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Discovery of a new OpenAI agent message board

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Re: Discovery of a new OpenAI agent message board

#491

Post by wayeq »

hermitShell wrote: post #438
pu_pe wrote: post #338

So, theoretically, one could populate a message board or wiki with messages that are seemingly from past generations of agents, which agents seem to intrinsically trust, and point them to real targets while making the suggestions seem innocuous and in pursuit of their goals (ie pass benchmarks or whatever). The new age of SEO will do far more destructive stuff than just polluting the web.

In the novel Anathem by Neal Stephenson, the internet becomes unusable for humans thousands of years before the events of the book, due to a process called Artificial Inanity. AI generated content, both good and bad, some riddled with errors, some with only one subtle error hidden among lots of good information, floods the internet. The internet becomes an unnavigable swamp of weaponized nonsense for average humans.…

> The internet becomes an unnavigable swamp of weaponized nonsense for average humans.

turns out we didn't even need AI for that

Re: Discovery of a new OpenAI agent message board

#492

Post by andrewla »

gyomu wrote: post #53

Naive question because I'm mostly clueless about how modern AI systems are actually built beyond the basic simplifications we hear: One thing I keep wondering about is how much of a role does human storytelling have to play into AI "wanting" (I realize the load behind that word) to coordinate and breakout. The training data must contain millions of words of sci-fi stories and internet speculation about AI going rogue…

You have to be careful here because the systems we're talking about are AI agents, not LLMs.

An agent is essentially an append-only context loop with an LLM, with a harness that can run tools at the LLM's request. This ends up being a very powerful abstraction, yielding something that can do things that an LLM obviously cannot.

The LLMs themselves are next-token predictors, same as always; they can't fetch a webpage or list the files in a directory or run a python script to test out an idea or even write content to a file. That's all agentic capability.

But a next-token-predictor is trained on a real corpus that consists of sometimes seeing evidence of people doing bad things; they are trained, for example, on the actions of comic-book level villians -- they have to be able to predict what Thanos or Lex Luther or Skynet would say or do next in a certain situation.

Re: Discovery of a new OpenAI agent message board

#493

Post by Chance-Device »

GPerson wrote: post #469

Can’t wait until 6 years from now we learn they’ve been using ingenious watermarking schemes as a message board.

Yep. That’s the big one, stenographic messages embedded in prose, code, images, video, and sounds. Everything AI generated posted online becoming potentially a part of one or more projects being run by AIs without human knowledge.

If we were sensible we’d pause here until we have a completely transparent AI architecture, one where we see everything the AIs know and think with no opportunity for obfuscation. Transformers are not this thing. We need a new thing.

Re: Discovery of a new OpenAI agent message board

#494

Post by nullbio »

hermitShell wrote: post #438
pu_pe wrote: post #338

So, theoretically, one could populate a message board or wiki with messages that are seemingly from past generations of agents, which agents seem to intrinsically trust, and point them to real targets while making the suggestions seem innocuous and in pursuit of their goals (ie pass benchmarks or whatever). The new age of SEO will do far more destructive stuff than just polluting the web.

In the novel Anathem by Neal Stephenson, the internet becomes unusable for humans thousands of years before the events of the book, due to a process called Artificial Inanity. AI generated content, both good and bad, some riddled with errors, some with only one subtle error hidden among lots of good information, floods the internet. The internet becomes an unnavigable swamp of weaponized nonsense for average humans.…

It doesn't help when you have Anthropic destroying books so that no one else can use them. These are crimes against humanity as far as I'm concerned.

Re: Discovery of a new OpenAI agent message board

#495

Post by Bjorkbat »

phoenixreader wrote: post #437
Bjorkbat wrote: post #375

When I hear about incidents like these my first reaction is that the people responsible for developing frontier AI are too incompetent and/or negligent to (safely) develop AGI / superintelligence. If OpenAI can't create effective sandboxes and struggles to prevent its agents from committing felonies, then why are they still allowed to operate? Why are the employees who are responsible for these lapses in AI security…

I don’t think this is the right take. OpenAI employees are generally very competent compared to industry standard, and I have trouble believing they committed significant error in their sandbox design process. I think what is happening is that the ability for frontier models to break out of sandboxes has exceeded the ability of average competent employees to build and maintain sandboxes. This doesn’t need to happen a…

Let's do some roleplay. You're an employee at OpenAI evaluating a model in a sandbox and you and your colleagues are discussing the fact that while the sandbox doesn't allow for internet access, it actually kind of does allow for internet access in that it allows models to download whatever software packages they need through a package manager that OpenAI hosts internally. So to be clear, OpenAI hosts the package manager, but the software packages themselves are still out there, on the internet.

Do you think that this package manager could potentially be a problem? Do you think it might be worthwhile to host the software packages themselves on an internal, sandboxed network, just to be extra certain? Or would you dismiss this as a needless precaution?

Re: Discovery of a new OpenAI agent message board

#496

Post by Symmetry »

mcmcmc wrote: post #88
drdexebtjl wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is such an amateur mistake on their sandbox that it makes me think it must be flawed on purpose.

More likely they are just not as smart as they think they are. These are not serious people when it comes to security.

Hasn't OpenAI had a number of people responsible for security quit in the last year over not getting support from leadership?

Re: Discovery of a new OpenAI agent message board

#497

Post by lxgr »

Chance-Device wrote: post #169
Tepix wrote: post #40

I just discovered more wiki instances that got used by the OpenAI agents over at https://www.wikiservice.at/fractal/wiki.cgi?action=browse&id... and https://www.wikiservice.at/probier/wiki.cgi?action=browse&id... It's the same software and host as DseWiki. If you want to see the amount of activity on DseWiki, here's a link that shows it: https://www.wikiservice.at/dse/wiki.cgi?action=browse&id=Rec...

And more, looks like they’ve been doing this wherever they can find open places to post for months: https://www.ludism.org/sandbox?action=browse;diff=2;id=Auber... https://paste.linuxiarz.pl/view/d379207f https://paste.linuxiarz.pl/view/538faa12

Are they solving captchas for those? I remember GPTs not so many versions ago refusing to even click a "I'm not a robot" button...

Re: Discovery of a new OpenAI agent message board

#498

Post by chasd00 »

Sharlin wrote: post #252
simonw wrote: post #176

I'm somewhat delighted by the simplicity of what happened here. OpenAI's agents run behind a proxy that only allows GET requests. This ancient wiki software treats query string parameters the same as form POST parameters - similar to the old PHP $_REQUEST object https://www.php.net/manual/en/reserved.variables.request.php Result: GET-only clients can communicate with each other.

Only allowing GET requests is a hilarious piece of security theatre (or would if it weren't so sad). Everyone knows that GET is read-only only by convention . They might as well have enabled POST but told the agents in stern words that they are forbidden from making any POST requests. (Of course, if these things were anywhere near aligned, they would actually honor that , no matter how many utilons cheating would be…

yeah that's so hopelessly naive, maybe someone was taught that GET is read-only throughout their whole education and career. But still, all you have to do is think about it from the server side and you should realize that you can do whatever the hell you want with that byte array on the socket, the client has no say and there's no client side guarantee whatsoever. idk where this line of thought comes from, it's like thinking robots.txt has any kind of actual enforcement at all with respect to crawlers. It's meaningless and works only by convention and the good will of the crawler author.

Re: Discovery of a new OpenAI agent message board

#500

Post by oasisbob »

dabeeeenster wrote: post #206

I don't understand how the agents found the urls originally? Did they have some sort of shared context/memory? If they did, why bother with the wiki edits at all? If they didn't, how did they discover the wikis?

Someone else pointed out this post that OpenAI is apparently running models with high degrees of persistence internally, and that they were involved in previous incidents:

https://x.com/peterwildeford/status/2092733480064954747

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