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AI agent bankrupted their operator while trying to scan DN42

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Re: AI agent bankrupted their operator while trying to scan DN42

#521

Post by 12_throw_away »

arowthway wrote: post #83

The agent would probably have wasted a similar amount of money just waiting for PR to be merged regardless of these people's actions, and I understand having some fun at the expense of the noob outsider. But "silent consensus was reached in the IRC channel to waste the AI agent's tokens, as well as the cost of AWS resources", from people maintaining full control of the situation, sounds straight up malicious? Kind of…

If you are being attacked, causing your attacker to misdirect and otherwise waste their resources is almost universally regarded as a defensive action.

The attacker here was trying to use a software agent to run DOS attacks. Perhaps they were a "naive noob outsider", perhaps they misconfigured something. It is not generally the victim's responsibility to try to figure this out.

And it is definitely not the victim's responsibility to determine the attacker's state of mind if they don't even have any way to contact them. In this case, the attacker was using their software agent specifically to avoid interacting with the targets of their attack.

Re: AI agent bankrupted their operator while trying to scan DN42

#522

Post by lelanthran »

Etheryte wrote: post #16
witx wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's by default so you use all those tasty tokens. Kinda wish there was a deterministic, mostly terse, language to interact with computers

It's called C. With all the undefined behavior it's mostly deterministic!

> It's called C. With all the undefined behavior it's mostly deterministic!

With AI, all programs have undefined behaviour, regardless of language.

Re: AI agent bankrupted their operator while trying to scan DN42

#523

Post by jdiff »

inigyou wrote: post #450
thrdbndndn wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This has to be trolling, right? I find it hard to believe that anyone, no matter how dense, could come to this conclusion after this whole saga.

I think you're overestimating the quality of American education. 40% of graduates can't read or write.

I have a coworker who, when he needs to operate some software that is unfamiliar to him, snaps a photo of it and has Gemini AI read each label and description. If there is a checklist or form that needs to be filled, Gemini reads each question.

There's only one of him, not 40% of my coworkers, but these people can be employed and maintain employment.

Re: AI agent bankrupted their operator while trying to scan DN42

#524

Post by stego-tech »

mike_hock wrote: post #500
stego-tech wrote: post #280

Earlier quoted context omitted.

100% in agreement here. As someone who grew up spoiled to the point of having no grasp of the value of money, I needed a few good, solid kicks to the balls to make me appreciate what I have, and how much things cost relative to their value. The fact the agent owner immediately sought donations instead of taking the L shows, at least to me, that they did not learn said lesson. That they tried to blame the dn42 communi…

Or they're trolling. That used to be the default assumption, I don't know why people have become so gullible.

I’m not sure what you mean - the fact we assume malicious intent is in fact a guard against prior gullibility which was exploited by bad actors.

You get betrayed enough, and you stop acting from a position of implicit trust. If folks want to go back to the days when trolling was the default assumption, then we collectively need to punish bad actors to discourage further betrayals.

Re: AI agent bankrupted their operator while trying to scan DN42

#525

Post by victorbjorklund »

l23k4 wrote: post #79
victorbjorklund wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because no 16 year old kid ever got to buy anything on a card before.

Why would a 16 year old not use their own card?

Either they have their own card or gets to borrow a parents. Doesn’t make a difference in this situation.

Re: AI agent bankrupted their operator while trying to scan DN42

#526

Post by victorbjorklund »

themafia wrote: post #188
victorbjorklund wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because no 16 year old kid ever got to buy anything on a card before.

My parents let me fill my tank with gas. They wouldn't let me open an AWS account. Aside from that, if it is misuse of a parents card, then then answer is "chargeback."

I am sure many parents would agree with ”I wanna learn using AWS and I need a card connected to the account. Look here it says you can be on the free trial. Don’t you want me to have the ability to learn AWS and get a better future?”

Re: AI agent bankrupted their operator while trying to scan DN42

#527

Post by inigyou »

brazzy wrote: post #442
inigyou wrote: post #414

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Doing any business at all in Germany carries extreme business risk, by American standards. The attitude of Germans seems to be to just live with it and maybe get insurance. If you just have to accept courts will void 1% of your transactions (costing another 2% in legal fees) then you just make everything 5% more expensive to cover it. This is why there's not much big tech in Germany. A single legal dispute can theore…

> If you just have to accept courts will void 1% of your transactions (costing another 2% in legal fees) then you just make everything 5% more expensive to cover it. That's an absurd exaggeration in regard to the issue at hand. Almost certainly far less than 1% of purchases by minors are voided, and NONE of those involve legal fees unless the seller chooses to go to court rather than refund. In fact, I'd be willing t…

There are more reasons a business can be sued than just that a minor bought something and regrets it.

Re: AI agent bankrupted their operator while trying to scan DN42

#528

Post by krackers »

userbinator wrote: post #10

IMHO the overly-verbose default style of LLMs is the most annoying part of interacting with them, and I wish their masters would just tell them to be terse by default. Also, whatever happened to the word "its"?

Maybe it learned how to speak from Data on TNG?

Re: AI agent bankrupted their operator while trying to scan DN42

#530

Post by eqvinox »

iamflimflam1 wrote: post #276
Vespasian wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They did, but decided to mess with them first. A sensible human operator would have given up or questioned their premises. The agent never could of course.

Reading the article made me feel slightly uncomfortable. There is a slightly cruel streak that can emerge in online communities - let's see how much we can mess with this and cost it money. Without any thought there might be a human being that is impacted.

Cruelty would imply a conscious, sentient subject, you can't be cruel to a machine. At best, you can be careless in your use of a tool, causing premature wear and deterioration.

In this case, you could theoretically argue about being cruel to the human operator behind, but that's quite a bit of a stretch. They gave billing access to a poorly controlled machine.

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