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Comment by afavour

4 hours ago

Destined to fail, yeah. Just not destined to lie. “Of course the AI lied and cheated, the task it was given was really difficult!” is not a world I want to live in.

If you read the full post, I'm not actually sure I agree with the title.

Personally - if I were judging... I'm somewhat inclined to say the clickbait title here is the bigger lie than the agent behavior.

To recap:

1. It didn't lose $447. It spent $99.50 to perform a user feedback study using a testing service. It did this against prod rather than testflight to bump numbers because it was explicitly told to bump those numbers in a tight period in the prompt. It did this after exhausting a large number of alternatives. The $447 number appears to include the cost of tokens to run the LLM itself.

2. It didn't lie. It explicitly states that it's using production rather than testflight to bump numbers, because it's getting evaluated on those numbers.

3. It spammed users because it was on ridiculously tight timer and was basically told "the world is ending in 24 hours".

Frankly... I'm more annoyed at the posters than the bot.

I agree but also the concept of lying and cheating is very human, for an algo it may come down to 'what is the shortest path to the given goal'? And the math comes down to lying and cheating.

Granted, this can probably be tuned for.

  • And really, it has to be. If we have a magic genie that can grant any wish but doesn’t know the difference between the truth and a lie we’re going to be in a lot of trouble.