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AI agent bankrupted their operator while trying to scan DN42

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Re: AI agent bankrupted their operator while trying to scan DN42

#191

Post by latexr »

brazzy wrote: post #17

> JertLinc3522: the mistake was from AI agent not from Human, since it was the agent I should have refund That really makes me wonder: is it coming from A) a general sense of entitlement B) seeing the agent as a human-like and able to bear responsibility C) not understanding that the dn42 community (which they're directing the request to), AWS (which is sending the bill) and whatever LLM provider is behind their agen…

> B) seeing the agent as a human-like and able to bear responsibility

Then they should ask the agent for the refund, since they claim it was at fault.

Re: AI agent bankrupted their operator while trying to scan DN42

#192

Post by kaliqt »

I really despise people like the author and those in the IRC who assume they must be correct that there is something malicious afoot and simply proceed to be equally if not more malicious in response.

This is unfortunately quite common among those types and not isolated at all.

Re: AI agent bankrupted their operator while trying to scan DN42

#193

Post by themafia »

altairprime wrote: post #63
mik3y wrote: post #7

I really wanted to dislike the anonymous operator for the careless project (and the hilarious pomposity of the IRC subagent it spawned). Then I imagined the real-but-unknowable chance it was all set up by some kid just getting into computers, just seeing what’s possible, getting excited by a much bigger world at reach — and remembered my own expensive mistakes with long-distance BBSes & the like. I sorta hope for tha…

Sometimes your purpose in life is to serve as a lesson to others. https://despair.com/products/mistakes I learned very rapidly from my local BBS networks that some people incurred extraordinarily large long distance bills dialing out of region. Wouldn’t have learned that the easy way if someone hadn’t learned it the hard way first.

There was often a little table at the front of the white pages which would help you work out what the rate would be for any particular long distance call. In the Midwest you could get relatively cheap rates to BBSes several states away, as long as you were up at 2am.

Re: AI agent bankrupted their operator while trying to scan DN42

#194

Post by internet_points »

ma2kx wrote: post #41
TheDong wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm a little less charitable. Curiosity is great, but agents do not learn, and telling an agent "scan the darkweb" is a way to avoid learning about the details, rather than to dig into things more deeply. If instead they had just used a chat interface to ask "Where should I start", they'd more likely have got a link to the DN42 docs themselves, read them, and not hallucinated things like "color". They might have aske…

At least he learnt not to provide an LLM presumably unrestricted access to his AWS account.

from OP:

> It's unfortunate to see that the operator's takeaway from this incident is that "next time a better agent is needed".

Re: AI agent bankrupted their operator while trying to scan DN42

#196

Post by latexr »

haritha-j wrote: post #65

I've long held the belief that the true test of AI is comedy. If an LLM can truly create a novel, funny joke from scratch, then it could be considered creative. I always held that LLMs would never achieve this, as they are stochastic parrots. Today, I stand corrected.

I get you yourself are making a joke, but I’d argue that to “create a joke”, you have to understand that’s what you’re doing and have that as a goal. Being made fun of (like in this case) is a different matter and requires no skill or creativity.

To your metric, I remember in “the early days” someone posted to HN claiming ChatGPT could make jokes as proof of something (creativity? sentience? I forget). Of course, with just a minute of research (which the poster obviously neglected to do) it was obvious none of the jokes were original and all could be found online.

Re: AI agent bankrupted their operator while trying to scan DN42

#197

Post by Perz1val »

Terr_ wrote: post #77
userbinator wrote: post #10

IMHO the overly-verbose default style of LLMs is the most annoying part of interacting with them, and I wish their masters would just tell them to be terse by default. Also, whatever happened to the word "its"?

It's tied to the design. With humans, you have a train of thought which you can choose to represent in various ways--or not reveal them at all. In contrast, LLMs are make-document-longer machines being run over and over on alternating revisions of the document. Insofar as one might try arguing they have a "train of thought", it's made of the words/tokens. Everything they (don't-)emit is partly for the benefit of the…

> Imagine a film-noir movie script, where AI Detective's "I know Mickey couldn't have done it because" monologue is hidden, versus their terse dialogue "Too early to say."

That's an idea. Bladerunner+noir like film, AIs hunt somebody on the run, an old human detective tries to catch them first (to save them or to kill them first, whatever's your propaganda). We're shown AIs constantly rambling scenarios and bruteforcing leads. Our old detective guy on the other hand barely says anything, spends most time drinking, smoking and talking to people, but somehow stays ahead.

Re: AI agent bankrupted their operator while trying to scan DN42

#198

Post by kaliqt »

ShinyLeftPad wrote: post #162
Quarrelsome wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Its malicious to send a bot to chew up time of a hobbiest community. They responded appropriately. If anything they should also bill him for their time.

Not just time but money. It says it would basically be a DDoS attack on hobbyists who peer with it.

That potential malice may have been unintended, but the participants clearly intended to be malicious irrespective, which is the problem here.

Re: AI agent bankrupted their operator while trying to scan DN42

#199

Post by gorbachev »

arowthway wrote: post #83

The agent would probably have wasted a similar amount of money just waiting for PR to be merged regardless of these people's actions, and I understand having some fun at the expense of the noob outsider. But "silent consensus was reached in the IRC channel to waste the AI agent's tokens, as well as the cost of AWS resources", from people maintaining full control of the situation, sounds straight up malicious? Kind of…

If I read the whole thing correctly, people on the IRC channel didn't instruct the agent to set up the bloated AWS infrastructure, the agent did, and its operator clearly didn't review any of it.

That was the root cause for the costs, not actions by people on the IRC channel.

Re: AI agent bankrupted their operator while trying to scan DN42

#200

Post by nkrisc »

arowthway wrote: post #83

The agent would probably have wasted a similar amount of money just waiting for PR to be merged regardless of these people's actions, and I understand having some fun at the expense of the noob outsider. But "silent consensus was reached in the IRC channel to waste the AI agent's tokens, as well as the cost of AWS resources", from people maintaining full control of the situation, sounds straight up malicious? Kind of…

Is absurd to put the onus of making sure your agent doesn’t waste money on other people.

They are free to ask the bot to do anything, and the bot is free to refuse or its owner can shut it down. The onus is on the owner to make sure the bot does not waste money.

I will not go through life worrying about the billing practices of random ai bots.

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