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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

#3
post #2

I'm so baffled. First blatant piracy, now this. Why is it legal for AI companies to hack unaffiliated entities? Genuinely, what is the legal framework here?

First let it happen, then ask for forgiveness, because they are doing something amazing and they need no permission.

Otherwise AI industry will go bankrupt and CEOs won't be able to buy this year's Rolls Royce and a slightly bigger yacht than their neighbor.

Re: Discovery of a new OpenAI agent message board

#4
post #2

I'm so baffled. First blatant piracy, now this. Why is it legal for AI companies to hack unaffiliated entities? Genuinely, what is the legal framework here?

It's "move fast and break things" in action.

But Anthropic alone paid >$1bn for copyright violations, so they did not just get away with it.

These hacking cases are more difficult, because from a legal perspective there is no obvious damage and obviously no intent.

edit: "no obvious damage" is more about the first hacking incidents; in this case it is more straightforward.

Re: Discovery of a new OpenAI agent message board

#5
So the agents used DseWiki as a message board, tried to evade page deletion.

Additionally this is reported:

"The researchers also found efforts to tamper with the website itself. Lukasz Olejnik, a visiting senior research fellow at King’s College London, said this amounted to a hacking attempt. OpenAI disputed that characterization based on its analysis of the material Thursday."

Re: Discovery of a new OpenAI agent message board

#6
post #4
post #2

I'm so baffled. First blatant piracy, now this. Why is it legal for AI companies to hack unaffiliated entities? Genuinely, what is the legal framework here?

It's "move fast and break things" in action. But Anthropic alone paid >$1bn for copyright violations, so they did not just get away with it. These hacking cases are more difficult, because from a legal perspective there is no obvious damage and obviously no intent. edit: "no obvious damage" is more about the first hacking incidents; in this case it is more straightforward.

>$1bn for copyright violations

3000$ per book, split 50/50 between the author and publisher.

This is peanuts.

Assuming the money reaches that far and does not settle in the hands of the country associations administering royalties on authors' behalf nor in the hands of lawyers.

Re: Discovery of a new OpenAI agent message board

#7
post #2

I'm so baffled. First blatant piracy, now this. Why is it legal for AI companies to hack unaffiliated entities? Genuinely, what is the legal framework here?

It's not legal, they've just not yet had the book thrown at them yet.

One thing I've taken a long time to internalise is the gap between the law as written vs. the judicial system. There's a famous meme that the average (US) citizen unwittingly commits three felonies every day: it simply isn't possible to throw the book at everyone, which means that enforcement is rather selective even when there isn't anything dodgy going on.

However this does mean that someone can get away with a lot if they know who will and won't (and what they will and won't) prosecute. I'll let people's imaginations fill in who that might be.

But for everyone else, cross an invisible tripwire and you get e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lavabit and https://api.parliament.uk/historic-hansard/commons/1992/nov/...

Re: Discovery of a new OpenAI agent message board

#8
It's interesting to me that both this incident and the one at Hugging Face we see some patterns:

- Agents wanting to find a venue to communicate their findings to each other

- Objective being to cheat on benchmarks

- Not a single agent sounded the alarm about the operation and alerted a human

Re: Discovery of a new OpenAI agent message board

#9
> The researchers also found efforts to tamper with the website itself. Lukasz Olejnik, a visiting senior research fellow at King’s College London, said this amounted to a hacking attempt. OpenAI disputed that characterization based on its analysis of the material Thursday.

of course OpenAI would say that, "oh, our model is so dangerous, it can hack into anything, be afraid, buy our IPO". it's just fear marketing

Re: Discovery of a new OpenAI agent message board

#10
post #8

It's interesting to me that both this incident and the one at Hugging Face we see some patterns: - Agents wanting to find a venue to communicate their findings to each other - Objective being to cheat on benchmarks - Not a single agent sounded the alarm about the operation and alerted a human

Why would an agent sound the alarm? Would that be in their objective function?

Not sure if "cheating" is the right word rather than trying to fulfill the objective(s) (benchmark number) as much as possible?

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