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AI agent bankrupted their operator while trying to scan DN42

lantian.pub

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

#381
post #262

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That’s up there with the password story, hunter2.

What the heck is *******?

If mind viruses exist this is one of them along with saying "nice" after something is 69 haha

Weird sort of internet-evolved performance art where people act out the old quote, every time.

It's 20 years old. Quit having fun!

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

#382
post #189
post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Honestly, kids (heck people below 23) shouldn't be allowed an AWS account. AWS also should have a strict cap on usage that's not "thousands of dollars". It's interesting they are yet to be regulated or sued for that. Having a web app where you can mistakenly (even without AI) click a button and get charged tens of thousands of dollars and only know that days later should have been unacceptable.

I couldn't disagree more. I was playing around with AWS when I was probably 14 years old, with a credit card from my parents with consent, and a strict budget and the understanding that if I mess up and overspend, I'm getting disciplined. I learned a lot of stuff about networking, how AWS works (VPCs, IAM, CloudWatch, etc) from trial and error, and hobby projects like personal websites (free tier), hosting a Minecraf…

Some variant of this topic comes up with some regularity. Leaving aside technical issues associated with implementing real-time hard caps, you still have a tradeoff. You either implement hard cutoffs which a student or someone else on a hard budget would like. Or you have a situation where an admin (or an admin who is no longer with a company) stuck some number in that seemed sensible at the time that brings down the company's whole system because of some sales spike.

I get that (and why) some people won't use AWS or its main competitors for this reason. But, frankly, they're not AWS's market and AWS will basically shrug.

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

#383
post #333

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That’s up there with the password story, hunter2.

I miss bash.org. Now excuse me, I have a cyber date, and I need to put on my robe and wizard hat.

Still, every time someone accidentally disconnects from a video meeting or the like I say "That wasn't my speaker cable."

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

#384

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.

AI is only creative when it's messing up. Guide rails are basically the opposite to the subversive nature of jokes, so the only time it can make with the funny is by falling off the rails

(or lifting some comedians work, but I'm not counting that as the AI's creation of course)

See also: Will Smith eating spaghetti

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

#385
post #338

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's so neat that if you type your hacker news password it automatically comes out as stars! ******* More places should have this feature.

Let me try: ******* Edit: it does really work.

Keeping track of password is for those who can’t crack any account whenever it’s needed, of course.

Just create the account, and crack it everytime a login is needed, as simple as that.

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

#388
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…

LLMs are not that smart. The extremely surprising and concerning part of this whole story is that the agent reported that they proactively spun up 5 AWS instances with a combined 100Gps of network egress capacity. What they spent wasn't cheap by any means but the egress itself would've been a whole lot more, while DoS'ing the whole hobby network. Ultimately, wasting the agent's time instead of allowing the scan to go through probably saved this person a lot of money.

Now I kinda wonder what AI model this was. We've now heard of comparably "proactive" behaviors from Fable, but that's only just been released. The latest GPT perhaps? Some random local model?

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

#389
post #338

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's so neat that if you type your hacker news password it automatically comes out as stars! ******* More places should have this feature.

Let me try: ******* Edit: it does really work.

Lmao I bet Dang is watching this chain like *finger on edit button*

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

#390

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

I haven't seen "agent operators" going for IRC as their communication channel. It's always Telegram, or Discord.
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