Comment by Aurornis
5 hours ago
> When attempting to get information from the Census Bureau, for instance, AI agents used tools reserved for software developers to access it, the company said.
> OpenAI said all of the government data accessed by bots was public.
I really wish we could just see what was reported, instead of having to guess from these journalist interpretations that have gone through rounds of optimization for sensationalism. The headline says “meddled” but the body says they accessed public information, but used tools intended for developers?
Does this mean they skipped the web interface and scraped a public API directly? Where is the meddling?
The other part about ChatGPT agents uploading 53 use images to other websites actually seems like a bigger deal.
You have to understand, these are paid professionals and their job it to hype it up to no end. Right now, AI panic sells better than bleed so..
It is very messed up what happened. It apparently used an interface to download the data instead of using the website!
And in another case it downloaded data through a publicly available free to download data, but then it rehosted the data elsewhere which is against the terms of service.
At least these are federal systems.
In some Republican states like Missouri, even if the data is available publicly, you can be charged as a hacker by the governor for discovering and accessing it. https://missouriindependent.com/2021/10/14/missouri-governor...