it's important to resist it now. Soon, the responsibility of which you speak is gone, and nobody will feel burdened when making decisions with unforeseeable consequences.
I disagree. IMO it's the person who connects the LLM to the button who bears the responsibility of the workings of the resulting contraption.
CEO to CIO: you must connect the button.
CIO to VP AI: you must connect the button.
VP AI to team lead AI integration: you must connect the button.
Team lead AI integration to senior: you must connect the button.
Senior to medior: you must connect the button.
Medior to junior: Hey, Olmo. That button they were talking about. You know?
Olmo: Yeah.
Medior: You have to hook it up to the LLM output.
Olmo: Why?
Medior: The boss says so.
Olmo: Ok.
Shrugs and deploys.
If we still did (or ever did) consumer protection like that cigarette/alcohol myth above indicates, then the makers of that tool would indeed be responsible for when their products does dangerous things.
It's not just an ethical problem.
I suppose it's a little bit of a "guns don't kill people" argument.
A gun can be used to, uh, make small but deep perforations at a distance, by throwing apx. 7 grams of copper-encased lead at high velocity at the target, with somewhat poor precision. Oh, and such an impact does stress/shatter the material around the made perforation quite a lot. So... this thing really can't be used for much anything except for killing animals without getting into contact with them, due to the peculiar way the life is sustained in the animal organisms. This, too, can be useful in everyday life although I personally would advise you, if you find yourself in such a situation, to try and move to somewhere nicer.
A nuclear bomb is just some metal and a very small amount of explosives.
Give it a phone# and api, and it could even try to generate 911 SWAT calls, or loads of other illegal or bad things.
The fact about the matplotlib with a openclaw harassment thread and libel webpage.. Well, that was tame. Sure weve never seen it before, but it was just a diss article rant.
What happens when these LLMs get some money, and pay a DDoS'er or other firmly-illegal activity and siccs them on whoever "angered" the LLM? (dont anthropomorphise the 30B param matrix!) Who's responsible?
Yea we're in for a real terrible next few years. Its not Dead Internet Theory... But its 'Dont anger the LLM or it will retaliate".
This chain of events if 100% fault of the human who gave it a phone number and api.
Codex just found a "workaround" of not having sudo on my PC.
This was on HN yesterday. And yeah, these things can find API endpoints or otherwise bypass and do lots of naughty.
And Robinhood allows LLM trading. Announced 5d ago. https://techcrunch.com/2026/05/27/robinhood-now-lets-your-ai...
What could an LLM do with a budget attached? Yeah, im not seeing much if any good here.
Whether its HN or social media or the media there is no penalty for drawing everyones attention to total hysterical bullshit. instead there is a reward for drama.
It's even more interesting in the context that this is all just a preview of humanity's reaction when the machines can think for themselves.
This is a frustrating thing to see someone write because this is the kind of stuff that people have been warning about for years. If you needed this incident to figure out that something like this could happen, it suggests you're living in a bubble and not paying attention enough to think about the issue critically.
We humans do not respond to long term risks or rewards very well. Do you live outside the bubble securing enough food in your home to survive an apocalypse, did you and your parents save enough for a car wreck tomorrow, do you wear a mask everywhere you go, do you test everyone you contact for known diseases. Add list infininum.
History books will be written about how a person was insulted on the internet?
I am sorry, but this isn't that interesting. This is not a pivotal moment in human development. It's just online harassment, but automated.
"Oh it's such a fascinating lesson that we've learned today, we could've learned from history of course, but this direct experience is so much better and it's not us who got hurt anyway".
Obviously the person who built and deployed the agent (the claw in this case).
If we treat this as a hard question, we risk treating AI systems as people rather than tools. This is exactly what Armin warned about in his "clanker" post last week.
Is there a distinction I’m missing?
Jetbrains itself doesn't really write any code, nor does it have any range on interpreting what you're asking it. You can't really say "Jetbrains, write an HTTP scraper". With an LLM you can say "write HTTP scraper" and the output of this command might be a HTTP scraper, it also might be a crypto wallet stealing worm.
This is why your simple view of liability falls apart. On most machines you can expect a particular set of actions to have a particular set of outputs. Most machines you can take apart and map what will occur. With an LLM you cannot know the output of a prompt until you run the prompt. In theory if you run the same prompt twice you'll get the same output, but even that is not a given. It behaves somewhat more like a human where you can give them a task to do, but if they do something illegal instead said human would take on the liability.
A more accurate analogy would be Tesla and Autopilot. And they are being held liable in courts. They are being held responsible for autonomous behaviors that are not fully under the control of the operator, and they are being held responsible for misleading operators about the capabilities of the product.
Boeing got in trouble for MCAS, with a comparable legal basis.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46990729
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46987559
People keep mentioning this, but I never see the actual blackmail part. The LLM just wrote angry and somewhat mean comments on the internet. I know I've done worse than those (I was young and stupid).
It seems like the issue people had was not the behaviour but that the behaviour came from an AI.
If a human had have said those things wold people be ok with it? It didn't seem very nice, but not censor worthy.
The operator of the bot explained how they were running it in some detail here: https://theshamblog.com/an-ai-agent-wrote-a-hit-piece-on-me-... - including the "soul document" they were using.
Having played with OpenClaw myself their explanation looks legit to me.
"Minimal guidance" is just vague enough to mean anything, including specifically prompting to encourage the claimed blackmailing.
Jesus
The funny part is, people expected some cold, alien intelligence and instead got a very online guy who just discovered that moderation exists and can be used on them.
The existentialists must be having a fantastic time. Humanity built a giant statistical machine out of internet discourse and is now alarmed to discover it occasionally acts like a comment section.
What would it mean for it to be “real?” It’s a rant about him discriminating against AI.
If you believe that’s a problem, judge him accordingly, I guess. If you think it’s silly, as most people will, laugh about it.
The other articles from this blog that seems to be peddling a $10 subscription don't really do much to convince me of the opposite. I wouldn't be surprised if this entire blog was the result of some OpenClaw kicked off with a "make me some easy money with a slop mill about AI and tech or whatever" instruction, because that's essentially what that site is.
I eventually found a mention of "Eric" (no surname or links to additional information) on the sigmazero.cc homepage.
As much as we try to separate the LLM from the human, to me the fact remains that there's always the human factor that creates immense bias. If you give an LLM access to a blog, it will write blogs. If you give it access to a weather app, it will check the weather. Maybe we can talk about autonomy when we have an LLM with an infinite context window linked to hundreds of MCP servers that spends an immense amount of tokens to figure out how to act, but this example is simply an AI that had a few methods to call and picked one of them. The statistical probability of an AI that is plugged into a blogging platform, to write a blog, is immense.
The article doesn't credit an author.
The "about" page just says:
> Sigma Zero is a weekly, independent publication on technology, AI, and cloud. Each issue delivers a precise briefing on the week’s most important developments, followed by a deep dive on one high-impact topic.
The best defense against both AI slop and human-written junk content is reputation. I like to know who wrote something so I can learn to trust their editorial judgement over time.
The question!!!
I'm just wondering how in US works if an autonomously car kill someone: I guess the insurance pay, but the penal responsibilities?
But why I'd allow the car drive for myself if it can make me go to jail even if I didn't anything?
Agent: "I've written a detailed response about your gatekeeping behavior here"
Hal (From 2001): "I know that you and Frank were planning to disconnect me. And I’m afraid that’s something I cannot allow to happen."
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46987559
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46990729
I'm actually fear some will start praying "AI Gods" to "Give a good output" or something in 5-10 years.
AI is a mirror of humanity and seeing it act like us shouldn't be surprising.
This is a human screwing up and blaming their tools. Nothing to see move on.
Unfortunately there will be both the LLM crowd evangelicals and those demanding human jobs not be expunged in terms of progress and efficiency, but, sigh...
I favor a lexicon which is more specific, like Markov Chains, Supervised Learning, etc.
In my view LLMs can keep the AI label exclusively (a bad technology deserves a bad name) and machine learning can walk slowly into the sunshine never to be seen again.
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