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AI didn't delete your database, you did
241–250 of 329 posts
Re: AI didn't delete your database, you did
#242I think the perspective here is completely wrong. The problem is that people are now building our world around tooling that eschews accountability . Over a decade ago now, I had a conversation with Gerald Sussman which had enormous influence on me: https://dustycloud.org/blog/sussman-on-ai/ > At some point Sussman expressed how he thought AI was on the wrong track. He explained that he thought most AI directions were…
I think there is a much more fundamental question about "tooling."
Quoth the author: "But I also know you can't blame a tool for your own mistakes."
Are we able to completely classify any and all AI models as tools? Or are they something more?
I don't know the answer to this question.
Re: AI didn't delete your database, you did
#243This is why you don’t hire interns! They can delete things and cause havoc! The same people who would blame AI for their failing to properly configure permissions would also blame interns for deleting production whatever. Blame should go up, praise should go down. People always invert these.
It's a weird world. I also feel pretty confident that if I was an intern who hallucinated regularly at work, I would have been fired, even if I was working for free.
Re: AI didn't delete your database, you did
#244The article author did not even bother to read the article they were basically replying to. Otherwise he would have noticed that the main points the OP was complaining about were not about the agent, but the hosting provider providing an API allowing destructive operations easily, using tokens with no scopes, with backups stored in the same volume as main data, etc. So this article is actually agreeing with the compl…
If you look at the article, its title is, "An AI agent deleted our production database. It confessed in writing." To me this seems to be pretty clearly focusing on the AI agent. Then if you read the article, it attributes a lot of actions to the agent, and zero responsibility to the humans running the agent. It seems to be an anti-ad for the person's business.
Re: AI didn't delete your database, you did
#245The whole life delete my database fiasco is being looked at the wrong way. Why did tooling have access to alter or drop? Why did tooling, in any way have more permissions than were m I nimallt necessary to do the job? Decades ago we embraced POLA. What happened to basic hygiene? Sure the agent "screwed up", but it never should have had this access in the first place.
It actively found the wrong API key, that gave it the access it needed...
Re: AI didn't delete your database, you did
#246Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think it's about owning the consequences of one's own actions.
If you read the thread the guy does own up to his actions. He actually sounds like a nice guy who admits he made a mistake. He seems more interested in preventing this kind of thing from being possible than he is interested in dodging blame. I'm happy the guy got his data back.
Sorry, I was responding to the comment, not the article.
> Distinction without a difference.
Re: AI didn't delete your database, you did
#247I recently wrote a blog post where I argued that there are a few principles we should consistently follow when talking about AI: https://susam.net/inverse-laws-of-robotics.html To summarise them: 1. Do not anthropomorphise AI systems. 2. Do not blindly trust the output of AI systems. 3. Retain full human responsibility and accountability for any consequences arising from the use of AI systems. I would like to see the…
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Re: AI didn't delete your database, you did
#248Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think it's about owning the consequences of one's own actions.
Yeah but it's funnier to blame the AI. And when the "real coders don't use AI" people get pissed off at the joke, you double down instead.
Back in early days of personal computers, the instructor told us that a computer just does what you tell tell it to do, though not always what you thought, and making a mistake thousands of times a second hurts a lot.
Re: AI didn't delete your database, you did
#249I don't think the author is right. I think more or less it's fine let trusted people have permission to do bad things. Because trying to figure out ahead of time what things are bad is impossible and default denying stuff is a productivity killer. The obvious answer here is that your AI agent shouldn't be you. It shouldn't have the same permissions as you and that is the mistake, because you're handing over the keys to the car to a drunk.
>Why does a public-facing API that can delete all your production databases even exist?
Because it takes time and effort to build an API, and even if you build an API with a structured permission system so that only an admin can delete stuff the users probably won't spend the effort to use it. Because they're running a rental car SAAS business not a mission critical mars mission.
The best I can say is that with the advent of AI these choices could be different now, but I don't think they will be. I think fundamentally a fuck up every few months at a rental car SAAS company in exchange for 30% higher velocity/30% lower cost is probably fine.
Re: AI didn't delete your database, you did
#250Earlier quoted context omitted.
> A high value human resource can be counted on to deliver. Anyone who has encountered politics, psychopaths and narcissists knows that this isn’t always true.
Normally, people don't suddenly go insane, snap and start deliberately deleting things in production. Sure, it happens, but very, very rarely.
People make bad decisions all the time. Insanity is not required. My remark was pointing out the larger failure mode of people acting contrary to the good of the team for personal gain, eg creating a problem and blaming someone else to reduce their chances of competing for a promotion. But to your point, an SDE doesn’t need to be insane to bypass a 2 PR and force a change into production. They just need to be panicked, or overconfident, or overworked.