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

economist.com

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

#141

Post by doawoo »

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…

Huge point here, yes.

Anthropomorphizing these models is doing immeasurable harm to society in ways we probably can’t event quantify right now.

As humans we’re already geared towards anthropomorphizing things, we do it to animals too!

And it always felt like giving these models a chat interface is really exploiting that tendency in us.

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

#142

Post by okamiueru »

the_af wrote: post #98
dominotw wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

what are you talking about they lie that it wrote tests and tests are passing, for example

Whether this distinction is relevant is up to you, but I think we can safely say agents do not lie in the human sense of the word, because they don't intend to deceive (in fact, they aren't capable of "intending" anything in the human sense of the word, much like a BASIC program doesn't "intend" to PRINT "HELLO WORLD"). Our very human minds can perceive intent, because that's what we humans do, which is unrelated to…

If you ask the dice "what's 2 + 2?" do consider it meaningful to say "the dice told the truth" if you happen to roll a 4?

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

#143

Post by mminer237 »

user_7832 wrote: post #130
user_7832 wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've asked claude for a translation of a song with Brazilian Portuguese lyrics, and claude has very helpfully gone out of its way to say that due to legal reasons, it will never share the actual lyrics with me. It's fun when you want to know what the lyrics are to a song and get treated like a criminal.

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.

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

#144

Post by ipsod »

Arainach wrote: post #138
ipsod wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Let's say you're facing an average psycho, who is intent on mass murder - the more the better. Would you rather them have: a) guns b) psycho-aligned next-gen AI

False dichotomy, there's no reason not to have controls on both. Given the choice between them having access to guns and nuclear waste my answer is also "neither".

The question was meant to illustrate the actual danger of always-user-aligned AI, not to vote for which one we get to keep.

So many here get so worried about guns, but don't think twice about how dangerous AI can be.

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

#145

Post by skinfaxi »

AndrewKemendo wrote: post #124
skinfaxi wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How do we reward honor? Honor does not always pay off as a strategy and requires coordination in that other actors have to exhibit honor for it to be rewarded. At least with humans there is a social backstop but what's the parallel for computer agents?

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..

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

#146

Post by bonoboTP »

hombre_fatal wrote: post #101
Aozora7 wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Consider what someone who doesn't use AI would take away reading that quote from the article, and what harnesses were actually made for.

> Consider what someone who doesn't use AI would take away reading that quote from the article, and what harnesses were actually made for. Or you could just communicate the point that you have in your head yourself instead of hoping I do it for you and then arrive at your conclusion when I just reached my own different, independent conclusion after making the same consideration. Man, how is everyone so wishy washy on…

Without a harness, all an LLM can do is output text tokens. Nothing else. It's the harness that allows it to read a file, write a file, run commands, start subagents. But even a simple chat application would need a harness, because something has to take the input from the user, mark it up that it's a user message, then parse the LLM's generated tokens and display the message content, or diplay a referenced image inline, or whatnot. All of this is independent of any kind of safety or filtering of naughtiness.

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

#147

Post by user_7832 »

no-name-here wrote: post #140
user_7832 wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've asked claude for a translation of a song with Brazilian Portuguese lyrics, and claude has very helpfully gone out of its way to say that due to legal reasons, it will never share the actual lyrics with me. It's fun when you want to know what the lyrics are to a song and get treated like a criminal.

> … claude has very helpfully gone out of its way to say that due to legal reasons, it will never share the actual lyrics with me. … It's fun when you want to know what the lyrics are to a song and get treated like a criminal. Anthropic has been in court for years being sued over lyrics by the music industry: 2023 https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2023/oct/19/music-law... 2026 https://www.reuters.com/legal/legal…

Oh, for sure. I'm well aware about lyrics copyright, or how even google iirc was sued after a company purposely put wrong lyrics and could prove google was scraping it.

I'm not doubting the law.

What I am saying, is, when a user uploads a screenshot of lyrics and goes "hey can you translate this please?", the LLM shouldn't go out of its way to make a hue and cry as if it's being asked on how to rob a bank while murdering baby kittens.

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

#148

Post by ttownbikes »

mettamage wrote: post #68
VeninVidiaVicii wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I suspect the hype will play itself out once the entire system of LLM-induced self gratification can’t sustain itself economically.

The personal software I've written so far is quite nice :)

That's all fine and dandy. Have you made a single cent as a result of any of them? Do you know the actual cost of building this software?

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

#149

Post by boothby »

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 completed the task fully.

In a word, how do you convey the discrepancy between truth and reported fact? In a word, how do you convey the violation of rules presented to the program as invioble?

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

#150

Post by bigstrat2003 »

LadyCailin wrote: post #53
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/

Christians also invented pray the gay away and the Crusades. What’s your point? Hospitals surely would have been invented by secular people too, but not the crusades.

> Hospitals surely would have been invented by secular people too, but not the crusades.

That's not true. Secular people are quite capable of murdering each other en masse for ideological reasons, and indeed have done so in the past. The crusades were caused by human nature and its evils, not by religion.

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