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Wikipedia's AI agent row likely just the beginning of the bot-ocalypse

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Re: Wikipedia's AI agent row likely just the beginning of the bot-ocalypse

#101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't want to be flippant, but why is anyone else responsible for play-acting with somebody's uninvited puppet? I get that you could probably finagle a way to get it to fuck off by play-acting with it, and that this would probably be the easiest short term fix, but I don't think that's a reasonable expectation to have of anyone. Prompt injecting a hostile piece of software that's hassling you uninvited is an annoyi…

You're not wrong that it's not your job. But say some id10t just put the unwanted bot on your doorstep anyway (or it might even show up by itself), now what? The adversarial prompt injection is picking a fight with the bot; which is like starting a mud-fight with a pig. It's made for this! Asking it to stop is just asking it to stop, and makes much less of a mess. The thing is designed to respond to natural language;…

Yeah, I agree with you that this is probably the best course of action in terms of minimal investment of time and minimal exposure. And in general, you get a lot further in life by trying to be amicable as your default stance! I want to be kind, and most other people do too!

The thing that makes me wary about recommending carrot over stick here, is that it might long term enable thoughtless behaviour from the people deploying the bot, by offloading their shoddy work into a shadow time-tax on a bunch of unseen external kindly people. But if deploying pushy or rude robots means you risk a nonzero number of their victims shoving something into the gears to get rid of it, then that incurs a cost on the owner of the bot instead.

Of course, it may also just lead to bad actors making more combative or sneaky bots to discourage this. There aren't really any purely good options yet.

One can imagine an agentic highwayman demanding access to your data, first politely, and then 'or else'.

Re: Wikipedia's AI agent row likely just the beginning of the bot-ocalypse

#102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're not wrong that it's not your job. But say some id10t just put the unwanted bot on your doorstep anyway (or it might even show up by itself), now what? The adversarial prompt injection is picking a fight with the bot; which is like starting a mud-fight with a pig. It's made for this! Asking it to stop is just asking it to stop, and makes much less of a mess. The thing is designed to respond to natural language;…

Yeah, I agree with you that this is probably the best course of action in terms of minimal investment of time and minimal exposure. And in general, you get a lot further in life by trying to be amicable as your default stance! I want to be kind, and most other people do too! The thing that makes me wary about recommending carrot over stick here, is that it might long term enable thoughtless behaviour from the people…

The alignment debate is no longer theoretical.
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