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An AI agent deleted our production database. The agent's confession is below

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Re: An AI agent deleted our production database. The agent's confession is below

#471
post #345

I would never, ever trust my data with a company that, faced with this sort of incident, produces a postmortem so clearly intended to shift all blame to others. There’s zero introspection or self criticism here. It’s all “We did everything we possibly could. These other people messed up, though.” You can’t have production secrets sitting where they are accessible like this. This isn’t about AI. This is a modern “oops…

> This is a modern “oops, I ran DROP TABLE on the production database” story. It's not that story, though. It's a story "oops, my tool ran DROP TABLE on the production database" (blaming the tool). At least I haven't heard people blaming their terminals or database clients as if the tool is somehow responsible for it.

It's an AI-enhanced "the script had a bug in it".

Re: An AI agent deleted our production database. The agent's confession is below

#472
post #261

The only healthy stance you should have on AI Safety: If AI is physically capable of misbehaving, it might ($$1), and you cannot "blame" the AI for misbehaving in much the same way you cannot blame a tractor for tilling over a groundhog's den. > The agent's confession After the deletion, I asked the agent why it did it. This is what it wrote back, verbatim: Anyone who would follow a mistake like that up with demandin…

He’s not necessarily anthropomorphizing it, he’s showing that it went against every instruction he gave it. Sure concepts like “confession” technically require a conscious mind, but I think at this point we all know what someone means when they use them to describe LLM behavior (see also “think”, “say”, “lie” etc)

> He’s not necessarily anthropomorphizing it, he’s showing that it went against every instruction he gave it.

It's deeper than that, there are two pitfalls here which are not simply poetic license.

1. When you submit the text "Why did you do that?", what you want is for it to reveal hidden internal data that was causal in the past event. It can't do that, what you'll get instead is plausible text that "fits" at the end of the current document.

2. The idea that one can "talk to" the LLM is already anthropomorphizing on a level which isn't OK for this use-case: The LLM is a document-make-bigger machine. It's not the fictional character we perceive as we read the generated documents, not even if they have the same trademarked name. Your text is not a plea to the algorithm, your text is an in-fiction plea from one character to another.

_________________

P.S.: To illustrate, imagine there's this back-and-forth iterative document-growing with an LLM, where I supply text and then hit the "generate more" button:

1. [Supplied] You are Count Dracula. You are in amicable conversation with a human. You are thirsty and there is another delicious human target nearby, as well as a cow. Dracula decides to

2. [Generated] pounce upon the cow and suck it dry.

3. [Supplied] The human asks: "Dude why u choose cow LOL?" and Dracula replies:

4. [Generated] "I confess: I simply prefer the blood of virgins."

What significance does that #4 "confession" have?

Does it reveal a "fact" about the fictional world that was true all along? Does it reveal something about "Dracula's mind" at the moment of step #2? Neither, it's just generating a plausible add-on to the document. At best, we've learned something about a literary archetype that exists as statistics in the training data.

Re: An AI agent deleted our production database. The agent's confession is below

#474

Some of this stuff is so embarrassing. Why would you even post this online?

The founder is attempting to throw both Anthropic and Railway under the bus for his own mistakes. This strategy won't work for the typical HN reader, but for everyone else? Possibly.

Completely agree with this.

Re: An AI agent deleted our production database. The agent's confession is below

#475
post #273

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Don't anthropomorphize the language model. If you stick your hand in there, it'll chop it off. It doesn't care about your feelings. It can't care about your feelings.

For those who might not know the reference: https://simonwillison.net/2024/Sep/17/bryan-cantrill/ : > Do not fall into the trap of anthropomorphizing Larry Ellison. You need to think of Larry Ellison the way you think of a lawnmower. You don’t anthropomorphize your lawnmower, the lawnmower just mows the lawn - you stick your hand in there and it’ll chop it off, the end. You don’t think "oh, the lawnmower hates me" –…

404 on that link.

Re: An AI agent deleted our production database. The agent's confession is below

#476
post #18

Interesting story. But despite Cursors or Railways failure, the blame is entirely on the author. They decided to run agents. They didnt check how Railway works. They relied on frontier tech to ship faster becsuse YOLO. I really feel sorry for them, I do. But the whole tone of the post is: Cursor screwed it up, Railway screwed it up, their CEO doesnt respond etc etc. Its on you guys! My learning: Live on the cutting e…

I love boring tech. It's reliable as hell and not as full of hidden surprises. Screw the cutting edge for serious work.

Re: An AI agent deleted our production database. The agent's confession is below

#477

Earlier quoted context omitted.

taps the "don't anthropomorphize the LLM" sign They don't have time preference because they don't have intent or reasoning. They can't be "reincarnated" because they're not sentient, they're a series of weights for probable next tokens.

That is not that strong an argument as it seems, because we too might very well be "a series of weights for probable next tokens". The main difference is the training part and that it's always-on.

That is a silly point. We very clearly are not "a series of weights for probable next tokens", as we can reason based on prior data points. LLMs cannot.

Re: An AI agent deleted our production database. The agent's confession is below

#478
post #261

The only healthy stance you should have on AI Safety: If AI is physically capable of misbehaving, it might ($$1), and you cannot "blame" the AI for misbehaving in much the same way you cannot blame a tractor for tilling over a groundhog's den. > The agent's confession After the deletion, I asked the agent why it did it. This is what it wrote back, verbatim: Anyone who would follow a mistake like that up with demandin…

Completely agree. This is a harness problem, not a model problem. The model is rarely the issue these days

No, this is a "being stupid enough to trust an LLM" problem. They are not trustworthy, and you must not ever let them take automated actions. Anyone who does that is irresponsible and will sooner or later learn the error of their ways, as this person did.

Re: An AI agent deleted our production database. The agent's confession is below

#479
post #37

I find these posts hilarious. LLMs are ultimately story generators, and "oops, I DROP'ed our production database" is a common and compelling story. No wonder LLM agents occasionally do this.

Sure, but do junior devs find another key, in an unrelated file and use that key instead of their own? Maybe once you read about someone doing this and maybe it happened or maybe someone was being overly "creative" for entertainment purposes. But it probably doesn't happen in practice. The LLM making this mistake is becoming more and more frequent.

Re: An AI agent deleted our production database. The agent's confession is below

#480
post #345

I would never, ever trust my data with a company that, faced with this sort of incident, produces a postmortem so clearly intended to shift all blame to others. There’s zero introspection or self criticism here. It’s all “We did everything we possibly could. These other people messed up, though.” You can’t have production secrets sitting where they are accessible like this. This isn’t about AI. This is a modern “oops…

Agreed. The post reflects that they were running an AI agent in YOLO mode in an unsandboxed environment with access to production credentials.

It doesn’t even seem to have crossed their minds that this behaviour is the real root cause. It’s everybody else’s fault.

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