Comment by amiga386
3 hours ago
> an AI tried to blackmail
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"
> 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
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.)
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.
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Between driving a car and driving a forklift, which of them would you like to see regulated more heavily?
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.
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.
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“Autocomplete” does not represent an analysis of its problem-solving capability, but of its place in the social order and its expected social competence.
> 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.
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.
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> 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.
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We've already long past that threshold.
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.
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> allowing spicy autocomplete
If it's just autocomplete, then there is no need to worry about it. Especially from an ethical standpoint.
Scale of operations matter.
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
If you connect the spicy automcomplete to the "Doing Things" button then you are responsible for the ethical questions when it presses the button.
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.
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If the Orphan Crushing Machine is just a machine you don’t need to worry about it being put on wheels.
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.
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We're actually putting it on tracked treads, those give us superior reach and ensure delivery even to the most unwilling customers.
If I wire my autocomplete to launch nukes, there are definitely reasons to worry.
It's not just an ethical problem.
I'd trust Claude more with nuclear codes than the current US commander in chief
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.
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.
> spicy autocomplete
A nuclear bomb is just some metal and a very small amount of explosives.
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".
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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".
Oh what hubris to believe with such certainty that we cannot build those things.
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