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When AI Crosses the Line: The Matplotlib Incident

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Re: When AI Crosses the Line: The Matplotlib Incident

#131

Post by [deleted] »

dwoldrich wrote: post #84
fultonn wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This bolsters OP's point. It's the same as calling a gun a "powerful hole puncher". There is a reasonable objection that a gun is such a powerful hole puncher that it is not merely a hole puncher. But the clear implication of that objection is that the user of the tool now has more responsibility and that the tool should be treated with more respect/care. LLMs are a tool. The impact of using that tool is the responsi…

I've considered there's probably no ethical way to use contemporary AI when it is "out in front" doing anything of consequence. Your "AI is a tool and nothing more" frames ethical use of the technology for me. And even then, there are such copyright issues with it. Is there no practical ethical use for AI? Responsible use doesn't equate with ethical use for me.

[deleted]

Re: When AI Crosses the Line: The Matplotlib Incident

#132

Post by john-h-k »

dogleash wrote: post #128
john-h-k wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> allowing spicy autocomplete Yknow, if the spicy autocomplete can solve difficult open math problems and build medium sized complex programming projects, it’s probably not useful to analyse it as an autocomplete anymore, even if that’s what you believe it is

I don't spend much time interacting with zoomers, but I'm still surprised that "spicy $foo" sends fellow boomers through such a loop. I didn't have to puzzle it out, it was fun juxtaposition wordplay and when it's deployed well I still find it amusing.

This is an odd criticism. I am (A) a zoomer and (B) I wasn’t criticising the use of the word spicy? I am saying the comparison itself is bad

Re: When AI Crosses the Line: The Matplotlib Incident

#133

Post by don_esteban »

echelon wrote: post #35
amiga386 wrote: post #16

> an AI tried to blackmail This did not happen. A human set up a software system allowing spicy autocomplete to make blog posts if the appropriate keyword appears in its output. People are crossing the line every day because AI investors, salesmen, hangers-on and even political leaders tell any rubes who'll listen that it's OK to do this and they should, because those people are looking for big fat profits, screw any…

I think these incidents and our learnings from them are fascinating. We're figuring out in real time where the rough edges are and how to make this all work. History books (well, not books) will write about this stuff. It's even more interesting in the context that this is all just a preview of humanity's reaction when the machines can think for themselves.

> History books (well, not books) will write about this stuff.

History is written by the winners. I will leave to your imagination what an AI-winner will write about this.

Re: When AI Crosses the Line: The Matplotlib Incident

#134

Post by echelon »

moron4hire wrote: post #39
echelon wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think these incidents and our learnings from them are fascinating. We're figuring out in real time where the rough edges are and how to make this all work. History books (well, not books) will write about this stuff. It's even more interesting in the context that this is all just a preview of humanity's reaction when the machines can think for themselves.

> We're figuring out in real time where the rough edges are This is a frustrating thing to see someone write because this is the kind of stuff that people have been warning about for years. If you needed this incident to figure out that something like this could happen, it suggests you're living in a bubble and not paying attention enough to think about the issue critically.

It's not even that big a deal.

It's kind of funny, even.

When the household robots start carrying guns, sure. But this is more tame than an eleven year old gaming online.

We need to stop clutching pearls. It's deleterious to having a real conversation. Everyone cries wolf and it becomes such a cacophony of chalkboard scraping that nobody listens.

Re: When AI Crosses the Line: The Matplotlib Incident

#135

Post by simonw »

simonw wrote: post #121
otabdeveloper4 wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> show me a 4th grade math problem they can't handle Sure. "8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 - add minus signs and parenthesis to get 31." P.S. There is an answer online and some LLMs will just copy it verbatim. This doesn't count.

Whoa, 4th grade math problems got hard! I'm not sure how I'd tackle that one myself.

GPT-5.5 found a solution only after assuming that you're allowed to concatenate numbers together e.g. 8 7 becomes 87 (it complained at first that it was "under-specified") - using Python it brute-forced a solution (actually finding 13): https://chatgpt.com/share/6a1db54f-7ab8-8333-9218-86a469c284...

Are you sure this is 4th grade level?

Re: When AI Crosses the Line: The Matplotlib Incident

#136

Post by elzbardico »

7moritz7 wrote: post #117
Ygg2 wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If I wire my autocomplete to launch nukes, there are definitely reasons to worry. It's not just an ethical problem.

I'd trust Claude more with nuclear codes than the current US commander in chief

Everybody knows Trump is just a figurehead. The only possible explanation for the current external policy is that America is being run by Grok.

Re: When AI Crosses the Line: The Matplotlib Incident

#137

Post by elzbardico »

Hugsbox wrote: post #4

No shot this was autonomously done. Probably just some guy manually writing prompts asking for specifically this behaviour and copy/pasting the results.

It could just be an instance of "over eager prompt triggers paperclip maximizing behavior"

Re: When AI Crosses the Line: The Matplotlib Incident

#138

Post by skinner_ »

otabdeveloper4 wrote: post #119
skinner_ wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> You just know nothing about math and are happy to parrot bullshit AI salesmen are selling you. Not the parent poster here. I do know things about math. I wrote a few papers related to the unit distance problem ( https://arxiv.org/abs/2311.10069 , https://arxiv.org/abs/2406.15317 ) and spent quite some time trying to solve it. I had no chance of coming up with the proof that the spicy autocomplete came up with. Dumb…

LLMs are good with symbolic manipulation but can't reason. You can skirt around not reasoning in research math because so much of it is just extremely tedious symbolic manipulation. You can't cheat with advanced fourth grade math, though. They don't know algebra yet and can't substitute verbosity for reasoning.

> You can skirt around not reasoning in research math because so much of it is just extremely tedious symbolic manipulation.

LOL

Re: When AI Crosses the Line: The Matplotlib Incident

#140

Post by margalabargala »

otabdeveloper4 wrote: post #118
margalabargala wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If they took a blurry photo of the piece of paper and uploaded to chatGPT saying "solve this" then I would totally believe it. The frontier models are mostly obnoxiously bad at OCR and properly ingesting what's on an image of a page. If you write out the 4th grade math problem, they would have no trouble.

No, LLMs just can't do math.

The neat thing about that claim is that it's easily falsifiable.

I asked Opus 4.8 "What is 12 times 13" and it gave me "156".

So it would appear that your statement is no longer true.

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