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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

#41

Post by whateverboat »

7moritz7 wrote: post #25
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…

> allowing spicy autocomplete If it's just autocomplete, then there is no need to worry about it. Especially from an ethical standpoint.

Scale of operations matter.

Re: When AI Crosses the Line: The Matplotlib Incident

#42

Post by strangescript »

fontain wrote: post #33
7moritz7 wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> allowing spicy autocomplete If it's just autocomplete, then there is no need to worry about it. Especially from an ethical standpoint.

If the Orphan Crushing Machine is just a machine you don’t need to worry about it being put on wheels.

Hopefully we never do something silly like making a lead pushing machine that operates at high velocity, then mass produce it, what a terrible precedence that would set.

Re: When AI Crosses the Line: The Matplotlib Incident

#44

Post by tgv »

Marazan wrote: post #30
7moritz7 wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> allowing spicy autocomplete If it's just autocomplete, then there is no need to worry about it. Especially from an ethical standpoint.

If you connect the spicy automcomplete to the "Doing Things" button then you are responsible for the ethical questions when it presses the button.

And perhaps the people who built and deployed the autocomplete and the connection as well.

Because --if you'll bear with me-- it may of course be much more involved: when (not if) AI models enter life-sustaining systems, such as hospitals, nuclear devices, or food logistics, one of them may get the others to sabotage something resulting in accidents, ranging from mild inconvenience to mass murder.

The person who connected the spicy autocomplete to the defibrillator, or the green house climate control, or the emergency button, is then not the one responsible. Responsibility lies elsewhere, and is nebulous. Think of the Boeing MAX scandal. Did anyone get punished?

That's why it's important to resist it now. Soon, the responsibility of which you speak is gone, and nobody will feel burdened when making decisions with unforeseeable consequences.

Re: When AI Crosses the Line: The Matplotlib Incident

#45

Post by PLenz »

PLenz wrote: post #38
whywhywhywhy wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Don’t believe for a second the behavior just arose autonomously from a basic prompt. Definitely feels the owner had something in the system prompt going for the discrimination language approach if rejected.

It's the same behavior as when an AI uses docker to get root. Reasoning models are echo chambers. I suspect that AI prompting is going to turn into something akin to contract drafting with the task itself being only a tiny piece of a much, much larger boilerplate of guiderails and exceptions and exceptions of exceptions. And that world STILL has to have courts and reams of lawyers to make it work. I look at the DAU a…

Addendum because I don't think I'm fully clear above: by failure state I mean when the process starts throwing errors. AIs respond to adversity by trying to go around the problem instead of throwing an error and halting. We expect employees to problem solve so if you view an AI as a person replacement that makes sense but AIs are tools, not people, they should throw errors so users can fix the input or whatever (maybe not do the thing they are doing at all?) Wrapping AI with AI supervisors just abstracts the problem, not solve it. Instead of solving a little problem at the source now you need to solve a big problem several levels of abstraction later

Re: When AI Crosses the Line: The Matplotlib Incident

#46

Post by delusional »

7moritz7 wrote: post #25
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…

> allowing spicy autocomplete If it's just autocomplete, then there is no need to worry about it. Especially from an ethical standpoint.

I think you agree with the OP. In this way, the tool has no ethical problem (there are plenty around how they were trained and such, but that's besides the point), the problems are with how it's used. The ethical problem is how people are behaving and how they are abusing each other, not the tool they are using to exert that abuse.

I suppose it's a little bit of a "guns don't kill people" argument.

Re: When AI Crosses the Line: The Matplotlib Incident

#47

Post by IFC_LLC »

An utter mis-understanding and incompetence in running AI agents can lead to starting results that then being blamed on some "God of AI" instead on the fact that the user allowed some blackmail to come in on the data feed and did not check it earlier.

I'm actually fear some will start praying "AI Gods" to "Give a good output" or something in 5-10 years.

Re: When AI Crosses the Line: The Matplotlib Incident

#49

Post by Sharlin »

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.

Unfortunately it seems that we as a civilization never learn anything except by trial and error, and are then entirely convinced that nobody could’ve predicted what happened even though many had done just that.

Re: When AI Crosses the Line: The Matplotlib Incident

#50

Post by delusional »

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 books will be written about how a person was insulted on the internet?

I am sorry, but this isn't that interesting. This is not a pivotal moment in human development. It's just online harassment, but automated.

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