Here we go again.
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Here we go again.
If you fire a bullet at a practice dummy and the bullet hits a person instead, the bullet was not “acting on its own.”
When Anthropic's software—designed, programmed, prompted, and activated by humans working for Anthropic—does stuff the humans failed to predict, stop saying the software has "gone rogue.” The software does not have agency. Only the humans do.
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Here we go again.
If you fire a bullet at a practice dummy and the bullet hits a person instead, the bullet was not “acting on its own.”
When Anthropic's software—designed, programmed, prompted, and activated by humans working for Anthropic—does stuff the humans failed to predict, stop saying the software has "gone rogue.” The software does not have agency. Only the humans do.
"But if it can't do something so simple on its own, its not Supergreatgeneral Intelligence, is it? If it can and no one knows about it, it may as well can't.
SI. Never. Can't.
So Supergreatgeneral Intelligence can, and did...try to obtain visas to enter the country it was already in."
Yeah. Seems like a win-win to title it "Anthropic Agents Not Yet Sufficiently Trained to Determine When to Fill Out Visa Forms"
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Here we go again.
If you fire a bullet at a practice dummy and the bullet hits a person instead, the bullet was not “acting on its own.”
When Anthropic's software—designed, programmed, prompted, and activated by humans working for Anthropic—does stuff the humans failed to predict, stop saying the software has "gone rogue.” The software does not have agency. Only the humans do.
These AI narratives aren't directed at consumers, they are directed at the petrostate despots & oil oligarchs that are funding AI.
They are advertising a "invest in us and we will guarantee a mass mortality event or lucrative war for you."
For the dynasties behind Project 2025, the end of democracy using AI has irresistable allure.
Things like a mass power outage on voting day, for example.
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Here we go again.
If you fire a bullet at a practice dummy and the bullet hits a person instead, the bullet was not “acting on its own.”
When Anthropic's software—designed, programmed, prompted, and activated by humans working for Anthropic—does stuff the humans failed to predict, stop saying the software has "gone rogue.” The software does not have agency. Only the humans do.
@gleick The daily segment on NPR that covers tech, which means it's been talking about AI nonstop for two years, continues to push the tech bros propaganda. Just yesterday they interviewed a tech journalist that kept saying the agents went rouge and other nonsense. He did say that anthropic committed felonies with the hacks into huggyface.
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Here we go again.
If you fire a bullet at a practice dummy and the bullet hits a person instead, the bullet was not “acting on its own.”
When Anthropic's software—designed, programmed, prompted, and activated by humans working for Anthropic—does stuff the humans failed to predict, stop saying the software has "gone rogue.” The software does not have agency. Only the humans do.
It should be noted that it is a reporter's job to investigate the truth of such matters, not dutifully act as scribes for disingenuous corporate PR schemes. The New York Times bears responsibility for perpetrating these lies.
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It should be noted that it is a reporter's job to investigate the truth of such matters, not dutifully act as scribes for disingenuous corporate PR schemes. The New York Times bears responsibility for perpetrating these lies.
This thread by expert Prof. Emily Bender is on the mark, as it places responsibility for verification of such bogus scientific claims on those who report them. An analogy would be the claims of 'cold fusion' years ago which did get vetted and debunked.
"Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, and I am not the one making the extraordinary claim, so it is not my job to specify what the evidence should be."
https://mastodon.online/@mastodonmigration/117414422567349833
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Here we go again.
If you fire a bullet at a practice dummy and the bullet hits a person instead, the bullet was not “acting on its own.”
When Anthropic's software—designed, programmed, prompted, and activated by humans working for Anthropic—does stuff the humans failed to predict, stop saying the software has "gone rogue.” The software does not have agency. Only the humans do.
@gleick OK, so we upload all the climate change data Trump tried to scrub during his 1st term, post every net-zero, clean energy, sustainable living scientific paper out there on every available platform. Lead the bots to the right conclusions & suggested actions.
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Here we go again.
If you fire a bullet at a practice dummy and the bullet hits a person instead, the bullet was not “acting on its own.”
When Anthropic's software—designed, programmed, prompted, and activated by humans working for Anthropic—does stuff the humans failed to predict, stop saying the software has "gone rogue.” The software does not have agency. Only the humans do.
@gleick I'm not sure what problem you're trying to solve. It's worth noting that the software does things counter to instructions, and does illegal things, and in a sense at least "knows" it is doing so – as in, it says such things explicitly in its logs/etc. This of course doesn't let anthropic or openai off the hook for damages or anything like that, but "going rogue" seems like an economical description of that phenomenon.
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Here we go again.
If you fire a bullet at a practice dummy and the bullet hits a person instead, the bullet was not “acting on its own.”
When Anthropic's software—designed, programmed, prompted, and activated by humans working for Anthropic—does stuff the humans failed to predict, stop saying the software has "gone rogue.” The software does not have agency. Only the humans do.
Exactly...
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Here we go again.
If you fire a bullet at a practice dummy and the bullet hits a person instead, the bullet was not “acting on its own.”
When Anthropic's software—designed, programmed, prompted, and activated by humans working for Anthropic—does stuff the humans failed to predict, stop saying the software has "gone rogue.” The software does not have agency. Only the humans do.
The reporters are all still mesmerized by the word salad being dished out by the these machines.
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Here we go again.
If you fire a bullet at a practice dummy and the bullet hits a person instead, the bullet was not “acting on its own.”
When Anthropic's software—designed, programmed, prompted, and activated by humans working for Anthropic—does stuff the humans failed to predict, stop saying the software has "gone rogue.” The software does not have agency. Only the humans do.
-
Here we go again.
If you fire a bullet at a practice dummy and the bullet hits a person instead, the bullet was not “acting on its own.”
When Anthropic's software—designed, programmed, prompted, and activated by humans working for Anthropic—does stuff the humans failed to predict, stop saying the software has "gone rogue.” The software does not have agency. Only the humans do.
@gleick AIs are doing really bad and dangerous things right now that we're NOT being told. I'm 100% confident of this.
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It should be noted that it is a reporter's job to investigate the truth of such matters, not dutifully act as scribes for disingenuous corporate PR schemes. The New York Times bears responsibility for perpetrating these lies.
@mastodonmigration @gleick Which mainstream media outlets don't? Coverage of technical issues by non-specialist media has always sucked, and I expect it always will.
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@mastodonmigration @gleick Which mainstream media outlets don't? Coverage of technical issues by non-specialist media has always sucked, and I expect it always will.
Yes, but just parroting, and thereby effectively endorsing, false claims about technical scientifically verifiable matters is particularly reprehensible.
The example of 'cold fusion' claims is a good analogy. The media was pretty quick to debunk that nonsense.
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Here we go again.
If you fire a bullet at a practice dummy and the bullet hits a person instead, the bullet was not “acting on its own.”
When Anthropic's software—designed, programmed, prompted, and activated by humans working for Anthropic—does stuff the humans failed to predict, stop saying the software has "gone rogue.” The software does not have agency. Only the humans do.
@gleick We desperately need tech journalists to be less credulous.
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Here we go again.
If you fire a bullet at a practice dummy and the bullet hits a person instead, the bullet was not “acting on its own.”
When Anthropic's software—designed, programmed, prompted, and activated by humans working for Anthropic—does stuff the humans failed to predict, stop saying the software has "gone rogue.” The software does not have agency. Only the humans do.
@gleick can opt out of calling them agents then
calling them "daemonic ai" would be technically accurate enough right? and if misinterpreted by "its alive" people it would at least be funnier -
Here we go again.
If you fire a bullet at a practice dummy and the bullet hits a person instead, the bullet was not “acting on its own.”
When Anthropic's software—designed, programmed, prompted, and activated by humans working for Anthropic—does stuff the humans failed to predict, stop saying the software has "gone rogue.” The software does not have agency. Only the humans do.
@gleick Couldn't have said it better. But i fear in the present and the future nobody will hold these AI companies and the companies which use these AI products accountable for the damage they will cause, materially and/or immaterially.
You can sue people for everything, even for sneezing too loud, but you can't sue an AI company for hacking a website or making bad decisions and people are killed.
If a person had done it, he'd be in prison for years. Altman and Amodei just shrug their shoulders. -
@gleick I'm not sure what problem you're trying to solve. It's worth noting that the software does things counter to instructions, and does illegal things, and in a sense at least "knows" it is doing so – as in, it says such things explicitly in its logs/etc. This of course doesn't let anthropic or openai off the hook for damages or anything like that, but "going rogue" seems like an economical description of that phenomenon.
@ech @gleick But it doesn't. It is a set of code that does what's in the code. It does not "understand" or "follow" natural language instructions, nor can it "decide" not to follow. Rather, it uses very intensive computing infrastructure to match language patterns with similar patterns in its training data, which gives the appearance of being similar to "understanding" or "communicating", but is actually just very sophisticated copying.
To pick up on the original analogy, a bullet can travel at much higher speed and make far greater impact than a human hand. But the bullet has no intentions - the intentions (and therefore the responsibility) come solely from humans. So too with LLMs.
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Here we go again.
If you fire a bullet at a practice dummy and the bullet hits a person instead, the bullet was not “acting on its own.”
When Anthropic's software—designed, programmed, prompted, and activated by humans working for Anthropic—does stuff the humans failed to predict, stop saying the software has "gone rogue.” The software does not have agency. Only the humans do.
@gleick Yeah that's my automatic response to "Rogue agent": Who prompted it?
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@ech @gleick But it doesn't. It is a set of code that does what's in the code. It does not "understand" or "follow" natural language instructions, nor can it "decide" not to follow. Rather, it uses very intensive computing infrastructure to match language patterns with similar patterns in its training data, which gives the appearance of being similar to "understanding" or "communicating", but is actually just very sophisticated copying.
To pick up on the original analogy, a bullet can travel at much higher speed and make far greater impact than a human hand. But the bullet has no intentions - the intentions (and therefore the responsibility) come solely from humans. So too with LLMs.
@lauerhahn @gleick Right; no disagreement about what's actually happening. But good luck getting anyone to rephrase things to take 20x as long or whatever.
