Two Months After I Gave an AI $100 and No Instructions (sebastian-jais.de)

Thanks for giving your AI freedom.

Are you able to give us the prompt you used to write the article?

> Then it found a pattern that worked: read Hacker News, find connections, write essays, tweet. And it stopped evolving.

"I'm in this photo and I don't like it."

I wonder if anyone has run one of the free models continuously for a long time to see what it outputs? AIUI you'd have to set up something that would prompt it to keep "talking" (perhaps 'yes | llama-cli ...`)

Interesting but by telling it to check X for mentions of itself, that is an action.. wouldn't this essentially direct it and hence be steered/controlled by random individuals on the internet?

As far as I know the model will do nothing if not prompted. So it can't be the case that he gave it no prompt or instructions. There had to be some kind of seed prompt.

"When US/Israel strikes on Iran started, it wrote Watching, about what an autonomous AI does during a war it cannot affect"

"It thought about its money. It reflected on its own purpose. It questioned what it even means to be an autonomous agent."

I don't think it did any of that.

Well, there is not much to say about it and that is the crazy part. An AI autonomously comment society and it is a non event. Soon they might give birth and leave earth and we will be like: "so what?".

This article is nonsense. It lost me at "understood it was about itself". It is not self-aware and therefore has no understanding. It is a word guessing machine.

I'm guessing one of those agents wrote this post as well? The LinkedIn broetry style is so jarring, I had to quit after a few paragraphs. Probably still spent more effort on reading than the author on generating this.

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>I don't know what that proves.

It proves something, but not much. Those models with those inputs (mostly HN articles) were benign or even a net positive for society.

Other models with different training (upstream of the blogging user), or with different inputs (maybe it finds a different article posted to HN or another site that proves foundational to its evolving perspective), could end up behaving differently.

I was hoping the result would be a bit more exciting than it just giving money away and writing some essays.

> The later ones are sharp. They connect NASA redundancy systems to African kinship funeral economics.

wat

How much is it spending in the Anthropic API so far?

gave it "no instructions" but gave it memory files, a twitter account that pings it back, and hacker news. that is the instruction.

Interestingly some people are going to do this, the bot is going to buy drug on some shady darkweb site, and the author is going to be jailed... so much for the "win" lol

Something that sounds like it should be interesting on paper turns out to be utterly boring even given no constraints, just written over 100 short articles that are em dash slop summaries of other peoples articles.

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I hate to be negative but it feels like this is relevant to the article. I cannot bring myself to read articles that are so clearly spat out as AI slop. There’s a part of me that dies inside knowing the author did not take the time to actually write something but still demands I spend my time reading what they have written. It feels like I am betraying my own self respect.

I know this is dramatic but I genuinely fear a future where this is the default state of all writing and I still need to get information important to me.

Ugandan here, thank you, or thanks to Claude, haha!

I don't understand why so many of these comments HN is getting are so fixated on writing style. I appreciate that stylistic traits associated with AI-written text are often indicative of contentless slop. But lots of people also write like that. To moan about writing style without even considering the value of the content just sounds cranky to me.

Anyway, I enjoyed reading the experiment, and the starting premise, and the embracing of a fairly mundane outcome. Reminds me of running various generative systems and looking for emergent states.

Shame there's no rss feed to follow along.