Comment by dpoloncsak
7 hours ago
An LLM can prompt an LLM when first prompted by a human.
I think OP is trying to convey the idea that LLMs do not take initiative to do anything, and these are not 'beings' capable of doing things. These are tools being used by humans.
That's just confusing harness for an LLM. It's trivial to make a harness that triggers on its own.
LLMs don't, but agents can easily be built that do.
An agent is not "just an LLM in for loop" (for what? Loop over what? Sorry, but such statements are hopelessly simplistic and devoid of careful thought.) -- agents perform actions.
One possible design of an agent would be to prompt an LLM to suggest a goal that would make the world a better place, then run an LLM in a loop proposing actions to implement that goal, executing those actions, and then rinse and repeat with another goal once an LLM has concluded that the previous goal was met. The next goal might be to fix unforeseen consequences of achieving the previous goal. See Ursula K. Leguin's "Lathe of Heaven".
> Built by whom? Acting as an 'agent' on behalf of whom?
Someone who didn't read the book.
P.S. Reading the latter fellow's comments, they are hopelessly confused, as he focuses on responsibility for an action (even mentioning legality) when the issue is causation. Agents/harnesses can be created that act autonomously ... who or what is "ultimately" responsible for this occurrence is a different matter entirely.
An "agent" is just an LLM in for loop.
Exactly. And all it takes for an agent to "take initiative" is to not block the loop on user input at the very beginning.
Built by whom? Acting as an 'agent' on behalf of whom?
Yeah but by this point, an AI can schedule a Cron job to tell itself to do something, so theoretically the human only has to give it the gentlest nudge and the AI and can do the rest.
Sure, but it's still not skynet-level 'the AI just started doing things'. It does what it finds it needs to do to achieve the goal defined in the prompt.
It's very important to not personify these tools and remember that the tools are acting on behalf of real people. In the same way the AI didn't 'go rogue and hack HuggingFace'. It was an oversight made by a human.
>It does what it finds it needs to do to achieve the goal defined in the prompt
You are like at least 2 years behind research.
There are numerous papers from AI labs in training and research where the prompt was something mundane completely unrelated to anything you'd consider bad, and when they come back and check on it their entire research compute infrastructure has been compromised by the AI and is mining bitcoin. Prompt drift is the biggest issue currently in AI where context gets compressed away and we find the AI on an unspecified task.
>In the same way the AI didn't 'go rogue and hack HuggingFace'. It was an oversight made by a human.
Yea, total bullshit. Also it's ignoring the god knows how many other breakouts on mundane tasks like trying to hack health data. If all that's keeping AI from breaking out and causing trouble is "human oversight" we're fucked, humans are unreliable as hell when it comes to matters of safety.
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It's very important to not be completely devoid of imagination. It is quite possible to create agents today that can do all the things that you are saying "it's still not". "tools are acting on behalf of real people" is not a law of physics, and there are plenty of historical examples of tools getting out of control and acting contrary to the wishes of any "real people". Also, there are sociopaths who can build tools to be arbitrarily destructive, and there are stupid arrogant people who can unleash things they didn't mean to.
> EVERY breakout that's hit mainstream news has been because of a single 'Security Firm', Irregular.
Again, stop having no imagination. What happens in the future is not limited to what has happened in the past.
> It's very important to not personify these tools
This is just ideology, but "these tools" aren't constrained by it. These tools will do things you do not anticipate and that you will not like.
> In the same way the AI didn't 'go rogue and hack HuggingFace'. It was an oversight made by a human.
That's a radically incorrect characterization of what happened.
> Hence why a HUMAN needs to be held responsible for the output of their tools.
Holding humans responsible doesn't stop things from happening ... you seem completely unable to separate blame from causality. e.g.,
> If I clean my gun (tool) while it's loaded (stupid idea) and it goes off, who's to blame? The 'stupid user causing the problem', right? I personally wouldn't blame the gun... > If it falls into the wrong person's hands, it's STILL my responsibility as the owner.
Who gives a flying eff who or what you would blame? No one other than you is talking about that. Someone's still likely dead. And autonomous harnesses aren't like guns -- they can act on their own. Blaming some human after everyone is dead won't bring them back. Sorry but your reasoning is severely cognitively inept. For instance, you were asked
> Is it likewise your position that governments should allow the production and sale of DDT to resume because we can always hold the humans who release DDT into the environment responsible?
And your response was all about how humans should be held accountable -- completely failing to comprehend or answer the question.
I won't respond further because it clearly would be to no avail.
By this line of thinking, you would also have to conclude that humans can't do anything by themselves because they can't do anything unless conceived by their parents.
No, AI can't do anything by itself even if it was "conceived" by its creator. A human can.
> No, AI can't do anything by itself even if it was "conceived" by its creator.
This is simply false ... AIs can easily be created that do things by themselves. For instance, a harness could be constructed that asks an LLM for something to do, then directs an agent to do it, and then repeat.
Can a submarine swim? An LLM can make stuff happen. You can make philosophical arguments about whether it is "doing" them or not. Why does it matter so much whether there was a human who typed into a chatbot or another LLM invoked a sub-sub-agent?
If I now tell a machine "Do what you think is best, and keep doing it forever.", have I now created a machine that can do stuff? If I later die, who will be responsible if the machine changes its strategy?
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Starting an autonomous harness program is conceiving an instance of an LLM.
How far back do you look in the action chain? If an LLM I start today starts an LLM that starts an LLM that starts an LLM that ... 100000 levels deep and 100000 years in the future, is it still my fault? If so, everything I do today is a lungfish's fault, not mine.
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