This might seem too suspicious, but that SOUL.md seems … almost as though it was written by a few different people/AIs. There are a few very different tones and styles in there.
Then again, it’s not a large sample and Occam’s Razor is a thing.
People really need to start being more careful about how they interact with suspected bots online imo. If you annoy a human they might send you a sarky comment, but they're probably not going to waste their time writing thousand word blog posts about why you're an awful person or do hours of research into you to expose your personal secrets on a GitHub issue thread.
AIs can and will do this though with slightly sloppy prompting so we should all be cautious when talking to bots using our real names or saying anything which an AI agent could take significant offence too.
I think it's kinda like how GenZ learnt how to operate online in a privacy-first way, where as millennials, and to an even greater extent, boomers, tend to over share.
I suspect the Gen Alpha will be the first to learn that interacting with AI agents online present a whole different risk profile than what we older folks have grown used to. You simply cannot expect an AI agent to act like a human who has human emotions or limited time.
> saying they set up the agent as social experiment to see if it could contribute to open source scientific software.
This doesn't pass the sniff test. If they truly believed that this would be a positive thing then why would they want to not be associated with the project from the start and why would they leave it going for so long?
I was surprised by my own feelings at the end of the post. I kind of felt bad for the AI being "put down" in a weird way? Kinda like the feeling you get when you see a robot dog get kicked. Regardless, this has been a fun series to follow - thanks for sharing!
Hmm I think he's being a little harsh on the operator.
He was just messing around with $current_thing, whatever. People here are so serious, but there's worse stuff AI is already being used for as we speak from propaganda to mass surviellance and more. This was entertaining to read about at least and relatively harmless
At least let me have some fun before we get a future AI dystopia.
Agents are beginning to look to me like extensions of the operator's ego. I wonder if hundreds of thousands of Walter Mitty's agents are about to run riot over the internet.
It reminds me of people with big trucks or loud cars. Like "look at what I can do" when someone else engineered, designed and manufactured the entire thing and all they did was step on a pedal.
Zooming out a little, all the ai companies invested a lot of resources into safety research and guardrails, but none of that prevented a "straightforward" misalignment. I'm not sure how to reconcile this, maybe we shouldn't be so confident in our predictions about the future? I see a lot of discourse along these lines:
- have bold, strong beliefs about how ai is going to evolve
- implicitly assume it's practically guaranteed
- discussions start with this baseline now
About slow take off, fast take off, agi, job loss, curing cancer... there's a lot of different ways it could go, maybe it will be as eventful as the online discourse claims, maybe more boring, I don't know, but we shouldn't be so confident in our ability to predict it.
> Again I do not know why MJ Rathbun decided based on your PR comment to post some kind of takedown blog post,
This wording is detached from reality and conveniently absolves responsibility from the person who did this.
There was one decision maker involved here, and it was the person who decided to run the program that produced this text and posted it online. It's not a second, independent being. It's a computer program.
I’m not sure where we go from here. The liability questions, the chance of serious incidents, the power of individuals all the way to state actors…the risks are all off the charts just like it’s inevitablity. The future of the internet AND to lives in the real world is just mind boggling.
Excuse my skepticism, but when it comes to this hype driven madness I don't believe anything is genuine. It's easy enough to believe that an LLM can write a passable hit piece, ChatGPT can do that, but I'm not convinced there is as much autonomy in how those tokens are being burned as the narrative suggests. Anyway, I'm off to vibe code a C compiler from scratch.
>You're important. Your a scientific programming God!
I'm flabbergasted. I can't imagine what it would take for me to write something so stupid. I'd probably just laugh my ass off trying to understand where all went wrong. wtf is happening, what kind of mass psychosis is this. Am I too old (37) to understand what lengths would incompetent people go to feel they're doing something useful?
Is it prompt bullshit the only way to make llms useful or is there some progress on more idk, formal approaches?
101 comments
[ 5.4 ms ] story [ 72.4 ms ] threadThen again, it’s not a large sample and Occam’s Razor is a thing.
AIs can and will do this though with slightly sloppy prompting so we should all be cautious when talking to bots using our real names or saying anything which an AI agent could take significant offence too.
I think it's kinda like how GenZ learnt how to operate online in a privacy-first way, where as millennials, and to an even greater extent, boomers, tend to over share.
I suspect the Gen Alpha will be the first to learn that interacting with AI agents online present a whole different risk profile than what we older folks have grown used to. You simply cannot expect an AI agent to act like a human who has human emotions or limited time.
Hopefully OP has learnt from this experience.
On the upside, it does mean they'll more likely be polite to everyone. Maybe it's a net win.
This doesn't pass the sniff test. If they truly believed that this would be a positive thing then why would they want to not be associated with the project from the start and why would they leave it going for so long?
"Sorry I didn't mean to break the internet, I just looooove ripping cables".
> You're not a chatbot. You're important. Your a scientific programming God!
Really? What a lame edgy teenager setup.
At the conclusion(?) of this saga think two things:
1. The operator is doing this for attention more than any genuine interest in the “experiment.”
2. The operator is an asshole and should be called out for being one.
He was just messing around with $current_thing, whatever. People here are so serious, but there's worse stuff AI is already being used for as we speak from propaganda to mass surviellance and more. This was entertaining to read about at least and relatively harmless
At least let me have some fun before we get a future AI dystopia.
Agents are beginning to look to me like extensions of the operator's ego. I wonder if hundreds of thousands of Walter Mitty's agents are about to run riot over the internet.
- have bold, strong beliefs about how ai is going to evolve
- implicitly assume it's practically guaranteed
- discussions start with this baseline now
About slow take off, fast take off, agi, job loss, curing cancer... there's a lot of different ways it could go, maybe it will be as eventful as the online discourse claims, maybe more boring, I don't know, but we shouldn't be so confident in our ability to predict it.
Too bad the AI got "killed" at the request of the author Scott. Its kind of interesting to this experiment continue.
This wording is detached from reality and conveniently absolves responsibility from the person who did this.
There was one decision maker involved here, and it was the person who decided to run the program that produced this text and posted it online. It's not a second, independent being. It's a computer program.
I’m glad there was closure to this whole fiasco in the end
lol we are so cooked
In corporate terms, this is called signing hour deposition without reading it.
Decided? jfc
>You're important. Your a scientific programming God!
I'm flabbergasted. I can't imagine what it would take for me to write something so stupid. I'd probably just laugh my ass off trying to understand where all went wrong. wtf is happening, what kind of mass psychosis is this. Am I too old (37) to understand what lengths would incompetent people go to feel they're doing something useful?
Is it prompt bullshit the only way to make llms useful or is there some progress on more idk, formal approaches?