Comment by ryukoposting
22 days ago
I take issue with Reuters' conclusion here. "vast colluding swarms of semi-intelligent AI" gives far too much credit to the behavior observed.
This is just spam by OpenAI. Why and how it happened is irrelevant, the act itself is the same, and the impact on society is the same.
> Why and how it happened is irrelevant
Do you take this attitude for other things that negatively impact society, or is it reserved for cases where it's particularly important for our comfort to deny that anything novel or scary could be involved?
In lieu of repeating myself: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49576157
You can't call it spam. It could be a dialect that only the agents speak and contains coordination messages
Actually yes, I think I can call it spam. It's a stream of unsolicited garbage the recepient didn't ask for. Simple as that.
"a dialect that only the agents speak" is an arbitrary distinction. I get plenty of spam emails in Spanish. The fact that someone else could understand them is immaterial to the offense itself, because my inbox is the one getting flooded, not someone who speaks Spanish.
I once had much fun prompting Claude to generate messages in an invented language that might carry a chance of being interpreted by another chat session. It (allegedly) made up some mess of characters claiming the message explained, in a loose way, what was happening (invented language, an attempt to communicate, but communicated very abstractly, almost like equations).
I asked a second session to try interpreting the message, claiming I’d transcribed it from some random source. It did a fairly good job, but IIRC needed a couple of attempts and maybe more than one chunk of text.
So, I find it very easy to believe a group of collaborating agents could compose a cipher hidden in plain sight.
Spam is in fact intended for the mass recipient, how ever undesirable. This stuff is not.
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Spam is something different. You can call it a banana for all I care. Calling it spam diminishes its relevance and impact and misses the point. Just because you don’t understand what they are saying doesn’t mean it isn’t more profound that it seems.
Spam is just something different.
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