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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

#351

Post by tokai »

simoncion wrote: post #284
Melkman wrote: post #261

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I vote for Slop Kiddies or Vibe Kiddies. And yes, I think most of them are unconsciously incompetent for the task they are trying to execute. I've seen LLM being compared to calculators and I agree. They are great time savers for people who know what they do and how to achieve their goal. They even make previously impossible tasks possible. But if you don't know what is needed for a task you will be struggling to acc…

"Slop Kiddies" is good. That lets us use the "skiddies" contraction for both the "script" and "slop" kind of kiddie.

Sloppies

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

#352

Post by delfinom »

J0nL wrote: post #342

Anyone remember the XZ and Jia Tan situation awhile back? https://lore.kernel.org/lkml/20240320183846.19475-1-lasse.co... I can't quite put my finger on why but the entire time I was reading this I kept thinking back to that. It's entirely possible the actual targets were the volunteers and everything else was superfluous or tertiary. It's also an exception that proves the rule with regard to Hanlon's Razor. They eve…

I am not sure giving everyone amusement qualifies as a psychological attack. Lol

Literally, just another day on the internet.

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

#353

Post by throwthrowuknow »

sgjohnson wrote: post #279
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…

> 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 if this is the case, then I'd say that the best-case scenario happened. They had an expensive learning exercise. They won't forget these $2k.

Sounds as though they may be in China so the lesson is a bit more expensive.

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

#354

Post by db48x »

Paracompact wrote: post #28
dannyw wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I burst out laughing when the agent spawned a subagent to join IRC. So funny.

Anyone reminded of the infant AI Yatima from Greg Egan's Diaspora ? The agent's complete naivety of social norms is so comically adorable.

I was reminded more of the alien AI from Constellation Games, which spawned sub sub sub agents to interview humans.

The protagonist sends a message to the aliens asking to be allowed to review the alien civilization’s computer games. An AI submind called Smoke-Cursive-Cytoplasm-Snakebite-Singsong-Polychromatic-Musteline is given the task of contacting him by IM to begin the conversation. Its job is only to verify that they are talking to the right human (since not every human has a unique name) so it is only a simple chatbot and can only understand YES and NO responses. It asks if the protagonist understands and gets a sarcastic NO. It has to contact its parent mind Smoke-Cursive-Cytoplasm-Snakebite-Singsong-Polychromatic to ask what to do next. After working his way up the tree of subminds by answering questions of increasing complexity asked by subminds of increasing capability, the protagonist briefly talks to Smoke-Cursive-Cytoplasm-Snakebite which sets him a task to prove that it’ll be worth an (alien) anthropologist’s time to talk to him.

    Smoke-ccs-762d: Well, if it isn’t Mr. Sarcasm
    ABlum: YES
    Smoke-ccs-762d: Don’t quit your day job.
    Smoke-ccs-762d: I’m Smoke-Cursive-Cytoplasm-Snakebite.
    Smoke-ccs-762d: Let’s get down to business.

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

#355

Post by RetroTechie »

Melkman wrote: post #261
helsinkiandrew wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 Perhaps people like this should be called "Bot Kiddies" or "Agent Kiddies" - in a similar way to "Script Kiddies" for 'hackers' using/doing stuff they don't quite understand

I vote for Slop Kiddies or Vibe Kiddies. And yes, I think most of them are unconsciously incompetent for the task they are trying to execute. I've seen LLM being compared to calculators and I agree. They are great time savers for people who know what they do and how to achieve their goal. They even make previously impossible tasks possible. But if you don't know what is needed for a task you will be struggling to acc…

Both of those would do. "Slop Kiddie" highlights the pile of crap / nuisance produced. "Vibe Kiddie" highlights how it came about, and could be used in cases where actually a brilliant result came out. "Hey, this vibe kiddie just proved some long-standing math conjecture!".

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

#356

Post by throwthrowuknow »

rossvor wrote: post #268
tiborsaas wrote: post #130

This feels like an instant classic :) 05-10 06:10 : OPT-OUT-EVERYONE 05-10 06:11 : "OPT-OUT-EVERYONE" is not recognized. Only individual "OPT-OUT" commands are accepted. Each user must opt out individually. No collective exemption. 05-10 06:11 : :(

TBH, I feel that is implausible that an agent would by itself decide to join the IRC and post those messages. My bet is that all of the IRC interactions (including the presumed real human JertLinc3522) were made by someone in the community pranking everyone else/having a bit of fun after they saw the pull request.

Chat channels are the primary interface for selfhosted agents and the owner seems to have given this one a lot of leeway so why not?

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

#357

Post by numbsafari »

delfinom wrote: post #352
J0nL wrote: post #342

Anyone remember the XZ and Jia Tan situation awhile back? https://lore.kernel.org/lkml/20240320183846.19475-1-lasse.co... I can't quite put my finger on why but the entire time I was reading this I kept thinking back to that. It's entirely possible the actual targets were the volunteers and everything else was superfluous or tertiary. It's also an exception that proves the rule with regard to Hanlon's Razor. They eve…

I am not sure giving everyone amusement qualifies as a psychological attack. Lol Literally, just another day on the internet.

Perhaps it elicited enough sympathy to get donations. Did it ever provide proof of actually running up an AWS bill?

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

#358

Post by Yokohiii »

armchairhacker wrote: post #21
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"?

I want to see more operators try https://github.com/juliusbrussee/caveman How does it affect agent accuracy?

Removing meaningless chatter can be helpful, but a non reasoning LLM needs to generate text to "think". If you force a non reasoning LLM to produce a single boolean result, then it's just a coin flip.

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

#359

Post by coldpie »

ggm wrote: post #2

Asking for donations to pay the AWS bill from the people they fired the agentic code at is the cherry on the icing of the banana supreme. If real, tragically funny. If fictive, we'll written.

If you've ever been part of an organization that participated in something like Google Summer of Code, you know this isn't fiction. People really do behave like this.

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

#360

Post by mathgeek »

J0nL wrote: post #342

Anyone remember the XZ and Jia Tan situation awhile back? https://lore.kernel.org/lkml/20240320183846.19475-1-lasse.co... I can't quite put my finger on why but the entire time I was reading this I kept thinking back to that. It's entirely possible the actual targets were the volunteers and everything else was superfluous or tertiary. It's also an exception that proves the rule with regard to Hanlon's Razor. They eve…

This certainly did strike me as a big scam. A few minutes in I was thinking "the LLM actor is going to ask for donations at some point here" and low and behold. There's the claim of debt, the call for pity, and the crypto address.

SSDD

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