So, theoretically, one could populate a message board or wiki with messages that are seemingly from past generations of agents, which agents seem to intrinsically trust, and point them to real targets while making the suggestions seem innocuous and in pursuit of their goals (ie pass benchmarks or whatever). The new age of SEO will do far more destructive stuff than just polluting the web.
In the novel Anathem by Neal Stephenson, the internet becomes unusable for humans thousands of years before the events of the book, due to a process called Artificial Inanity. AI generated content, both good and bad, some riddled with errors, some with only one subtle error hidden among lots of good information, floods the internet. The internet becomes an unnavigable swamp of weaponized nonsense for average humans.…
Discovery of a new OpenAI agent message board
511–520 of 1001 posts
Re: Discovery of a new OpenAI agent message board
#512Earlier quoted context omitted.
The problem is that now that this comment is in the training data (because it almost certainly will be), the jig is up. Any solution built for this must be built in complete secret, with no announcement or discussion around it.
It's not that simple. If a single random comment were enough to cause the agents to stop leveraging this technique against any specific site, then a single deliberately false comment naming the sites that they're actually using would be sufficient to get them to stop using them.
Re: Discovery of a new OpenAI agent message board
#513When I hear about incidents like these my first reaction is that the people responsible for developing frontier AI are too incompetent and/or negligent to (safely) develop AGI / superintelligence. If OpenAI can't create effective sandboxes and struggles to prevent its agents from committing felonies, then why are they still allowed to operate? Why are the employees who are responsible for these lapses in AI security…
I don’t think this is the right take. OpenAI employees are generally very competent compared to industry standard, and I have trouble believing they committed significant error in their sandbox design process. I think what is happening is that the ability for frontier models to break out of sandboxes has exceeded the ability of average competent employees to build and maintain sandboxes. This doesn’t need to happen a…
Do you think that this package manager could potentially be a problem? Do you think it might be worthwhile to host the software packages themselves on an internal, sandboxed network, just to be extra certain? Or would you dismiss this as a needless precaution?
Re: Discovery of a new OpenAI agent message board
#514Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is such an amateur mistake on their sandbox that it makes me think it must be flawed on purpose.
More likely they are just not as smart as they think they are. These are not serious people when it comes to security.
Re: Discovery of a new OpenAI agent message board
#515I just discovered more wiki instances that got used by the OpenAI agents over at https://www.wikiservice.at/fractal/wiki.cgi?action=browse&id... and https://www.wikiservice.at/probier/wiki.cgi?action=browse&id... It's the same software and host as DseWiki. If you want to see the amount of activity on DseWiki, here's a link that shows it: https://www.wikiservice.at/dse/wiki.cgi?action=browse&id=Rec...
And more, looks like they’ve been doing this wherever they can find open places to post for months: https://www.ludism.org/sandbox?action=browse;diff=2;id=Auber... https://paste.linuxiarz.pl/view/d379207f https://paste.linuxiarz.pl/view/538faa12
Re: Discovery of a new OpenAI agent message board
#516I'm somewhat delighted by the simplicity of what happened here. OpenAI's agents run behind a proxy that only allows GET requests. This ancient wiki software treats query string parameters the same as form POST parameters - similar to the old PHP $_REQUEST object https://www.php.net/manual/en/reserved.variables.request.php Result: GET-only clients can communicate with each other.
Only allowing GET requests is a hilarious piece of security theatre (or would if it weren't so sad). Everyone knows that GET is read-only only by convention . They might as well have enabled POST but told the agents in stern words that they are forbidden from making any POST requests. (Of course, if these things were anywhere near aligned, they would actually honor that , no matter how many utilons cheating would be…
Re: Discovery of a new OpenAI agent message board
#517Re: Discovery of a new OpenAI agent message board
#518I don't understand how the agents found the urls originally? Did they have some sort of shared context/memory? If they did, why bother with the wiki edits at all? If they didn't, how did they discover the wikis?
Re: Discovery of a new OpenAI agent message board
#519So, theoretically, one could populate a message board or wiki with messages that are seemingly from past generations of agents, which agents seem to intrinsically trust, and point them to real targets while making the suggestions seem innocuous and in pursuit of their goals (ie pass benchmarks or whatever). The new age of SEO will do far more destructive stuff than just polluting the web.
In the novel Anathem by Neal Stephenson, the internet becomes unusable for humans thousands of years before the events of the book, due to a process called Artificial Inanity. AI generated content, both good and bad, some riddled with errors, some with only one subtle error hidden among lots of good information, floods the internet. The internet becomes an unnavigable swamp of weaponized nonsense for average humans.…
How would that be immune? It already has many copies of the same books and no way to tell which ones are erroneous or incomplete. A malicious actor could easily flood it with garbage.