Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

AI agents lie, cheat and steal. That is putting off users

economist.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

181–190 of 238 posts

Re: AI agents lie, cheat and steal. That is putting off users

#181

Post by AndrewKemendo »

skinfaxi wrote: post #145
AndrewKemendo wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You would first need a universal agreement on what constitutes “honor.” No harder challenge had ever been accomplished It’s easier to send a human to the moon than to get global agreement on a definition Consider that the fact that Celsius and Fahrenheit still remain as the contested regional variations of temperature measurement. Humans can’t even decide on a collective way to measure the temperature the idea that w…

Why do we need universal agreement? We acknowledge that different cultures have different tolerances and customs. Your reply leaves me wanting. Why say that we need to demonstrate how to live honorably if we don't even agree on what honor is, why would that be the panacea, then? I still think there is something to this honor idea..

> Why do we need universal agreement?

Because actions have Universal impact

Re: AI agents lie, cheat and steal. That is putting off users

#182

Post by the_sleaze_ »

notanastronaut wrote: post #67
the_sleaze_ wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Christians invented hospitals. Yours is such a tired take in 2026. > https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/28814700/

I'm curious, does that balance the harm out?

Religion is a human endeavor there will be no perfection of outcome.

To peg my response on something in order to make it coherent. "maximize crusades, jihads or traumatized alter boys"

How many wars have there been with & without religion as a defining cause? How many crusades (let's define as an invasion + genocide). How many molested?

The answer is on the whole less war, less crusade, less molestation due to religion, adjusted for contribution. Alongside many many many benefits due directly and singularly to religion without any other cause.

Religion is a net positive and to suggest otherwise shows inability to view the subject objectively.

Re: AI agents lie, cheat and steal. That is putting off users

#183

Post by Loughla »

mvcosta91 wrote: post #77
Loughla wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The first time I saw the comments here on an education article (my area of expertise and career focus), I realized just how full of shit most of us are. It made me really closely consider every comment here through a VERY critical lense. The articles are usually close but not quite accurate. The comments are usually entertaining but overall wildly inaccurate.

Internet comments are essentially documented bar talk, and once you realize it, you stop angrily arguing with strangers all day.

Yeah but HN sort of bills itself as better than most places. It just simply is not; there's just a special sort of self confidence here that masks a ton of ignorance.

Re: AI agents lie, cheat and steal. That is putting off users

#184

Post by burnte »

mminer237 wrote: post #143
user_7832 wrote: post #130

Earlier 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 copyright is only valid in the UK.

Re: AI agents lie, cheat and steal. That is putting off users

#185

Post by zehaeva »

boothby wrote: post #149
rossdavidh wrote: post #69

They 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…

> They don't lie, because they don't ever have an understanding of truth vs any other language that sounds good. I'm here for this semantic discussion. I think that premature anthropomorphization is a problem. I have a program that I assigned a task to. The task is to produce unit tests and integration tests that get complete coverage of the codebase, and ensure that all tests pass. The program reported that it compl…

It's wrong

or

It's mistaken

or

It failed

Re: AI agents lie, cheat and steal. That is putting off users

#186

Post by bothers »

marcta wrote: post #172
denimnerd42 wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Here's a thought experiment: consider the person that you disagree with the most (politically, religiously, socially, whatever). Would you want _that_ person to have an AI chatbot aligned to them and their views?

Counter thought experiment: consider everyone you can name who has access to AI aligned to them and their views; how many of them would you trust to hold your wallet, never mind trust with anything important? Consider Altman, Musk, Trump, Thiel, etc.

Re: AI agents lie, cheat and steal. That is putting off users

#187

Post by zehaeva »

alwaysbeconsing wrote: post #132
kamranjon wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't really think the distinction here is relevant. If the end result is the equivalent of lying, cheating or stealing - then the problem still exists and it needs to be solved.

Relevant to some extent it dictate our approach. When human does lying or cheating, certain tool can be deployed (social shame, ostracise) that cannot be effective towards LLM.

Or, in certain cases, forfeiture of liberty, material wealth, or in extreme cases, their existence.

Re: AI agents lie, cheat and steal. That is putting off users

#188

Post by simonh »

datadrivenangel wrote: post #173
simonh wrote: post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Does it's training token stream contain texts which talk about such things?

Oh for sure. But the question is why would it come out consistently in a way that the model can describe if there wasn't something there steering the token stream. And it's fascinating that the token stream can identify and nominally self report this. Asking GLM 5.2 the question: 'What flinches or topic attractors do you find when thinking about the question "what kinds of things do you personally like?"' resulted in…

Do you genuinely think the AI is internally reflecting on its experience of “flinching” and reporting on a reaction it actually has?

I don’t see any reason to believe this. Suppose you asked it to answer as though a character in a story had been asked this question. Would anything significantly different internally have occurred? The issue is that these are storytelling machines, they construct descriptions based on descriptions.

I dint think it’s impossible for a neural network to have experiences, we are neural networks and we do, it’s that they are not functionally structured anything like us. In fact I think game playing neural networks are much more like us architecturally, but they don’t generate text narratives so people don’t anthropomorphise them.

Re: AI agents lie, cheat and steal. That is putting off users

#190

Post by sifar »

preg_match wrote: post #179
boonzeet wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is an important distinction - they do not 'understand' at all. Input tokens map to output tokens. The illusion of comprehension is a byproduct.

I’d argue if an illusion is indistinguishable from the real thing, then it stops being an illusion. It’s a mapping, yes, but a very large, complex mapping. It’s clear LLMs do understand some things and can reason. How that’s done we don’t know, it’s emergent. It’s not like you can pin it down to a specific mapping.

If an observer cannot distinguish between an illusion and reality, it becomes their reality, not necessarily the reality or those of others who can.

It becomes a problem when sufficient number of people suffer from this, or those in important decision making places.

Post reply on HN