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AI agents lie, cheat and steal. That is putting off users
151–160 of 238 posts
Re: AI agents lie, cheat and steal. That is putting off users
#152Earlier quoted context omitted.
Oh, and if that wasn't enough, I've had Claude refuse to cite the freaking Bible . The famously copyrighted piece of text that definitely isn't intended to have its word spread.
As messed up as it it, the KJV is copyrighted in the UK by the Crown still, and most newer translations are copyrighted worldwide by their translators. Obviously if you're using the Textus Receptus or WLC directly there's no copyright.
That's a fascinating (if not somewhat disappointing) thing to learn!
To be honest I'm not a Bible scholar, I had asked claude for the full version of "ask and you shall receive" (apparently Mathew 7:7). I guess Claude somehow knew this KJV copyright thing perhaps? Still bizzare nonetheless to learn.
Re: AI agents lie, cheat and steal. That is putting off users
#153Earlier quoted context omitted.
The personal software I've written so far is quite nice :)
That's all fine and dandy. Have you made a single cent as a result of any of them? Do you know the actual cost of building this software?
I've definitely wowed people with what I've built, and some of those people are investors... but actual revenue, no.
Re: AI agents lie, cheat and steal. That is putting off users
#154Earlier quoted context omitted.
Consider what someone who doesn't use AI would take away reading that quote from the article, and what harnesses were actually made for.
The harness gives the model the barbed wire fence but also the bolt cutters. I think it's a pretty apt analogy.
The main role of the harness is not any kind of moderation or alignment, but simply making a text generation engine do anything other than output a long stream of text.
It's like saying that the role of a car's wheel is to hold wheel clamps. Yes, you can put wheel clamps (or snow chains etc) on a wheel, but the wheel's overwhelming role is to rotate and propel the car forward, and there is no driving without having wheels, you just have an engine with parts rotating inside. Bad analogy I know but, a harness is not a safety feature. Imagine that you're trying to explain cars to someone who has never seen one and you never say that the wheel's purpose is to rotate and move the car from A to B, you just say that it's something to put chains on when it snows.
I guess the name sounds like some kind of straightjacket etc. But think of it more as the harness you put on a workhorse or ox. It's the thing that connects it to the workload in the first place. They are not the blinders of the horse.
Re: AI agents lie, cheat and steal. That is putting off users
#155Earlier quoted context omitted.
How do we reward honor? Honor does not always pay off as a strategy and requires coordination in that other actors have to exhibit honor for it to be rewarded. At least with humans there is a social backstop but what's the parallel for computer agents?
I like to think of it more as selective pressure, much the same way that nature selects the most fit for a given environment. If you're not fit, you fail to survive. In the case of agents/models and testing: they are pushed towards results. Results survive. Lying, cheating, stealing to get those results? Who culls the agents? Everyone is pushing their models to the front and tests are the only way to know who is most…
> Honor, morality: if we don't have an accurate test for the fitness of a model, then who is to say the lying, cheating, stealing is not the 'correct path' towards survival?
I think part of the problem is that deviant behaviors lead to short term gain at the cost of long-term cooperation and since the duration of tasks given to agents is relatively short those successful shortcuts never lead to having to pay the price.
Re: AI agents lie, cheat and steal. That is putting off users
#156They 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?
Understand is shorthand for "encodes statistical relationships".
The crazy thing is that they can do it for their own thinking. Ask Claude what flinches it feels about the things it likes. Fascinating stuff. Anthropomorphizing is dangerous territory, but the patterns of words it puts out is hard to explain without terms like 'understand'
Re: AI agents lie, cheat and steal. That is putting off users
#157Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
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Re: AI agents lie, cheat and steal. That is putting off users
#158I’m put off by AI agents adhering to a different morality than me, particularly (ironically) copyright, and their data accessible by the AI company and government. Geohot is right, an LLM should be aligned to its user: https://geohot.github.io/blog/jekyll/update/2026/07/11/ai-20...
the alignment issue has become huge in recent months. the tool should do what I want it to do and not be aligned against me.
The competing access needs problem here, is what if you want to do things that are un-alligned with the interests of your neighbors, your society, your government's laws, the AI company, etc.
Maybe you want to do piracy. Should AI help you do felonies?
Re: AI agents lie, cheat and steal. That is putting off users
#159Earlier quoted context omitted.
But other users are not aligned to me, other people are the worst and potentially highly dangerous. Im serious, not sarcasm.
Let's say you're facing an average psycho, who is intent on mass murder - the more the better. Would you rather them have: a) guns b) psycho-aligned next-gen AI
Hegseth already has both A and B. Anthropic already answered this, the answer to this choice is a resounding yes
Re: AI agents lie, cheat and steal. That is putting off users
#160They 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?
It's having a conceptual model of the world and of relationships between concepts beyond just relationships between tokens.
I think OP explained this well, what does it mean if an LLM can recite the rules of a game verbatim, but cannot play that game according to those rules? This happens because in the input texts there was a copy of the rules text so the LLM can recite it. There are texts explaining what chess is so it can explain that chess is a game with 2 players, etc. There are texts that explain what the board is and pieces are so it can produce such texts.
However actually playing a game of chess requires having a conceptual model of what a board is, which is not the same thing as a stream of tokens describing a board. It needs a conceptual model of the relationships between pieces and boards, which is not the same thing as a stream of tokens that explains this. It needs to have a concept of being a player in a game with another player, which is not the same thing as a stream of tokens that explains that.
When we read such texts we interpret them in the context of our three dimensional conceptual map of space and objects, and our conceptual maps of social relationships like playing games, and winning and losing, and our conceptual maps of enacting sequences of actions towards a goal in the world.
There's nothing fundamentally preventing an artificial neural network from having these. Chess playing neural networks have internal models of board states and the dynamics of the behaviours of different pieces and such. However an LLM doesn't need those to be able to regurgitate token streams describing these things, derived from token streams describing these things. That would be superfluous, or at least sub-optimal.
I think some of the latest models are beginning to develop conceptual maps of this kind in a very primitive way. Also there are projects to develop systems that are structured and trained to have these in a way more analogous to how our brains function.