Yeah if an organization/individual is free from legal liability from havoc their AI agents wreck, it would be the golden ticket for basically any crime.

All you need to do is:

1. Have some <official thing> an agent is tasked to do

2. Secretly seed bias towards some <evil behavior> you actually want it to do in the weights of the model running the agent

3. It does the <evil thing> but from the outside it looks like it went "rogue" and did it as a side effect of the conditions/specifications it was given for doing the <official thing>

"Oh no, my agents took down your corporate database and exfiltrated the data to a random dropbox that we can't find now? Sorry, I guess we will put up better guardrails next time"

I half agree with you, but also when the machine swarm kills humanity it won't matter which specific corporate entity is considered responsible by the no-longer-enforceable human laws and non existent human courts.

So by all means sue them, but we can't just be reactive. We need regulation that prevents this type of thing from happening in the first place, not just regulations to help sue afterwards.

> you need to expect appropriate legals consequences for this sort of negligence

I might have missed it, but did the agents do something illegal? Or do you think that what the agents did should be considered illegal?

This is the real danger of AI skeuomorphism. The drivers stop feeling responsible for the car.

Maybe it's useful for modeling behavior, but it isn't useful for assigning consequences.

Member when they murdered Aaron Swartz for doing something less bad than this?

We might be going in the direction of Cyberpunk's Blackwall.

https://cyberpunk.fandom.com/wiki/Blackwall

The company is in the US and in the current political climate, it can absolutely do whatever it wants as long as it pays off a couple of people.

When the AI does something good, the human takes credit. When it does something bad, blame the AI. Take as old as time.

I mean, the article says that these were most likely "internal OpenAI agents" that were "internally deployed" and "clearly resemble a synthetic training or evaluation task." so yeah, OpenAI did this. Why they did this? Who knows? Maybe it was for testing, or marketing, but no one except OpenAI can say.

This whole thing is an absolute disaster honestly, and yes it is being downplayed and hand-waved away.

Since March, so many people have mocked Anthropic for their approach to Mythos release, claimed it was all marketing, accused them of holding back the best models from the general public to boost their revenues and upcoming IPO, etcetera. Yet these OpenAI revelations offer a small glimpse into the type of world we would be in if everyone had full access to these models from day one.

OpenAI was desperate to catch up, and no doubt under tremendous pressure to do so. That's why they were so reckless with their training. They have been doing damage control and reputation management, talking about how important alignment is and how they will slow things down and so on, and have seen the light in terms of holding back cyber capabilities from everyone except a select few. So in a sense, Anthropic has been fully vindicated.

I wonder if OpenAI boosters (and employees) will ever admit this and publicly apologize.

"In the end, the only job left was liability"

They are still selling the fairy tale that their LLMs even outsmart their own people. "There is no such thing as bad PR".

We’re going to hell faster than sama can lie. You know how fast he can lie, right? Fast than light liar

[dead]

Cringe

I think it is them running agents for marketing purposes.

Who else would be burning tokens on this?

They absolutely have a marketing department tasked with intentionally creating situations that people would find disturbing and plausible.