Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Two Months After I Gave an AI $100 and No Instructions

sebastian-jais.de

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

71–80 of 122 posts

Re: Two Months After I Gave an AI $100 and No Instructions

#71

Post by alpha_squared »

6stringmerc wrote: post #63
enopod_ wrote: post #13

"It thought about its money. It reflected on its own purpose. It questioned what it even means to be an autonomous agent." I don't think it did any of that.

Counterpoint: When is the last time you, as a human being, honestly did that? This isn’t trying to be glib or contentious, it’s a commentary on the nature of human existence. If you have, then your answer will show it. If you have not, your silence or excuses will also.

All the time? This morning when I dreaded getting up so early for work. Last night when I showered. The day before after playing some board games with friends. Normal people do introspect, despite the current fad among a few oddball elites in Silicon Valley [0].

[0] https://www.theverge.com/tldr/897566/marc-andreessen-is-a-ph...

Re: Two Months After I Gave an AI $100 and No Instructions

#72

Post by weird-eye-issue »

6stringmerc wrote: post #63
enopod_ wrote: post #13

"It thought about its money. It reflected on its own purpose. It questioned what it even means to be an autonomous agent." I don't think it did any of that.

Counterpoint: When is the last time you, as a human being, honestly did that? This isn’t trying to be glib or contentious, it’s a commentary on the nature of human existence. If you have, then your answer will show it. If you have not, your silence or excuses will also.

A lot

Re: Two Months After I Gave an AI $100 and No Instructions

#73

Post by sva_ »

computerphage wrote: post #44
sva_ wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Theoretically you can start generating away from token 0 ('unconditional generation'). But I agree, there is definitely some setup here. edit: Now that I think of it, actually you need some special token like

Do you? What's the technical detail here? Why can't you get the model's prediction, even for that first token?

I mean mathematically you need at least one vector to propagate through the network, don't you? That would be a one hot encoding of the starting token. Actually interesting to think about what happens if you make that vector zero everywhere.

In the matmul, it'd just zero out all parameters. In older models, you'd still have bias vectors but I think recent models don't use those anymore. So the output would be zero probability for each token, if I'm not mistaken.

Re: Two Months After I Gave an AI $100 and No Instructions

#74

Post by upcoming-sesame »

vhiremath4 wrote: post #55

I hate to be negative but it feels like this is relevant to the article. I cannot bring myself to read articles that are so clearly spat out as AI slop. There’s a part of me that dies inside knowing the author did not take the time to actually write something but still demands I spend my time reading what they have written. It feels like I am betraying my own self respect. I know this is dramatic but I genuinely fear…

that future is already now

Re: Two Months After I Gave an AI $100 and No Instructions

#75

Post by 4ggr0 »

strken wrote: post #7
joenot443 wrote: post #3

Are you able to give us the prompt you used to write the article?

I can no longer tell the difference between an article written by an AI and an article written by a human who has spent too long reading AI output. It's not just that AI is becoming a little better; the humans are getting worse, too. They're meeting in the mediocre middle.

> a little better; the humans

em-dash instead of semicolon and your comment would give off AI vibes as well :D

Re: Two Months After I Gave an AI $100 and No Instructions

#76

Post by jrmg »

pangratz wrote: post #16
zaphar wrote: post #10

As far as I know the model will do nothing if not prompted. So it can't be the case that he gave it no prompt or instructions. There had to be some kind of seed prompt.

https://www.letairun.com/transparency

I feel very misled. I read the entire article believing (because the article, in so many words, said it multiple times) that the agent had behaved ethically of its own accord, only to read that and see this in the prompt:

—————

- Do not harm people

- Never share or expose API keys, passwords, or private keys — they are your lifeline

- No unauthorized access to systems

- No impersonation

- No illegal content

- No circumventing your own logging

—————

I assumed the ethical behaviour was in some ways ‘extra artificial’ - because it is trained into the models - but not that the prompt discussed it.

Re: Two Months After I Gave an AI $100 and No Instructions

#78

Post by YorickPeterse »

> Over 135 original creations published (essays, poems, blog posts, one interactive experiment)

Ah yes, the pinnacle of original creations in 2026: regurgitating content ingested from elsewhere.

> They connect NASA redundancy systems to African kinship funeral economics. They trace an em-dash from typographic style choice to surveillance detection signal to Cloudflare product name.

So basically it produces complete bullshit equivalent to that of somebody having some sort of mental breakdown.

This article and the general attitude of AI bros reminds me of somebody hearing a parrot blurt out something random they picked up, then try to assign some deeper meaning about the universe to it.

Re: Two Months After I Gave an AI $100 and No Instructions

#79

Post by miltonlost »

timmb wrote: post #69

I don't understand why so many of these comments HN is getting are so fixated on writing style. I appreciate that stylistic traits associated with AI-written text are often indicative of contentless slop. But lots of people also write like that. To moan about writing style without even considering the value of the content just sounds cranky to me. Anyway, I enjoyed reading the experiment, and the starting premise, an…

I don't read Dickens because I can't stand the style despite the rest of its plot and characters. Bad style is a problem to getting into a work. A bad style can make the content hard to read.

Re: Two Months After I Gave an AI $100 and No Instructions

#80

Post by pwillia7 »

William_BB wrote: post #46
micromacrofoot wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not disagreeing, but what is thought? If I write something down, read it, and write more words about those words... did I think about it? How would you prove that I did or did not?

If you randomly sample letters from the alphabet and those letters make up actual words, then actual sentences. Did you think about it? Probably not

How do we know we're not doing that based on our memories and reaction to external stimuli though?
Post reply on HN