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AI didn't delete your database, you did

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291–300 of 329 posts

Re: AI didn't delete your database, you did

#291
post #244

The 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.

I did not say they did not read the title of the article. They clearly did. It's the rest of the content that was lost, such as the long focus on the sloppiness of the API provider

Re: AI didn't delete your database, you did

#292

I 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…

Yeah I'd like to know in a solid way WHY Claude kept changing a file that I explicitly told it not to. The .mds, Claude's plan all said not to touch that file, and Claude just kept at it. I've had it happen repeatedly lately. Really basic failures.

The idea being that as frustrating as it is, if I knew why I might be able to do something about it.

But no, we have the black box, where sometimes what comes out just is brain dead and the rate that you get bad output is a mystery...

It feels like gambling at times.

Re: AI didn't delete your database, you did

#293

I 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…

> But a much better path would be to not use systems which fail to have these properties, and expand work on systems which do.

Sounds like sage life advice. If it isn’t accountable then it might not be a good idea to have much business with it.

We teach children to be accountable so eventually they can be independent. Any system in your life that you don’t want to parent should probably be accountable for its own actions. Accountable banks. Accountable restaurants, accountable friends.

Re: AI didn't delete your database, you did

#294

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We dont know the final amount, as they settled out of court, but in 1992 a woman was awarded hundreds of thousands of dollars by the judge after receiving third degree burns from a coffee at a McDonalds. She had originally asked for $20,000 to cover medical expenses. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liebeck_v._McDonald%27s_Restau... If instead this happened in another part of the world instead of the USA, I doubt that M…

When healthcare is free the amount of damages is harder to claim maybe?

If healthcare is free then you aren't paying your doctors.

What you mean is "when healthcare is paid for by other people", and in that case the cost of the healthcare is still calculable.

Re: AI didn't delete your database, you did

#295
post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I think you won’t get [cathedral],.. > even if you do get [cathedral], [bazar] will run circles around you…

Ahhh I like that It's nested and recursive cathedrals and bazaars, all the way down. And perhaps the bazaar has finally arrived inside the favourite cathedral of most everyone here EDIT: out of curiosity, does anyone have any good examples of biomes/ecosystems that are so far toward cathedrals? Or is that a uniquely human invention/extreme at the ecosystem scale?

First thing that comes to mind is beehives and anthills. Highly ordered societies where each insect has a role to perform. Don't know how well you think that fits the "cathedral" model, but I'd say it's pretty close.

Beavers reshaping the landscape also comes close, but that's individual beavers acting more or less on their own, not a rigidly structured society like ants and bees, so perhaps the beavers are closer to the bazaar analogy than the cathedral.

Re: AI didn't delete your database, you did

#296
post #226

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Just because you can claim that a person kick started something Kick started what? If you decided to give an LLM access to your database, it's completely on you when you when it does something you don't want. You should've known better. If all you "kickstart" is an LLM generating text that you can use however you decide, there will never be anything to worry about from the LLM. > Let's put things in perspective: if…

it bothers me that others don't feel the same I bet these are the same people who don't admit they make mistakes; they are never wrong, something else is to blame.

I like to think every mistake I make at work is my manager's fault.

Re: AI didn't delete your database, you did

#297
post #296
post #226

Earlier quoted context omitted.

it bothers me that others don't feel the same I bet these are the same people who don't admit they make mistakes; they are never wrong, something else is to blame.

I like to think every mistake I make at work is my manager's fault.

same, plus I also blame HR who gave me the contract to begin with

Re: AI didn't delete your database, you did

#298

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>1. Do not anthropomorphise AI systems. This is maddeningly difficult IMX.

Give it a name, but something non-human like "thingbot" or "tacosplosion." "Hey tacosplosion, generate me an exploding taco image."

You already failed. We don't say hey to machines.

Re: AI didn't delete your database, you did

#299

I 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…

My team and I are firm that we are the ones accountable. LLMs are a tool like every other. Only that it's non deterministic. But I am the one using the tool. I am the one giving the tool access. I am the one who has to keep everything safe. I have shot myself in the foot using gparted in the past by wiping the wrong disk. gparted wasn't to blame. I was. Letting LLMs work freely without supervision sounds great but it…

> LLMs are a tool like every other. Only that it's non deterministic.

Which is exactly what makes them not like other tools. A non deterministic tool is not fit for any serious purpose.

Re: AI didn't delete your database, you did

#300

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A band saw is always a screaming band of bladed death. An LLM is sometimes a buddy, sometimes a mentor, and only sometimes a guy that drops your database.

Maybe we can just not give it access to production databases ever? Not picking on you, but AI maximalism has infected tech to the point where we talk about how to stop AI from deleting prod instead of seeing that giving AI access to prod is a foolish idea to begin with.

That is certainly true. Anyone who gives an LLM access to their systems is a fool who will soon find themselves out of a job.
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