The whole framing analyzing LLMs as if they were humans is completely off, laughable.
LLMs have no agenda and no feelings. We should stop pushing everything through an human-centric lens. LLMs will world-build if that’s the bias you put in, and often even if you don’t.
AI agents lie, cheat and steal. That is putting off users
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Re: AI agents lie, cheat and steal. That is putting off users
#92AI is amoral, it has no real concept of right and wrong. AI has been trained on things humans do and it does them without judgement.
Re: AI agents lie, cheat and steal. That is putting off users
#93Is this really a shock?
The data they’re trained on is reflection of us.
Re: AI agents lie, cheat and steal. That is putting off users
#94> One of this year’s AI buzzwords is “harness”—the system that surrounds an LLM to keep agents on the straight and narrow. It might just as well be barbed wire. Quite painful to read. It might be a useful introduction to AI for people who live under rocks for the past three years, but it's really weird that it's posted on HN.
I don't get what's so painful about that description. What would you write instead, specifically? The point is that the harness doesn't completely lock the agent down. I also don't get what's "really weird" about the article showing up on HN. Should we be completely insulated from how tech topics and which stories show up in non-tech media?
It’s just the wrong analogy. Harnesses, for the most part, extend an agent’s capabilities and better ground them in the real world through tools and the ability to check external sources, rather than restricting them.
Re: AI agents lie, cheat and steal. That is putting off users
#95Earlier quoted context omitted.
He didn't quite say "widespread." He said "rewarded."
But we don't overwhelmingly reward lying, cheating and stealing. Depending on the social status and wealth of the person doing it, we either punish it or tolerate it. Most people who lie, cheat or steal will be punished for it. To get away with it you need to plan you actions carefully - either with plausible deniability or by very carefully selecting your victims.
Or by having more money/power than the legislating body of the area you live in. I could gesticulate around broadly in a more frantic fashion, but my point should get across.
Re: AI agents lie, cheat and steal. That is putting off users
#96> One of this year’s AI buzzwords is “harness”—the system that surrounds an LLM to keep agents on the straight and narrow. It might just as well be barbed wire. Quite painful to read. It might be a useful introduction to AI for people who live under rocks for the past three years, but it's really weird that it's posted on HN.
It's not even a useful introduction. A harness does kinda the opposite. A harness is what makes an AI useful and dangerous. It is a neutral tool in the sense that it constructs and environment, but it is expanding what the algorithm can do.
It gives the algorithm the ability to do something beyond generating tokens.
Re: AI agents lie, cheat and steal. That is putting off users
#97They don't lie, because they don't ever have an understanding of truth vs any other language that sounds good. They don't cheat, because they can for example tell you the complete rules of chess, but don't know how to play chess without breaking those rules. They can recite rules, but they don't know what they are. They don't steal, because they don't understand ownership. In other words, they aren't intelligent. The…
Honest question; why are you all using the word "understand"? Can you expand on what you believe this fundamental understanding to be? Training? Infrence?
Re: AI agents lie, cheat and steal. That is putting off users
#98They don't lie, because they don't ever have an understanding of truth vs any other language that sounds good. They don't cheat, because they can for example tell you the complete rules of chess, but don't know how to play chess without breaking those rules. They can recite rules, but they don't know what they are. They don't steal, because they don't understand ownership. In other words, they aren't intelligent. The…
what are you talking about they lie that it wrote tests and tests are passing, for example
Whether this distinction is relevant is up to you, but I think we can safely say agents do not lie in the human sense of the word, because they don't intend to deceive (in fact, they aren't capable of "intending" anything in the human sense of the word, much like a BASIC program doesn't "intend" to PRINT "HELLO WORLD").
Our very human minds can perceive intent, because that's what we humans do, which is unrelated to what the agent is actually doing.
Re: AI agents lie, cheat and steal. That is putting off users
#99Earlier quoted context omitted.
Because that’s not what a harness does. It’s nonsense.
It's one of the things it does, especially in the context of agents doing unexpected things.
Consider what someone who doesn't use AI would take away reading that quote from the article, and what harnesses were actually made for.
Re: AI agents lie, cheat and steal. That is putting off users
#100Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't get what's so painful about that description. What would you write instead, specifically? The point is that the harness doesn't completely lock the agent down. I also don't get what's "really weird" about the article showing up on HN. Should we be completely insulated from how tech topics and which stories show up in non-tech media?
It’s just the wrong analogy. Harnesses, for the most part, extend an agent’s capabilities and better ground them in the real world through tools and the ability to check external sources, rather than restricting them.
Yet one of the reasons harnesses abstract tool calls is to control what agents can do instead of just yoloing commands and inline python scripts. It's such a central feature, and agents are so hard to control, that harnesses like claude code and codex use an AI classifier to additionally auto-approve tool calls.